I hate to pick on Democrats at a time when Republicans have lost their minds and foresworn Democracy itself in lockstep with the hopes and dreams of billionaires everywhere, but the Drug War's staying power is due to the fact that it is a fully bipartisan project. Nor can I help it that the poster child for faulty reasoning when it comes to the Drug War is former president and democratic stalwart Bill Clinton himself. For Bill happens to be the poster child for one of the main logical fallacies of the Drug War: namely, the warped idea that prohibition saves lives.
Bill, it might be remembered, once remarked that his brother Roger would have been dead had cocaine in particular been legal. But this is both a selfish and a racist reason to call for drug prohibition, for it completely ignores the countless individuals who will have to suffer so that we can theoretically save Roger from his own ignorance. It is also a crazy and disingenuous viewpoint given the fact that it is drug-war policy NOT to educate the Rogers of the world, but rather to make them fear drugs instead. Why should others have to suffer the downsides of prohibition when we cannot even be bothered to educate Americans as to safe use?
Freud knew that cocaine was a godsend for the depressed. But doctors saw it as a threat to their bottom line and so they studied only the rare misuse of the drug.
The racism of Bill's prohibitionist mindset is clear. If prohibition saved Roger Clinton, it only did so by killing kids like 15-year-old Niomi Russell in a drive-by shooting in Washington, D.C.1 It was substance prohibition which filled cities like D.C. with guns in the first place. And as Ann Heather Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014:
"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 2 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."
Black lives matter3? Not as much as the life of Bill's white brother, apparently. This is why I am forever saying that Black Lives Matter should be taking on the Drug War as public enemy number one. Why do they not see that Drug War propaganda has taken their eye off the prize? It was the Drug War which armed the 'hood to the teeth and gave racist police officers carte blanche to be as evil as they wanted to be. The officers attacking George Floyd actually pointed this out to us, albeit unwittingly. They were shouting "Just say no to drugs!" as they throttled Floyd. It was basically a confession that the Drug War had empowered them to violate civil rights. How much clearer can the racists make it for us??? Substance prohibition is the problem 4 !!!
BLM should be fighting prohibition, just as anti-suicide movements should be fighting prohibition5, just as folks against shock therapy should be fighting prohibition6, just as the Holocaust Museum should be fighting prohibition7, just as mycologists should be fighting prohibition8. And they are all blind to the real villain of the piece. I know: I have tried in vain to convince them otherwise, and been completely ignored, of course.
America is asleep at the wheel when it comes to common sense -- and the Drug Warriors are laughing their way to the bank to cash their dividend checks from Big Pharma 910 and Big Liquor and Big Prisons -- the big recipients of the corporate welfare program known as the War on Drugs.
Nixon's domestic advisor, John Ehrlichman, admitted in a 1994 interview that the Drug War was a campaign against Blacks and war protestors. 'Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,' said Ehrlichman.
The idea that drug prohibition would save even Roger from himself is already a highly doubtful claim, since cocaine 1112 is readily available at night clubs around the world, even in an age of drug prohibition. All that prohibition has accomplished is to ensure that the drug is likely to be contaminated with other unknown substances, and that is not something to crow about, Bill.
But even if drug prohibition DID save Roger (which is something that we could never know for sure, in any case), it would still be dead wrong -- because it could only save him by outsourcing prohibition-related downsides to minorities and foreigners -- and to the millions of INTELLIGENT people who could have found rational and beneficial ways to use drugs, including to inspire new religions, and yet have to do without inspiring substances, thanks to the ignorance of those others whom we refuse to educate.
I fail to see how a Rhodes Scholar like Bill could believe that it makes sense to put government in charge of our personal health in the first place. GK Chesterton clearly saw the hateful ignorance of this idea13. There is no greater despotism than for a government to control how and how much one can think and feel in this life. So the idea that we would even THINK to outlaw psychoactive substances was always insanity -- and a slippery slope, indeed. For once you give government the job of ensuring our personal health, then every demagogue can become a self-styled expert on what substances are bad and what are good.
Americans completely ignore the role of prohibition in destroying inner cities.
This is because all such "experts" fail to realize that health is a balance of a wide variety of inputs. It is determined by our genetics, our biochemical makeup, the psychological makeup of our parents, our level of education, etc. etc. etc. We are unique individuals, after all, however much the behaviorist might try to ignore that fact. A drug that is poison for some people at some doses when used for some reasons can be a godsend when used by other people at other doses for other reasons. As Chesterton put it:
"Health is not a quality. It is not a thing like darkness in the hair or length in the limbs. It is a relation, a balance.14"
Do you have what it takes to support a social policy that has destroyed inner cities and forced pain patients and the depressed to go without godsend medicine? Help us enforce Drug War sharia in the United States!
Of course, our judgments about health are blatantly hypocritical in any case, since we have no prohibition for the one substance which kills more Americans than any other on the planet, namely liquor, which accounts for 178,000 deaths a year in America alone15. Indeed, drug prohibition is a sort of consolation prize for the Carrie Nation mentality of Americans: they lost their fight to hold liquor responsible for the evils of the world, but they were given the mother of all consolation prizes: the right to outlaw every single one of liquor's less dangerous rivals.
In rebutting Bill's viewpoint, I have not yet adduced any benefits to drug use. There are at least two reasons for this.
