The Drug War increases drug misuse by children by, 1) keeping the subject of "drugs" forever on the mind of rebellious youth (see "Synthetic Panics" for how this is accomplished), and 2) encouraging them to fear and despise substances rather than to understand them. (It often accomplishes this here in the States by having the state police or the DARE organization bribe the kids with teddy bears to adopt a jaundiced Christian Science view of psychoactive medicines.) That's why "crack cocaine " is a byword for "hopelessly addictive substance" in the west, even though that form of coke can be used non-addictively by a person who has been taught to do so. In a recent documentary ("Kid 90") about the '80s child star Soleil Moon Frye (AKA "Punky Brewster" of sitcom fame), one of her friends describes how he used a variety of illegal substances, including crack cocaine , "acid," and heroin 1 (which he says he smoked). "But," he said, "I always did this little thing where I'd do it and then not do it for a long time, where I wouldn't get so super strung out or anything."
Sounds like he saw through drug-war lies, right? He realized that informed use was the answer rather than substance demonization. But not so, for he then adds, apparently in deference to drug-warrior sensibilities: "Which isn't any excuse, but..."
Really? Why not?
A second friend then proceeds to blast "drugs" by implicitly blaming them for the deaths of his friends in the '90s, despite the fact that those deaths were a result of prohibition combined with the drug-war policy of willful ignorance about psychoactive substances. But Soleil's only comment about "drugs" in this documentary was in reference to an ecstatic experience that she had with her friends in a sunny wheat field after consuming a few mushrooms. "I have such a soft spot in my heart for mushrooms," she says, "I must tell you, because of that experience."
Indeed, the experience was so positive that she violates drug-war etiquette by failing to follow up this statement with the customary post-facto denunciation of her youthful "drug use," thereby failing to emulate the seemingly endless list of two-faced British politicians who profess their scorn for the cocaine 23 that they used so liberally in their youth.
It's amazing. Drug law is outlawing science -- and yet so few complain. Drug law tells us what mushrooms we can collect, for God's sake. Is that not straight-up insane? Or are Americans so used to being treated as children that they accept this corrupt status quo?
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.
Musk vies with his fellow materialists in his attempt to diss humans as insignificant. But we are not insignificant. The very term "insignificant" is a human creation. Consciousness rules. Indeed, consciousness makes the rules. Without us, there would only be inchoate particles.
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."
Our government treats drugs like uranium and spends hundreds of billions of dollars trying to scare us about them.
Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal":
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."
Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).
I'm going to get on the grade-school circuit, telling kids to say no to horses.
"You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!"
That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.
The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.
America never ended prohibition. It just redirected prohibition from alcohol to all of alcohol's competitors.
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