Here's the take-home message from the new book "Whiteout": we crack down on drugs when the victims of prohibition are minorities and we "medicalize" drugs when the victims of prohibition are white.
Here's where I'd usually tell you all the ways that the book I'm reviewing has "missed the point." But "Whiteout1" is a very rare book when it comes to drugs: one in which the authors truly have something to teach ME. I believe this all the more after listening to their discussion on YouTube (April 12, 2023). They truly "get it" about prohibition.
The deadpan Robin Kelley is not necessarily being entirely facetious when he calls "Whiteout" the best book of all time. Let's all read it -- multiple times, if possible.
My mother was a Caucasian. She became dependent on oxy after her local practitioner prescribed the drug for her anxiety. When you're white, these substances are called "medicines" you see.
Already, there's a problem here. My mom's anxiety could have been excellently treated with a wide variety of substances with no addiction potential, starting with MDMA and a wide variety of other phenethylamines created by chemists like Alexander Shulgin. Then there are psychedelics and plant medicines which intoxiphobic westerners have not even dared investigate because these drugs are both illegal and highly stigmatized in superstitious America.
So the Drug War ideology of substance demonization tied the hands of her GP. If white patients like my mom complain constantly about anxiety, they have nothing effective to offer her except drugs like oxy with addiction potential.
The odd thing, however, is how such drug use is viewed by society. I personally never in the world thought of my mother as a "drug" user in the evil sense of that word. Nor did any family members. I never even thought about the specific drug that she was using. To me, it was just some medicine with which she was having issues, not a "drug" in the negative sense of that word.
Only after her decade-long bout with her anxiety "medicine" was coming to an end did I realize that the drug involved was oxy, a substance whose name was slowly becoming a term of reproach in modern parlance. She, after all, was not the kind of person who used "drugs." She was using medicine!
Of course, the problem with this viewpoint is that minorities and the poor who, for financial and systemic reasons, use drugs without state sanction are considered "druggies," even though they are basically just guilty of self-medication. They are punished by drug law for leaving the doctor out of the loop when it comes to psychological relief.
There is something obviously racist here. Drug abuse among minorities and the poor is an excuse to lock them up in America -- whereas drug abuse among elderly middle-class white American females is a medical matter worthy of our concern and empathy. Had Congress gotten wind of opiate use in a subsidized housing complex, they would have introduced new bills about drug-testing residents and removing them from their homes if they tested positive. This is blatant racism, of course. Imagine if Congress were to pass laws requiring elderly white middle-class women to undergo drug testing for oxy and denying them Social Security payments should they fail the test. That is unimaginable, for the simple reason that the Drug Warrior's motive is to punish the poor and minorities, not to punish respectable white women.
Don't get me wrong, I would not have wanted my mother locked up or disparaged for her substance-related issues; however, the compassionate "spin" that society gave to her use clearly demonstrates the racist nature of the Drug War. This double standard of empathy (for whites) versus anger (for minorities) when it comes to their drug use shows that the Drug War is racist in the extreme.
That's why there was a sudden outpouring of concern about the so-called opiate problem in America: the public now saw that the laws they had designed to punish minorities were beginning to cause problems for respectable white people as well. This was not what Drug Warriors had in mind, so they focused the public narrative on helping folks with oxy issues, while, of course, blaming "drugs" for all the downsides that were ultimately being caused by prohibition itself, the laws that they had passed which had outlawed all safe means of anxiety relief and virtually forced GP's to prescribe oxy, or else to lose their many anxious white patients.
But the problem is not oxy. It is not fentanyl. It is not heroin. It is not morphine. The problem is drug prohibition.
There was no opiate problem when opium was legal in America. Thousands of young people were not dying in the streets. People used regulated product in the safety of their homes and carried on normal lives. It took drug prohibition to render drug use deadly by outlawing safe mind and mood medicine, discouraging drug education, and failing to regulate drug supply.
There are endless reasons why the Drug War is inhumane insanity; just check out my hundreds of essays on this topic. But the book "Whiteout" reminds us that the Drug War is ultimately nothing but a "respectable" way of practicing racism. The makeup of the U.S. prison population is proof of that claim. Blacks make up 13% of the American population but they account for 37% of America's record-breaking prison population2. This is, in fact, how racists and fascists win close presidential elections in America today, because they have crafted drug laws to throw their enemies in jail. Unfortunately, most Americans refuse to see this connection. The penny will not drop, even though this Drug War racism has now resulted in the election of a Russia-loving fascist and replaced democracy with insurrectionism and dictatorship.
Note: As Carl Hart reminds us, most people use drugs wisely3. Even "addictive" drugs can be used safely to fight anxiety, even though drug law policy is designed to encourage ignorance and to make safe use as difficult as possible. There are endless common-sense drug-use protocols that come to mind to fight anxiety the moment that we start learning about drugs rather than demonizing them. See my essay on Fighting Drugs with Drugs for more on this topic.
Book Reviews
Most authors today reckon without the drug war -- unless they are writing specifically about "drugs" -- and even then they tend to approach the subject in a way that clearly demonstrates that they have been brainwashed by drug war orthodoxy, even if they do not realize it themselves. That's why I write my philosophical book reviews, to point out this hypocrisy that no other philosopher in the world is pointing out. (Hey, if I thought I would ever be recognized in this lifetime, I would be humble and patient -- but it's clear to me that I'm to be largely ignored here-below until such time as I bite some serious dust, so you'll just have to put up with my horn-blowing, fair enough?)
This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.
Trump is the prototypical drug warrior. He knows that he can destroy American freedoms by fearmongering. He has seen it work with the Drug War, which got rid of the 4th Amendment, religious freedom and is now going after free speech.
The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.
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.
A Pennsylvanian politician now wants the US Army to "fight fentanyl." The guy is anthropomorphizing a damn drug! No wonder pols don't want to spend money on education, because any educated country would laugh a superstitious guy like that right out of public office.
Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug:
Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits
People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.
To put it another way: in a sane world, we would learn to strategically fight drugs with drugs.
We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.
Imagine if we held sports to the same safety standard as drugs. There would be no sports at all. And yet even free climbing is legal. Why? Because with sports, we recognize the benefits and not just the downsides.
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, Whiteout: A Philosophical Review, published on April 9, 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, Whiteout: A Philosophical Review, published on April 9, 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)