Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.
I then got some apparent pushback, stating that scientists have been trying for years to get the DEA to acknowledge drug benefits and that conservatives are the real problem.
This is true in a way, but not without major important qualifications, and so I responded to this thoughtful individual with a small barrage of qualifying tweets, which I hope elucidated rather than miffed.
I reproduce my responses here in the hopes of illuminating the subtleties involved in this important topic viz. scientists and their guilt (or lack thereof) in promoting the War on Drugs -- and its hateful incarcerations of people who are, after all, merely trying to improve their own damn minds!
1) Yeah, there are definitely good guys out there. Unfortunately, they are either limited by their materialist orthodoxy into adducing only specific and limited microscopic evidence or they abandon materialism for the nonce and talk the common psychological sense that we all understand implicitly and for which we need neither degrees nor lab coats.
2) In other words, scientists qua scientists (i.e., as materialists) are very limited in what they can demonstrate positively about drugs. This is because it is a category error to consider them specialists about human emotions and psychology in the first place.
3) Folks like Ben Franklin enjoyed opium and used it wisely and to good effect, as did Marcus Aurelius. But to PROVE that this helped them is asking a lot. Indeed, it's asking too much. Materialist science is not qualified to do that: the user's own successful life itself IS the evidence of efficacy! (When we look elsewhere for proof of efficacy, we are like OJ Simpson launching a search for a killer -- anyone at all, other than himself.)
4) And so when scientists and/or the d e a claim a lack of established benefits, they are making a philosophical statement peculiar to westerners, that efficacy must be judged under a microscope.
5) Conservatives set the pernicious trend in the Drug War and are happy to have materialist scientists in charge of determining drug efficacy. they know that such progress will be glacial. the fda STILL can't wrap its materialist head around the obvious, that mdma 'works,' in every meaningful sense of that word.
And so while it's fine to say that scientists have tried to be helpful, that statement can only be properly understood in the light of a number of important qualifications that could never be compressed into a single tweet (except perhaps by the linguistically thrifty William Shakespeare himself) hence the foregoing mini essay.
Cocaine
Cocaine can be used wisely, believe it or not. You have been taught otherwise by a lifetime of censorship -- and by an FDA which dogmatically ignores all positive aspects of drug use, including increased communicative skill and endurance.
I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.
We should be encouraging certain drug use by the elderly. Many Indigenous drugs have been shown to grow new neurons and increase neural connectivity -- to refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!
The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.
Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.
I'm grateful to the folks who are coming out of the woodwork at the last minute to deface their own properties with "Trump 2024" signs. Now I'll know who to thank should Trump get elected and sell us out to Putin.
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
If NIDA covered all drugs (not just politically ostracized drugs), they'd produce articles like this: "Aspirin continues to kill hundreds." "Penicillin misuse approaching crisis levels." "More bad news about Tylenol and liver damage." "Study revives cancer fears from caffeine."
The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."
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, Scientific Collaboration in the War on Drugs published on October 1, 2024 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)
oday I posted the following tweet on X:
You have been reading an article entitled, Scientific Collaboration in the War on Drugs published on October 1, 2024 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)