Not only do drugs exist that could help Claire to die peaceably at home without permission of her government or doctors, but there are also drugs that could make her want to live -- although she has been brainwashed since childhood by Drug War censorship into believing as a matter of faith that such drugs do not exist. Consider, for just one example, these user reports of the phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the early 1990s2:I felt that the experience continued for many days, and I feel that it is one of the most profound and deep learning experiences I have had.
Excellent feelings, tremendous opening of insight and understanding, a real awakening
I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing.
"One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. " --William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature3
To repeat, then, modern psychology reckons without the Drug War and this has had disastrous results. I know this all too well, as this oversight has helped to justify draconian drug laws that have deprived me for a lifetime now of the godsend mood medicine that grows at my very feet."No one who has not lived for years in a DRUG WAR SOCIETY can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."
Did the Vedic People have a substance disorder because they wanted to drink enough soma to see religious realities?
Saying "Fentanyl kills" is philosophically equivalent to saying "Fire bad!" Both statements are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as safely as possible for human benefit.
Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.
Getting off some drugs could actually be fun and instructive, by using a variety of other drugs to keep one's mind off the withdrawal process. But America believes that getting off a drug should be a big moral battle.
The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.
If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.
Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that drug prohibition is wrong.
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.
The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.
If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault.
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