Editor's note, November 16, 2021: While Brian calms down a skosh, let me apologize on his behalf for the fact that this rant of his (as justified as it may be) has nothing whatsoever to do with Lamar Alexander, who it will be remembered was the Secretary of Education under one of the Drug Warrior Bushes. I think there's been some mix-up here, perhaps due to the overwriting of a file or two.
Brian: Thanks, Editor. My bad. There has indeed been some mix-up.
Editor: So what was the deal about Lamar Alexander?
Brian: Well, about a year ago, this Lamar chap started beefing about the fact that states were changing drug law policy when he thought it should be decided by the national government in conjunction with scientists. Am I like, "Lamar, baby, you had no right to outlaw plant medicine in the first place, homie! Second, you know as well as I do that plant medicine is only criminal these days because of the interests of racists, Big Pharma 1 2 , intolerant Christians, and the Corrections industry -- whose interests are all championed by the wealthiest 3% who control the Senate via bribery (see "Billionaire Democracy" by George R. Tyler). Under such a corrupt system, it makes perfect sense for Americans to change the system from the ground up when it comes to so-called drug policy, especially since you politicians feel the need to bow and scrape before the evil DEA, which has knowingly lied for half a decade now about godsend plant medicine -- and which poisoned American pot smokers with paraquat in the 1980s, a weed killer that causes Parkinson's disease.
There you go, Ed, baby. That paragraph contains both the warp and weft of the factual yarn that I'm spinning -- the original of which, as you rightly suppose, was probably overwritten due to some boneheaded error on the part of some lowly clerk or other, who shall be sacked quite momently, I assure you, with malice-a-freakin' forethought, even. (I'll be like: YOU are zee veekest link!) No, seriously, Eddy: How do you like that Lamar person? Typical politician -- wants to tell me what plant medicine I can use. He's the kind of politician who would have been cheering the DEA on as they stormed onto the once-"hallowed" ground of Monticello 3 in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants -- a coup against the whole concept of natural law upon which this nation was built.
Editor: Thanks, Brian, that was a delightful one and a half paragraphs. It did my heart good just to read them!
Brian: Aw, shucks!
Editor: Plus, it doesn't hurt that you're right as rain.
Brian: I think somebody should force Lamar to undergo a drug test -- 'cause I'm sure he's "used" alcohol in the last month or two. God help me, if we find so much as a trace of liquor in his blood, we're going to confiscate his house and remove him from the workforce! There's a Drug War for you, Lamar: one that isn't targeted against minorities either!
Editor: Okay, Brian, easy, boy! Easy!
The WHO says that depression will be the number-one cause of disability by 2030. What they don't say is that this is only because drug prohibition has outlawed all obvious treatments for depression.
In fact, there are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.
The DEA should be tried for crimes against humanity. They have been lying about drugs for 50 years and running interference between human beings and Mother Nature in violation of natural law, depriving us of countless potential and known godsends in order to create more DEA jobs.
Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.
Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.
I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!
If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.
(up)