I would like to comment on a statement of yours, however, on page 12 of the introduction:
You say, "To be clear, there are legitimate medical reasons why someone should not smoke heroin or snort cocaine."
A few comments.
Regarding cocaine:
As a chronic depressive, I have been denied healing for a lifetime now because self-interested doctors demonized cocaine -- without even asking what the depressed thought about the drug. They judged the drug only by focusing on misusers, exactly as if they were to judge alcohol by looking only at drunkards. Moreover, the original "abusers" were folks who had trouble using morphine wisely. Why are we surprised that such people would have trouble using cocaine wisely? And why are "misusers" the only stakeholders in this debate? Why are hundreds of millions of depressed people like myself left to suffer in silence and forced to use Big Pharma meds that can never be kicked? The outlawing of cocaine has turned me into a patient for life, with all the demoralizing, expensive and time-consuming baggage that comes with that designation.
Freud knew that cocaine was a godsend for most of the depressed. Nor did he have trouble getting off the drug himself. In fact, he reports in "On Cocaine 2" that for him, his drug use was self-limiting: he felt a seemingly drug-inspired revulsion to the idea of unnecessary use. I doubt we would have heard of Freud today had he not conquered his procrastinating tendencies with the use of cocaine. He dropped his advocacy only after it became clear which way the wind lay. Doctors refused to see any good in a drug that would put them out of business, at least when it came to treating the depressed. Social Psychologist Henry Lennard3 is the poster child for such self-interested demonization, as I discuss in the following essay4:
There is enormous self-interest at work here, even if the cocaine-demonizers are not conscious of it themselves. The medical industry profits ENORMOUSLY from the outlawing of opium and coca. This is why it's so problematic that Big Pharma funds 75% of the FDA's drug division budget5.
Regarding heroin:
A study by Lee Robins showed that only 5% of the Army's heroin users in Vietnam required help getting off the drug when they returned to the States. 5%.6
I am on a Big Pharma drug that has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users and which I believe can NEVER be kicked successfully (at least not without the psychological help of the endless psychoactive substances that America has outlawed) 7. I got off the drug for three months this year and found I could not think straight. The drug had apparently mucked about with my brain chemistry in a seemingly irreversible manner.
Then, too, heroin only became " a thing" because we had outlawed the peaceable smoking of opium at home, after which the search was on for an opiate replacement that was easier to conceal from the police.
I may be oversensitive, but I read your quote as saying; "We can all agree that heroin smoking and cocaine snorting are particularly bad ideas, medically speaking." This, to me, is like saying that driving a car is a bad idea because it could lead to a car accident. In fact, this is the problem with the Drug War, in my opinion: it has taught us to judge drug use outside of all context, as being good or bad. Is cocaine use really a bad idea, medically speaking, for someone who might kill themselves in the absence of such a godsend? We need context before we can discuss the medical advisability of any practice.
I am not sure Americans realize how much indoctrination they have received over the years on these matters. I don't think they understand that they have been shielded by the media from all talk of beneficial drug use -- indeed, that the media has rewritten history, while working with the White House to frame anti-drug messages in TV sitcoms8.
Meanwhile, Jim Beam targets their ads for bourbon at young people on prime-time television -- and the FDA approves of Big Pharma drugs whose side effects include death itself! The FDA also promotes shock therapy for severe depression, while refusing to approve of drugs that would make shock therapy unnecessary.
In my opinion, almost every single author on these topics has western-inspired prejudices of which they are unaware. These prejudices always make them underestimate the full evil of drug prohibition, which is actually the outlawing of our right to take care of our own health. These prejudices always come out when the author writes about the things that "we all know," like the idea that "snorting" cocaine is medically problematic.
Our very use of the word "snorting" serves to indicate our puritan disgust for the practice: one TAKES their meds, one SNORTS cocaine, like a pig. My point is simply that the subject of what "we all know" is highly problematic in a world in which we have been brainwashed from birth in the drug-hating ideology of substance demonization.
Your statement is at best only technically true. I realize that you added some qualifications after the citation on the subject of what we consider to be "drugs" in the first place. Yet the statement seems to support the Drug Warrior notion that there are some particularly evil substances that are bad in and of themselves, and this is, in my opinion, the big lie of the Drug War. Even deadly Botox has beneficial uses. It is now being used to treat migraine headaches -- a breakthrough that would not have occurred had we demonized and criminalized the drug based on the fact that it was deadly when considered in the abstract, outside of all context (like dose, reason for use, the user's goals in using, etc.).
I think historian William Shirer could have been writing about Drug War America when he wrote the following in his book about Nazi Germany:
"No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda." 9
Yours in the hope of advancing the conversation on these matters...
Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.
As great as it is, "Synthetic Panics" by Philip Jenkins was only tolerated by academia because it did not mention drugs in the title and it contains no explicit opinions about drugs. As a result, many drug law reformers still don't know the book exists.
Drug prohibition is the perfect racist crime. It brought gunfire to inner cities, yet those who seek to end the gunfire pretend that drug prohibition has nothing to do with it.
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.
In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.
"The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.
Lying billboards in Philadelphia say that "Fentanyl Kills." NONSENSE! If Fentanyl kills, then so do cars, horses and alcohol. PROHIBITION IS THE REAL KILLLER.
Psychiatrists never acknowledge the biggest downside to modern antidepressants: the fact that they turn you into a patient for life. That's demoralizing, especially since the best drugs for depression are outlawed by the government.
We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.
Cocaine is not evil. Opium is not evil. Drug prohibition is evil.
Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.
