Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, I wanted to hassle you because you're young and black. No, seriously, I wanted to tip you off to this cache of related essays on this topic:
New article in Scientific American: "New hope for pain relief," that ignores the fact that we have outlawed the time-honored panacea. Scientists want a drug that won't run the risk of inspiring us.
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.
Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.
Now the US is bashing the Honduran president for working with "drug cartels." Why don't we just be honest and say why we're REALLY upset with the guy? Drugs is just the excuse, as always, now what's the real reason? Stop using the drug war to disguise American foreign policy.
What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.
That's why I created the satirical Partnership for a Death Free America. It demonstrates clearly that drug warriors aren't worried about our health, otherwise they'd outlaw shopping carts, etc. The question then becomes: what are they REALLY afraid of? Answer: Free thinkers.
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.
Our tolerance for freedom wanes in proportion as we consider "drugs" to be demonic. This is the dark side behind the new ostensibly comic genre about Cocaine Bears and such. It shows that Americans are superstitious about drugs in a way that Neanderthals would have understood.
Wade Davis writes that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. What about the 49,000 that commit suicide every year because we have outlawed drugs that could cheer them up!!!
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.
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