Thomas Szasz1 was an American-Hungarian doctor who saw through the unprecedented madness of America's drug-related attitudes like no one else. He revealed the philosophical inanity of those attitudes in clear language. He has a special place in my heart since he is the only drug pundit who not only answered a letter of mine on the subject of drugs, but responded to it in detail, and in a handwritten letter no less. This was in the 1980s, unfortunately, when I had yet to appreciate the full evil of drug prohibition. I wish our years on earth had aligned more felicitously so that I could bounce my ideas off the man today, rather than to continue tossing them in vain at the brick walls erected by the bamboozled pundits of our time.
The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.
Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.
Self-medicating has always been the most basic of human rights, until the medical industry demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.
Alcohol is a drug in liquid form. If drug warriors want to punish people who use drugs, they should start punishing themselves.
"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary
Question: Why do doctors judge cocaine by its worst possible use? Answer: Follow the money.
To oppose the Drug War philosophically, one has to highlight its connections to both materialism and the psychiatric pill mill. And that's a problem, because almost everyone is either a Drug Warrior or a materialist these days and has a vested interest in the continuation of the psychiatric pill mill.
Drug warriors have harnessed the perfect storm. Prohibition caters to the interests of law enforcement, psychotherapy, Big Pharma, demagogues, puritans, and materialist scientists, who believe that consciousness is no big "whoop" and that spiritual states are just flukes.
The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.
The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.
(up)