or all his popular writing about psychoactive medicine, Michael Pollan supports prohibition. He believes it actually makes sense to outlaw Mother Nature's bounty. That's a strange position for a botanist living in a purportedly free country. Worse yet, Michael is hypocritical, because he believes that prohibition makes sense for you and I, but not for himself. That's why, in his lengthy book "How to Change Your Mind," he spends 400 pages telling of his personal experiences with psychedelics, only to confess on page 405 that he is not in favor of mushrooms being legal for mere human beings. Putting the elitist hypocrisy aside, I think this is an appalling position for a botanist to take.
But let's suppose for a moment that Mother Nature is so evil that outlawing her bounty makes sense - even though such measures would violate the natural law upon which America was founded and clash with Christian orthodoxy which tells us that people can be good or bad, not things. Even then, we have the proof of the last 100 years that prohibition causes civil wars overseas, militarizes police forces, creates inner-city violence, arms the gangs and the cartels, causes drive-by shootings, denies godsend medicines to the depressed and those in pain, and censors science. And what is Michael's argument in FAVOR of prohibition? A shroom might be misused by a young American kid.
Well, of course a shroom might be misused, Michael, but that's BECAUSE of the Drug War itself, which teaches Americans to fear drugs rather than to understand them. That's why the tellingly named National Institute for Drug Abuse publishes endless papers on misuse and abuse of drugs, but almost nothing on responsible use, which, as Dr. Carl L. Hart writes in "Drug Use for Grown-Ups," is by far the main way that psychoactive drugs are used in the real world, this despite the fact that the Drug Warrior does everything they can to keep Americans ignorant about drugs, since their goal is to make us fear rather than understand them.
And why do prohibitionists like Michael insist on thinking that young white American suburban kids are the only stakeholders in the prohibition debate? As a chronic depressive, I've been forced to go a lifetime now without godsend medicine that grows at my feet. Yet I've never heard of a Drug Warrior wringing their hands on my behalf. And there are hundreds of millions like me who suffer all so that we can protect Johnnie and Janie Whitebread from the politician-created boogieman called drugs. I'm not saying that Michael is racist himself, of course, but the prohibition that he supports (however lukewarmly) most definitely is. (See the book "Whiteout" for some of the many ways that this is so.)
The truth is that Michael is Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to drugs. The choice of his subject matter makes him sound progressive, but he occasionally lets slip a line which betrays a deep conservative streak as well. In supporting prohibition, for instance, in "How to Change Your Mind," Michael tells us that Nixon outlawed psychedelics in order to ensure the health of young men being recruited into the army. That's simply not true. Nixon didn't want the campus followers of Timothy Leary to be fit for military service, he wanted them thrown in jail, preferably on felony charges to deny them the future right to vote.
He created drug laws in order to disenfranchise his opposition, a step that removed hundreds of thousands of blacks from the voting rolls and handed elections to Drug Warriors, and eventually to Donald Trump himself, who, if re-elected has voiced his determination to start executing those Black drug dealers that previous administrations had been satisfied with just throwing in jail.
If Michael is really excited about the psychoactive substances that he is studying, he should denounce the Drug War which keeps all those godsends from being used by his readers. Until then, Michael is treating those readers like Tantalus of the Greek myth, vividly exciting them about a host of substances that turn out to be just out of reach for everybody but Michael himself.
Most substance withdrawal would be EASY if drugs were re-legalized and we could use any substance we wanted to mitigate negative psychological effects.
This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.
We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.
Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
Scientists cannot tell us if psychoactive drugs are worth the risk any more than they can tell us if free climbing is worth the risk, or horseback riding or target practice or parkour.
It's an enigma: If I beat my depression by smoking opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag subject to immediate arrest. But if I do NOT "take my meds" every day of my life, I am a bad patient.
How else will they scare us enough to convince us to give up all our freedoms for the purpose of fighting horrible awful evil DRUGS? DRUGS is the sledgehammer with which they are destroying American democracy.
Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.
"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.
There would be almost no recidivism for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, The Problem with Michael Pollan: Why a botanist should not support the drug war, published on June 7, 2023 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
or all his popular writing about psychoactive medicine, Michael Pollan supports prohibition. He believes it actually makes sense to outlaw Mother Nature's bounty. That's a strange position for a botanist living in a purportedly free country. Worse yet, Michael is hypocritical, because he believes that prohibition makes sense for you and I, but not for himself. That's why, in his lengthy book "How to Change Your Mind," he spends 400 pages telling of his personal experiences with psychedelics, only to confess on page 405 that he is not in favor of mushrooms being legal for mere human beings. Putting the elitist hypocrisy aside, I think this is an appalling position for a botanist to take.
You have been reading an article entitled, The Problem with Michael Pollan: Why a botanist should not support the drug war, published on June 7, 2023 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