First of all, I should not have to do so. The reasons cited above deny the prohibitionist any excuse to pry into my digestive system in the first place. I am therefore reluctant to supply any reasons for my drug use lest I thereby imply that the legality of my use should depend upon what the State thinks of the emotional and mental states that I thereby obtain. The whole point is that I must have sovereignty over my own emotional and mental states in order to be a full human being in this life.
I am also reluctant to provide such "proof" for the simple reason that the proof that drugs have beneficial uses is obvious. Everyone knows that there are drugs which can cheer one up. Drug warriors and their behaviorist collaborators in modern medicine have been gaslighting us for decades by pretending otherwise, by pretending that we require microscopes in order to confirm the obvious. I do not want my enumeration of drug benefits to imply that I have "fallen" for this gaslighting 16 , that I truly believe that drug efficacy has to be proven, when in reality it is obvious to anyone who has not been brainwashed by the drug-hating powers that be.
If you still desire proof of the existence of beneficial drug use and common sense does not get you there, I invite you to read any of my hundreds of essays on that topic, most especially the recent one entitled Case Studies in Wise Drug Use. Spoiler alert: the Hindu religion was inspired by the use of a drug, Mr. Rhodes Scholar17 -- by a drug that both elated and inspired. The Vedic scriptures make this clear time and time again.
"The Soma juice inspires us, and we are guided by the tradition received from our ancestors."
"Flow on, Sage Soma, 18 with thy stream to give us mental power and strength."
"Thou art strong by insight, O Soma 19 thou art mighty in thy might and greatness."
The Hindu religion owes its very existence to a drug that elated and inspired, from which it clearly follows that the outlawing of psychoactive substances is a violation of religious liberty. Those who have ears, let them hear. Those who have ignorant white brothers, let them educate them rather than outlawing the religious impulse itself by outlawing the godsends of Mother Nature (and the many wonderful drugs that have been inspired thereby).
Even if we refuse to acknowledge any benefits to drug use, however, drug prohibition would be wrong both as a matter of principle and based on its actual effects in the real world. As a matter of principle, the Drug War puts the government in charge of personal health, which results in a complete emasculation of human beings as personal agents in life. It denies them sovereignty over their own emotional and mental processes. It is, in fact, the most hateful tyranny one can imagine: one that does not simply censor one's world, but dictates how one is allowed to feel and think about that world.
As for actual effects, drug prohibition causes endless unnecessary suffering. In its attempts to save everybody, it kills and disempowers countless millions. They are literally countless because they are never counted. Why not? Because prohibitionists never keep track of those whom they cause to suffer: the 67,000 victims of gun violence 20 in inner cities over the last two decades21; the 60,000 Mexicans who have been disappeared thanks to drug prohibition22, which has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America; the depressed who sit at home behind closed doors contemplating suicide because racist politicians have outlawed all substances that elate and inspire23; the workers who have been emasculated and humiliated by drug tests that are performed, not to detect impairment, but rather to remove them from the workforce should they be found to be using plant medicine of which pharmacologically clueless politicians disapprove -- in other words, employees who can be fired for being a Christian Science heretic, and through an extrajudicial process at that24.
Prohibitionists like Bill Clinton (and Kevin Sabet and Donald Trump and Joe Biden 2526, etc...) should be down on their knees, begging forgiveness for promoting policies that kill children like Niomi Russell. For to repeat:
If prohibition saved Roger Clinton, it only did so by killing Niomi Russell.
This topic of prohibition is so fraught with mad but unspoken assumptions on the part of the Drug Warrior that I find it hard to bring this essay to a close. I keep thinking of new ways in which a brainwashed American will misunderstand me, bearing in mind that they have been shielded for a lifetime from all positive reports of drug use. My inclination is to deal with each imagined scruple by itself and in detail, which is a protocol for which I have no time.
I will therefore simply refer any unconvinced reader at this point to the rest of my website, where I have addressed hundreds of possible reader misgivings over the years in my attempt to convince Drug Warriors that they have things completely backwards: that drug use is like any other risky activity on earth, that it has benefits and downsides -- and that prohibition, for its part, has only downsides, unless considered selfishly and from a racist point of view. What's more, that prohibition is evil in and of itself, for it puts politicians in control of how and how much human beings are allowed to think and feel in this world. It is even worse than an outlawing of religion. It is worse even than the outlawing of the religious impulse. It is the outlawing of personal agency and hence the greatest tyranny of all times.
This is why Bill Clinton was not just wrong about prohibition, but horribly wrong -- i.e. wrong with consequences. His attitude is responsible for the deaths of many a Niomi Russell in our inner-cities.
And why was Clinton wrong? Because he fell for the two big lies of the War on Drugs: 1) that drug use has no upsides, and 2) that prohibition has no downsides.
I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.
First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.
3:51 PM · Jul 15, 2024
The Drug War treats doctors like potential criminals and it treats the rest of us like children. Prohibition does not end drug risks: it just outsources them to minorities and other vulnerable populations.
Drug prohibition has resulted in hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths thanks to totally preventable drug overdoses!
It's amazing. Drug law is outlawing science -- and yet so few complain. Drug law tells us what mushrooms we can collect, for God's sake. Is that not straight-up insane? Or are Americans so used to being treated as children that they accept this corrupt status quo?
@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?
Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.
I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.
Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.
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