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
Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.
If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.
I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.
Someone should stand outside Jefferson's estate and hand out leaflets describing the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello to confiscate poppy plants. That raid was against everything Jefferson stood for. The TJ Foundation DISHONORED JEFFERSON and their visitors should know that!
Even if the FDA approved MDMA today, it would only be available for folks specifically pronounced to have PTSD by materialist doctors, as if all other emotional issues are different problems and have to be studied separately. That's just ideological foot-dragging.
Morphine can provide a vivid appreciation of mother nature in properly disposed minds. That should be seen as a benefit. Instead, dogma tells us that we must hate morphine for any use.
The DEA stomped onto Thomas Jefferson's estate in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And the TJ Foundation helped them! They sold out Jefferson.
Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.
When people tell us there's nothing to be gained from using mind-improving drugs, they are embarrassing themselves. Users benefit from such drugs precisely to the extent that they are educated and open-minded. Loudmouth abstainers are telling us that they lack these traits.
Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.
