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Today California passed a law to ban drug testing for Marijuana use. That's one small step for white America, but NO STEP AT ALL for blacks.
California should outlaw all drug testing , unless it is searching for IMPAIRMENT.
Drug testing today is not searching for impairment. Drug testing today is an extrajudicial fishing expedition to find mere traces of substances of which politicians disapprove. Employees can lose jobs, and potential employees can fail to get jobs, NOT because they're impaired, but merely because lab techs have found traces of demonized substances in their system (the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions, as the Soma medicine inspired the Vedic-Hindu religion, the Mayans venerated magic mushrooms and the Inca considered coca to be divine). Drug testing is an extrajudicial fishing expedition in the most intimate of all places: one's own body.
Big business today is actually drug-testing Americans as a kind of stealth contractor for the US Government, checking to see whether Americans have been naughty or nice as those terms are hypocritically defined by Christian Science conservatives (that is, politicians who are motivated by the Christian Science belief that drugs may be called bad without regard for how, why or when they are used).
Not only is this extrajudicial punishment, but it is cruel and unusual punishment to deny a person the right to get a job in America. We do not even punish murderers in that way.
And yet the worker thus barred has no right to appeal, for the Kafkaesque reason that they have never actually been charged with a crime. They have just been "written off" as a money earner by a wink-and-a-nod from the anonymous powers that be.
Wake up, Californians: Outlaw all drug testing 1 , unless it is searching only for demonstrable impairment, and not for mere traces of substances that have been demonized by pharacologically clueless politicians.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."
Drugs like opium and cocaine should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.
In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.
Jim Hogshire described sleep cures that make physical withdrawal from opium close to pain-free. As for "psychological addiction," there are hundreds of elating drugs that could be used to keep the ex-user's mind from morbidly focusing on a drug whose use has become problematic for them.
Why don't those politicians understand what hateful colonialism they are practicing? Psychedelics have been used for millennia by the tribes that the west has conquered -- now we won't even let folks talk honestly about such indigenous medicines.
Drug prohibition has resulted in hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths thanks to totally preventable drug overdoses!
Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
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.
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