This is not exactly a correction, but I could not find an email address that precisely covered my reason for writing you today.
I'm writing in reference to The Student Newspaper article that you cite, apparently because it contains a favorable mention of Erowid. The article is entitled 'In Case You Choose Not to Say No to Drugs, Kids.'
Although we might praise the author of that post for 'having her heart in the right place,' her article demonstrates clearly that she is under the influence of Drug War propaganda, which she has apparently accepted uncritically.
Why, for instance, should we be telling kids to say no to 'drugs' in the first place, when drugs are essentially Mother Nature's plant medicines? Why do we not also want them to say no to 'Big Pharma 1 2 meds' to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted?
These are just two philosophical issues that loom unnoticed in Karolina Zieba's article. I critique the article in more detail in two essays on my site at abolishthedea.com (see links below). I invite you to read them. I've devoted two essays to this one article because I think that the staying power of drug-war prohibition has been due in large part to the philosophical shallowness of many of its would-be opponents, folks who write half-heartedly on the topic, taking the anemic and misinformed line that 'Illegal drug use is unnecessary, but it's going to happen anyway, so we might as well allow it.'
I fear that, like Karolina, many Erowid readers (perhaps editors, too, for all I know) may 'have their heart in the right place' when it comes to these topics and yet fail to comprehend the full evil of the Drug War, because they have been bamboozled by Drug War lies, propaganda, and the drug-war revision of history thanks to which Americans never hear of the positive use of currently illegal substances. Perhaps they've also been bamboozled by well-meaning authors like Karolina herself who fail to grasp the many injustices that are perpetrated daily in the name of the Drug War: from stifled research on drugs to fight Alzheimer's 3 to the use of electroshock therapy that could have been avoided had medical godsend plants been available to treat depression.
I also write because, by prominently listing Karolina's article, Erowid seems to be (at least to some degree) endorsing its content, and I therefore feel compelled to write you to explain why I believe that such an endorsement is misplaced.
Drug prohibition began as a racist attempt to prevent so-called "miscegenation." The racist's fear was not that a white woman would use opium or marijuana or cocaine, but that she might actually fall in love with a Chinese, Hispanic or Black person respectively.
Many people take antidepressants believing their depression has a biochemical cause. Research does not support this belief. --Dr. Noam Shpancer, Psychology Today
If they're going to throw doctors in jail for prescribing too much pain medication, they should also throw them in jail for prescribing too LITTLE.
"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau
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!
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."
Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.
Our tolerance for freedom wanes in proportion as we consider "drugs" to be demonic. This is the dark side behind the new ostensibly comic genre about Cocaine Bears and such. It shows that Americans are superstitious about drugs in a way that Neanderthals would have understood.
Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote:
"The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."
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