Thanks for the excellent article on drugs. With respect, however, you overlooked a number of the most important victims of the Drug War. The Drug War is a war on the depressed, it is a war on religion, it is a war on scientific freedom, etc. Here are some details:
1) By outlawing "drugs," we commit millions of the depressed and anxious around the globe to unnecessary lives of misery.
2) By outlawing "drugs," we shunt the chronically depressed off onto highly addictive Big Pharma meds, that they must take every day of their life, some of them (like Effexor 1 ) more addictive than heroin 2 (source: NIH) In fact, 1 in 4 American women take Big Pharma 34 meds every day of their life (source: Julie Holland), drugs that I can tell you from personal experience tranquilize rather than inspire -- a fact that makes illegal drug use the SANE choice, not an aberration.
3) By outlawing "drugs," we outlaw religions. The UDV had to fight the DEA all the way to the Supreme Court to use ayahuasca in its rituals -- and the DEA is still going after religions that are trying to use the drug (or rather drug mixture). Even as I write, the DEA is trying to stop a church in Florida from using ayahuasca.
I have placed "drugs" in quotation marks, because in Drug War Newspeak, the term has come to mean: "substances of which pharmacologically clueless politicians disapprove, which we should NEVER take," as distinguished from "meds," which we're told we should REMEMBER to take, preferably every day of our lives.
You quote Milton Friedman as saying that "men of good will" may disagree about drug legalization 5 . This only proves that Milton Friedman did not understand the insidious nature of prohibition. He probably thought that prohibition just keeps some hedonists from enjoying their poison of choice. What it actually does is ban not just entire religions, but the very religious impulse itself! The Vedic religion was inspired by Soma, a psychedelic drug -- so there would be no modern Hinduism if the DEA had been active in the Indus Valley in 1500 BC. Plato got his view of the afterlife from drinking the psychedelic kykeon at Eleusis. And the philosophy of William James was deeply influenced by his use of laughing gas 6 , which taught him that "there are more things in heaven and earth" than were dreamt of in his philosophy.
But the Drug War says no to such researches. It says no to medical research. Why? Because of the Drug War ideology which falsely tells us that criminalized substances can have no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, in any dose. But the fact is there are no substances of that kind -- and to say so is to give up on science. Even cyanide has positive uses.
The Drug Warriors have us all arguing on the back foot, because they have been demonizing drugs for 100 years now, teaching us to fear them rather than to understand them. This propaganda has been accomplished mainly, first by indoctrinating children in Christian Science ideology toward drugs and second, by keeping the media and academia from ever talking about any POSITIVE USES OF DRUGS. They have thereby censored science -- because almost every modern treatise on psychology and mind completely ignores the fact that we have outlawed all the medicines that could give us something to say on those topics.
Friedman is dead wrong. The problems with the Drug War are manifold. As a chronic depressive, I take this personally, because the Drug Warrior has made me go my entire life now without godsend meds for depression. So, no, I do not consider Drug Warriors to be people of good will -- I consider them to be brainwashed at best -- and brainwashers at worst.
You might have also mentioned how the Drug War overthrows natural law, for John Locke told us that we have a right to the use of the land and all that lies therein. Yet Reagan sent the DEA stomping onto Monticello 7 in 1987 to confiscate the founding father's poppy plants. This is not, to me, a topic upon which reasonable people can disagree, this is simple injustice and the overthrow of freedoms that had been painfully prised from despots over centuries.
Finally, you do not sufficiently point out that drugs can be used for GOOD! MDMA 8 brought peace, love and understanding to the British dance floor in the '90s. That's one of the outcomes of drug use that the Drug Warrior never discusses. Instead, they cracked down on Ecstasy -- with the result that concert goers became drunk and violent and organizers had to hire special forces troops to police concert venues (see the documentary "United Nation" by concert promoter Terry Stone).
January 28, 2023
Brian refers to Bandow's work as an 'article,' but it is actually a lengthy and highly annotated paper. So when Bandow fails to mention things like the Drug War's censorship of scientists or its affect on the depressed, it is apparently not an oversight. He has just not thought of these matters, perhaps because he has been convinced by a lifetime of Drug War propaganda that "drugs" really do have no positive uses and so the best we can do is support the individual's right to self-harm. This, of course, is an exaggeration of his nuanced viewpoint, yet it does catch the general tenor of his observations, so far are they from highlighting the many positive uses (both potential and historical) of so-called "drugs." Like most libertarians, he resents government interference in private lives, yet seems to assume that if such interference WERE permissible, then "drugs" would be one of the first things that government would indeed be obliged to "crack down on."
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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.
Typical materialist protocol. Take all the "wonder" out of the drug and sell it as a one-size-fits all "reductionist" cure for anxiety. Notice that they refer to hallucinations and euphoria as "adverse effects." What next? Communion wine with the religion taken out of it?
The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.
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.
If opium and cocaine were legal again in America, the healthcare industry would suddenly have to undergo extensive downsizing, as Americans were once again put in charge of their own health.
Americans were always free to take care of their own health -- until drug warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine.
For those who want to understand what's going on with the drug war from a philosophical point of view, I recommend chapter six of "Eugenics and Other Evils" by GK Chesterton.
The "scheduling" system is completely anti-scientific and anti-patient. It tells us we can make a one-size-fits-all decision about psychoactive substances without regard for dosage, context of use, reason for use, etc. That's superstitious tyranny.
Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.
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