Pity the time traveler who arrives from the 1600s, bristling with a new idea for a science-fiction story:
Time-Traveler: "Hey, I've got this cool idea for a story in which some future despotic government goes out and burns plants to keep the populace from using those substances to improve their minds! I'm gonna call it 'Fahrenheit 452!'"
Me: "Sorry, dude, but that's not science-fiction."
Time-Traveler: "What? Maybe you don't hear so good. I said it's a story about government going out and getting rid of therapeutic plants!"
Me: "Right, and that's exactly what our government does today!"
Time-Traveler: "You're kidding me? I thought I traveled forward in this time machine, not backwards."
Me: "Hey, where are you going?"
Time-Traveler: "Back to my ship -- I'm gonna visit the Earth 200 years from now and see if they've finally got it right."
Americans are childish about drugs. We blame our problems on inanimate objects and burn other countries' plants so that we can feel safe at home. We need to grow up and learn to use nature's bounty wisely for human benefit.
Discussion Questions for Students
1) What is the satirical message of this short drama?
2) What does it tell us about the mentality behind drug prohibition and the War on Drugs?
3) Imagine you traveled forward in time to a world in which horses were outlawed because politicians focused only on the downsides of horseback riding -- like the fact that equestrian sports are the number-one cause of traumatic brain injury in the sporting world. How would you go about trying to convince the horse prohibitionists that they were being silly? Could you succeed, given that everybody in that future society had been taught from childhood to say no to horses? Let's assume that their media had kept them from seeing, reading, or hearing any depictions of beneficial "horse use" as well.
For Further Study
The Drug War Philosopher occasionally illustrates the incoherence of Drug War ideology with the help of science-fiction. See, for instance, his philosophical send-up of the 2022 movie Moonfall, in which he takes a young alien to task for his naive faith in the ability of his humanoid species to 'get along' without the help of some serious empathogens (given the hate-filled propensities of that species' nearest biological cousins, that is, videlicet Earthlings).
What do you think makes science-fiction such a purebred stalking horse for drug-law reformers when it comes to snapping the suspenders off of the cocky challengers on the Prohibitionist side of the jousting field? Hint: when science-fiction authors are not evoking a Mad Max dystopia, they are generally promoting the idea (as 'twere by implication) that technology brings happiness, than which nothing could be more silly, of course, with the possible exception of the idea of the modern drug researchers that laughing gas could not help the depressed. In other words, the DWP would fain task the science-fiction author with psychological naivete. "I mean, come on!" he would essentially say, "Let's be REAL, people!"
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.
The U.S. government created violence out of whole cloth in America's inner cities with drug prohibition -- and now it is using that violence as an excuse to kick the people that they themselves have knocked down.
Hollywood presents cocaine as a drug of killers. In reality, strategic cocaine use by an educated person can lead to great mental power, especially as just one part of a pharmacologically balanced diet.
Big pharma drugs are designed to be hard to get off. Doctors write glowingly of "beta blockers" for anxiety, for instance, but ignore that fact that such drugs are hard -- and even dangerous -- to get off. We have outlawed all sorts of less dependence-causing alternatives.
As great as it is, "Synthetic Panics" by Philip Jenkins was only tolerated by academia because it did not mention drugs in the title and it contains no explicit opinions about drugs. As a result, many drug law reformers still don't know the book exists.
We give kids drugs to improve their concentration -- but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.
Why does no one talk about empathogens for preventing atrocities? Because they'd rather hate drugs than use them for the benefit of humanity. They don't want to solve problems, they prefer hatred.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
Endless drugs could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for materialists and drug warriors to understand -- let alone materialist drug warriors!).
AI is inherently plagiaristic technology. It tells us: "Hey, guys, look what I can do!" -- when it should really be saying, "Hey, guys, look how I stole all your data and repackaged it in such a way as to make it appear that I am the genius, not you!"
1) What is the satirical message of this short drama?
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