Vice writers are like all Drug Warriors: they write as if a natural psychoactive substance can be justifiably condemned provided only that it causes one single solitary problem for one single solitary person (even if the person in question was massively irresponsible when using said substance). What anti-scientific idiocy! A 2017 study shows that aspirin kills 3,000 people a year, and yet Vice is not writing horror stories to illustrate that fact. Why not? Because Vice authors have an agenda. They're not out to demonize drugs in general, but only those substances that threaten Big Business and the scientistic status quo.
Vice is guilty of what we should henceforth call the "ONE STRIKE YOU'RE OUT" fallacy, which says that a criminalized substance can be dismissed as evil merely because of its association with one single solitary instance of misuse. The fact that adult writers can glibly accept such an idiotic assumption shows how far the Drug War has melted the brains of America's so-called intellectual class.
The British Parliament was guilty of the "One Strike You're Out" fallacy when they broke up the peaceful rave scene in 1995 by cracking down on Ecstasy, merely because the drug had resulted in one single solitary death -- a death which was caused by the Drug War itself because it outlawed objective research into the drug in question, thereby denying safe-use information to the ravers who used it.
In fact, there are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
Had the FDA been around in the Indus Valley 3,500 years ago, there would be no Hindu religion today, because they would have found some potential problem with the use of soma.
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful.
To oppose the Drug War philosophically, one has to highlight its connections to both materialism and the psychiatric pill mill. And that's a problem, because almost everyone is either a Drug Warrior or a materialist these days and has a vested interest in the continuation of the psychiatric pill mill.
Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.
There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.
If there were no other problem with antidepressants, they would be wrong for the simple reason that they make a user dependent for life -- not as a bug (as in drugs like opium) but rather as a feature: that's how they "work," by being administered daily for a lifetime.
Over 45% of traumatic brain injuries are caused by horseback riding (ABC News). Tell your representatives to outlaw horseback riding and make it a federal offence to teach a child how to ride! Brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.
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.
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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