The Drug War is wrong root and branch. It was begun to disfranchise minorities while allowing the US to invade other countries at will, under the pretext of fighting the politically created boogieman called "drugs." We're legalizing pot today only because it's becoming overwhelmingly popular with Anglo-Americans. We keep cocaine criminalized because it is associated with Hispanics and Blacks (even tho' Freud himself considered cocaine 12 to be a godsend for his depression and it has been used for millennia by MesoAmericans, all without a lot of belly-aching about the supposed immorality of it all). What's the result? We're causing a Civil War in Mexico, empowering a self-described "Drug War Hitler" in the Philippines, and sending militarized police forces into hitherto sacrosanct American homes, all in an effort to keep the world from accessing the plant medicine that grows at their very feet (which is a violation of Natural Law, by the way, should America's legal system ever choose to wake up from their self-satisfied slumber and face this outrage head-on).
If we have to have a Drug War, let's jail everyone who has so much as a trace of alcohol or tobacco in their system. Let's remove them from the work force and force them to urinate for us upon demand. Let's remove them from the voting rolls and throw them into overcrowded prisons. That's a Drug War that would give the Drug Warriors a taste of their own medicine. (Of course, let's break down the doors of all these tobacco and alcohol "fiends," kick their family members in the groin while shouting, "Get down! Get Down!"
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
Drug prohibition began as a racist attempt to prevent so-called "miscegenation." The racist's fear was not that a white woman would use opium or marijuana or cocaine, but that she might actually fall in love with a Chinese, Hispanic or Black person respectively.
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of drug dependency. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing drugs of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.
Ann Lemke's case studies make the usual assumptions: getting free from addiction is a morality tale. No reference to how the drug war promotes addiction and how banned drugs could solve such problems. She does not say why daily SSRI use is acceptable while daily opium use is not. Etc.
An Englishman's home is his castle.
An American's home is a bouncy castle for the DEA.
There would be little or no profiling of blacks if the Drug War did not exist.
Question: Why do doctors judge cocaine by its worst possible use? Answer: Follow the money.
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