I would encourage you to consider how the Drug War has created the opioid problem by outlawing godsend psychoactive medicine, discouraging honest talk about substances, and incentivizing dealers to sell the most available and addictive substances possible. Please consider that the Vedic-Hindu religion was inspired by the psychoactive effects of plant medicine1, and that drugs are therefore not the problem. Rather the desire for transcendence is universal, and when we make that transcendence illegal through drug laws, we empower criminals to sell the most dangerous substances possible.
Please consider also that the menace is not from opiates, Arab: the menace is from the Drug War, which for the first time in human history has told humanity that it has no right to the medical and religious bounty that grows at their very feet.
The desire for self-transcendence will never disappear. The desire for profit will never disappear. If we want less suffering in the world, what needs to disappear is the anti-scientific and anti-religious war on psychoactive plant medicine, aka the Drug War.
Author's Follow-up: June 21, 2024
This is the whole problem with the Drug War: it demonizes drugs. Well, guess what? All drugs have positive uses at some dose, in some circumstance. Even cyanide has potential positive uses.2
Many psychonauts (like Terence McKenna) praise psychedelics while demonizing other psychoactive substances. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason for some people in some circumstance.
Prohibitionists will me that we're all children when it comes to drugs, and can never -- but never -- use them wisely. That's like saying that we could never ride horses wisely. Or mountain climb. Or skateboard.
Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.
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.
American businesses judge people, not by the color of their skin but by the contents of their digestive systems.
The MindMed company (makers of LSD Lite) tell us that euphoria and visions are "adverse effects": that's not science, that's an arid materialist philosophy that does not believe in spiritual transcendence.
Prohibitionists have the same M O they've had for the last 100+ years: blame drugs for everything. Being a drug warrior is never having the decency to say you're sorry -- not to Mexicans, not to inner-city crime victims, not to patients who go without adequate pain relief...
Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.
Until prohibition ends, rehab is all about enforcing a Christian Science attitude toward psychoactive medicines (with the occasional hypocritical exception of Big Pharma meds).
If I should die of some unusual concatenation of circumstances, I want my survivors to pass "Brian's Law," a law stating that we will no longer pass laws based on hard cases and so needlessly fill our prisons by taking common-sense discretion out of the hands of judges.
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