he University of Pennsylvania just blacklisted the words "freshman" and "sophomore." Whatever we may think of this latest politically correct gambit, it strikes me as amusing that we have this faux freedom to tweak the dictionary while we have no freedom to use the plant medicine that grows at our very feet. If the university wants to be truly progressive and take a truly courageous action, they would ban the word "drugs," which is used in the US as a Christian Science pejorative for psychoactive medicine. But that would be a real stand that might cause real pushback, and that's not the kind of "bold action" that university deans are known to favor. "Look at us, we're attacking patriarchy -- but we still grant government the right to control how much we can feel, how we can think, and how much we can think."
August 30, 2022
You see what he did there? Brian's suggesting that progressives these days are hitting easy targets while steadfastly ignoring the biggest infringement of all time, both of personal and civil rights: namely, the Drug War, which punishes us (albeit usually indirectly) for saying or doing anything that conflicts with the Drug Warrior's attitude of substance demonization. For almost 40 years now, the government's official policy about "drugs" has been to lie to us about them. Not so much by saying false things but rather by reporting only negative outcomes of substance use. Office of National Drug Control Policy actually has a charter that forbids its members from even considering any positive uses for the substances that America has criminalized. And yet we're talking about the kind of medicines that have inspired entire religions.
What Have We Learned?
August 30, 2022
Mouse over questions to read answers
What is the main point of this mini essay?
To compliment University of Pennsylvania for their new rules about forbidden speech?
To task that otherwise worthy institution for ignoring the 24,000-pound gorilla in the room, viz the Drug War, which has created endless problems out of whole cloth.
To congratulate the school for ignoring the Drug War like everybody else.
In other words, Brian is wondering, when the heck is anyone going to realize that "drugs" is the loaded term par excellence?! For the way it's used today by Drug Warriors, it means: psychoactive substances for which there is no beneficial use whatsoever: not today, not tomorrow, not at any dose whatsoever for any person whatsoever for any reason whatsoever in any country whatsoever, ever.
Of course there are no substances like that in the entire world. A scientific country (not to say one that studies history and was founded on natural law) knows that any substance can be used for good or ill. There are no evil substances. Evil is not a property of things, but of people. Evil, for instance, is being done when a government purposefully tries to scare its people from psychoactive substances rather than educating them in the ways of safe use.
Author's Follow-up: October 10, 2023
I am not seeking to opine here on any particular progressive cause célèbre. My meaning is merely this: If the far left would get as indignant about their rights to Mother Nature as they currently are about the misuse of pronouns, the world would be making far more progress in overthrowing the anti-scientific, racist and panic-driven ideology of the War on Drugs -- which, of course, is actually a war on the users of the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions.
Had the FDA been around in the Indus Valley 3,500 years ago, there would be no Hindu religion today, because they would have found some potential problem with the use of soma.
Did the Vedic People have a substance disorder because they wanted to drink enough soma to see religious realities?
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.
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
Countless millions suffer needlessly in silence because of America's fearmongering about drugs.
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!
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.
Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.
The addiction gene should be called the prohibition gene: it renders one vulnerable to prohibition lies and limitations: like the lack of safe supply, the lack of choices, and the lack of information. We should pathologize the prohibitionists, not their victims.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Penn State Patsies for the Drug War published on May 20, 2021 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
he University of Pennsylvania just blacklisted the words "freshman" and "sophomore." Whatever we may think of this latest politically correct gambit, it strikes me as amusing that we have this faux freedom to tweak the dictionary while we have no freedom to use the plant medicine that grows at our very feet. If the university wants to be truly progressive and take a truly courageous action, they would ban the word "drugs," which is used in the US as a Christian Science pejorative for psychoactive medicine. But that would be a real stand that might cause real pushback, and that's not the kind of "bold action" that university deans are known to favor. "Look at us, we're attacking patriarchy -- but we still grant government the right to control how much we can feel, how we can think, and how much we can think."
I am not seeking to opine here on any particular progressive cause célèbre. My meaning is merely this: If the far left would get as indignant about their rights to Mother Nature as they currently are about the misuse of pronouns, the world would be making far more progress in overthrowing the anti-scientific, racist and panic-driven ideology of the War on Drugs -- which, of course, is actually a war on the users of the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions.
You have been reading an article entitled, Penn State Patsies for the Drug War published on May 20, 2021 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
