I just overheard your station promoting an upcoming concert that will be promoting the War on Drugs.
I urge you not to promote such concerts for the following reasons:
1) Americans should be educated about substances, not taught to fear them.
2) The Drug War killed almost 800 blacks in Chicago alone last year by gunfire. And as Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014: "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 1 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist.2"
3) The Drug War makes it criminal for scientists to do their work.
4) The Drug War outlaws the mere study of plants that could help cure Alzheimer's 3 disease and autism, not to mention end school shootings (as could the therapeutic use of the drug Ecstasy by folks prone to violence).
5) The Drug War led to the psychiatric pill mill 4 , which has addicted 1 in 4 American women to Big Pharma 56 meds, some of which are harder to kick than heroin 7.
6) The Drug War has forced American soldiers to go for almost 40 years now without MDMA , a super-safe medicine that is a godsend for fighting PTSD.
7) The Drug War, as we speak, is causing civil wars in South America and empowering a self-styled "Drug War Hitler" in the Philippines.
8) HG Wells and Jules Verne loved coca wine, Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius enjoyed opium . Plato's views of the afterlife were inspired by psychedelics (at Eleusis). And the entire Vedic-Hindu religion was inspired by the psychoactive effects of the Soma plant.
Drugs are not the enemy, ignorance is -- the ignorance that the Drug War encourages by teaching us to fear drugs rather than to understand them.
Closer to home, the DEA stomped onto Monticello 8 in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in the name of the Drug War, thereby overthrowing the natural law upon which Jefferson founded America. (Natural Law tells us that some rights cannot be justifiably abridged, like the right to what John Locke called "the use of the land and all that lies therein.)
By the way, the Drug War event that you were promoting was being sponsored by Bud Light. How ironic. Alcohol kills 95,000 a year in the US, and yet you want kids to say no to plant medicine that grows at their very feet. That's indoctrination, not patriotism. Sounds like Bud Light doesn't want competition for the shabby self-transcendence that its tasteless brew provides.
Facts not fear. Education not incarceration.
Please stop promoting the hateful Drug War, which has militarized police forces around the world and which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some.
Think of Thomas Jefferson, and stop promoting the anti-American War on Drugs. Just say no to the violence-causing Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
PS If we have to have a Drug War, let's focus on the biggest killers. Let's throw anyone in jail who has the least trace of tobacco or alcohol in their systems, drugs which, combined, kill a half a million people in the US every year. Let's deny such people jobs and government loans. Let's confiscate their houses. In other words, let's give the Drug Warriors a taste of their own racist medicine.
Author's Follow-up: February 4, 2025
I wrote the above letter to CBS after a visit to my elderly mother in hospice, where she was suffering unnecessarily thanks to the outlawing of godsend medicines.
Incidentally, isn't it the mother of all irony when the Budweiser corporation sponsors a "just say no" rally? The corporation's product results in 178,000 deaths per year9, and yet they want us to say no to substances that have inspired entire religions.
William Brereton would have appreciated that irony. He frequently contrasted opium with liquor in his treatise entitled 10," in answer to the Anti-Opium Society of England when they first started spreading extravagant lies about the smoking of opium in China.
Brereton pointed out that Chinese opium smokers did not beat their wives, that they were never kept from performing their occupations thanks to opium , nor was their health ravaged by the drug, despite English lies to the contrary.
But the very word "opium 11 " is used as a conjuring spell these days to summon up all that is evil about drugs. So let's think of phenethylamines instead like MDMA 12 . Alexander Shulgin synthesized hundreds of such drugs that inspired and elated without causing dependency or addiction13.
But Budweiser corp. would prefer that young people keep dying from alcohol -- while turning up their self-righteous snouts at the modern government-created boogieman called "drugs."
Here's a comedy routine that illustrates what's wrong with the Drug War -- and the hypocritical folks at CBS and Budweiser who support it. As for the Christian Science rallies mentioned above: I wonder how many young people have failed to show up at such events because they were killed en route by a drunk driver.
Click below for a short comedy routine 14 about the hateful hypocrisy of the War on Drugs.
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.
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.
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.
Trump supports the drug war and Big Pharma: the two forces that have turned me into a patient for life with dependence-causing antidepressants. Big Pharma makes the pills, and the drug war outlaws all viable alternatives.
I might as well say that no one can ever be taught to ride a horse safely. I would argue as follows: "Look at Christopher Reeves. He was a responsible and knowledgeable equestrian. But he couldn't handle horses. The fact is, NO ONE can handle horses!"
Imagine a world in which we were told about both the potential benefits AND the potential harms of drugs like cocaine and opium.
Pro-psychedelic websites tell me to check with my "doctor" before using Mother Nature. But WHY? I'm the expert on my own psychology, damn it. These "doctors" are the ones who got me hooked on synthetic drugs, because they honor microscopic evidence, not time-honored usage.
We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
Wade Davis wrote in Rolling Stone that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?! 178,000 people die from alcohol every year in America alone.
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