Cynicism -- that refuses to see any good in spiritual states -- indeed that refuses to see any spiritual states at all, referring all good feelings to "getting high."
Scientism -- that associates plant-induced mystical states with unscientific tribal life, insisting instead that folks take scientifically approved medications developed on reductive criteria, ignoring all such obvious benefits of substance use as ecstasy and the psychologically beneficial anticipation of the same.
Racism -- that, consciously and/or subconsciously, seeks to fashion laws that impact minorities, the racism being evident in the fact that white Anglo Saxon drugs of tobacco and alcohol receive zero state punishment, while far less dangerous substances which are associated with non-whites and foreigners are demonized and criminalized to the point that Anglos even travel overseas in an attempt to eradicate such plant medicine from the face of the earth.
Author's Follow-up:
June 01, 2025
Another problem with the status quo is the Drug Warrior's inability to wait for delayed gratification. The Drug Warriors never look ahead at the long-term totalitarian consequences of their drug laws. Like a blissful canine, the Drug Warrior lives forever in the present, wielding drug laws to achieve immediate social goals, totally oblivious of the consequences of their principle-free policymaking. What? You say that drug panic has destroyed the first and fourth amendments to the Constitution? "Who cares?," quoth the Drug Warrior, "our drug laws have helped us to cut down on minority voting in the here and now, and that is all that matters to us." And if the Drug Warriors were honest, they would add: "Besides, who needs democracy, anyway, when rich white people should be running the show?"
If we "listen to the Drug War," we will realize that it is based on the following absurd idea:
If a psychoactive substance can cause problems for white American young people when used at one dose for one reason, then it must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
This is nothing less than a bar on human progress. It is a racist and xenophobic attempt to withhold medicines from everybody in the world merely because immature Americans might find a way to misuse them. This outcome is especially galling considering that American Drug Warriors refuse "on principle" to educate their citizens about the safest and wisest methods for using the psychoactive medicines with which we are surrounded as human beings. It is as if a bunch of ignorant juvenile delinquents had injured themselves while playing with knives and then blamed their injuries on the knives themselves rather than on their own ignorance about knives. And so these delinquents become politicians and craft laws to outlaw knives, not simply in America, but around the world, as if to say, "If our uneducated white American young people cannot use these things safely, then clearly nobody in the world can." A more cavalier attitude could not be imagined. America wants to "save" its own undereducated citizens from the dangers of drugs by depriving the entire world of all the benefits of using them.
For more on this selfish and massively counterproductive idiocy, see my essay entitled The Bill Clinton Fallacy.
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?
Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.
Many articles in science mags need this disclaimer: "Author has declined to consider the insights gained from drug-induced states on this topic out of fealty to Christian Science orthodoxy." They don't do this because they know readers already assume that drugs will be ignored.
Now the folks who helped Matthew get Ketamine must be sacrificed on the altar of the Drug War, lest people start thinking that the Drug War itself was at fault.y
The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.
America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of drug dependency. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing drugs of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.
The prohibitionist motto: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."
The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
No wonder the "Justice" Department relies on plea deals; otherwise juries could use nullification to free those charged with mere drug possession.
This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.
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