As I was adding my Drug War Comic Book to Kindle marketplace today, I was prompted for a category. Naturally, I looked for a category about the Drug War, since my book is all about that abominable Christian Science war on psychoactive medicine. Much to my surprise, however, there were no such categories proposed. There were categories about LGBT rights, pornography, and feminism, but nothing about the Drug War.
You do realize what this means, don't you? It means that America takes the Drug War status quo as a sort of natural baseline. Drug War assumptions have become so mainstream that their downsides are invisible to us. It's just life. We now consider it natural that we should have to urinate in order to qualify for a job and that we can be sentenced to life in prison for possessing plant medicines that were considered godsends by other cultures for thousands of years.
This is no surprise, however. Scientific authors have been doing the same thing for the past five decades. They write apparently authoritative articles on subjects like the supposed intractability of depression, never once mentioning the fact that outlawed plant medicines have the potential of working near miracles for the chronically depressed. Meanwhile self-help authors fell whole forests worth of trees to publish their five- six- or ten-step plans to happiness, remaining absolutely silent about the ability of properly administered plant medicine to help us work through the mental cobwebs and the vicious circular mental prisons that we build for ourselves.
Why? Because the western world has been duped by bigoted politicians into demonizing plant medicines instead of learning to live with them safely and benefit from their wise use.
The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.
Rick Strassman reportedly stopped his DMT trials because some folks had bad experiences at high doses. That is like giving up on aspirin because high doses of NSAIDs can kill.
Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.
The drug war is being used as a wrecking ball to destroy democratic freedoms. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and freedom of religion and given the police the right to confiscate the property of peaceful and productive citizens.
This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.
Peyote advocates should be drug legalization advocates. Otherwise, they're involved in special pleading which is bound to result in absurd laws, such as "Plant A can be used in a religion but not plant B," or "Person A can belong to such a religion but person B cannot."
Ketamine is like any other drug. It has good uses for certain people in certain situations. Nowadays, people insist that a drug be okay in every situation for everybody (especially American teens) before they will say that it's okay. That's crazy and anti-scientific.
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?
Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.
(up)