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.
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.
News flash: certain mushrooms can help you improve your life! It's the biggest story in the history of mycology! And yet you wouldn't know it from visiting the websites of most mushroom clubs.
The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.
Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug:
Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
I think many scientists are so used to ignoring "drugs" that they don't even realize they're doing it. Yet almost all books about consciousness and depression (etc.) are nonsense these days because they ignore what drugs could tell us about those topics.
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise come from user reports.
And so, by ignoring all "up" sides to drugs, the DEA points to potential addiction as a knock-down argument for their prohibition. This is the logic of children (and uneducated children at that). It is a cost-benefit analysis that ignores all benefits.
The idea that "drugs" have no medical benefits is not science, it is philosophy, and bad philosophy at that. It is based on the idea that benefits must be molecularly demonstratable and not created from mere knock-on psychological effects of drug use, time-honored tho' they be.
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You have been reading an article entitled, Vice and The 'One Strike You're Out' Fallacy published on March 7, 2021 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, Vice and The 'One Strike You're Out' Fallacy published on March 7, 2021 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)