n the age of the opium-smoking Marco Polo, there were no such things as drugs in the evil sense in which we use the word today. "Drugs" just referred to all body-affecting substances, from sugar to opium. A Reddit on drugs could not have existed at that time, not just because the Internet did not exist, but because the topic of "drugs" would have been far too broad and open-ended to foster a meaningful discussion.
The only reason we have a "drugs" Reddit today is because racist American politicians began redefining the word "drugs" in 1914 to mean "evil psychoactive substances," this despite the fact that the substances in question have been used responsibly for millennia by other cultures and even inspired entire religions. The Vedic religion was inspired by soma. Plato got his views of the afterlife from the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries. And Mesoamerican religions developed entire cosmogonies based around their use of the coca plant and so-called "magic mushrooms." But the history-challenged Drug Warriors censored all such factoids, and encouraged us to do the same.
And we have done so. We have fallen for their demonization campaign, accepted their politically strategic redefinition of the word "drugs," and created popular Reddits like this one to discuss the topic of "drugs" from the unscientific and fearmongering point of view of our racist forebears.
And what was the political purpose behind the Drug Warrior's redefinition of the term "drugs" as a pejorative epithet? It was to punish and marginalize those minorities of whom the beer-swilling and tobacco-smoking Drug Warriors disapproved and to create a conservative Christian society ruled by militarized police forces.
And that strategy worked beyond their wildest dreams, as the Drug War soon became America's number-one export, as country after country gladly followed suit in outlawing godsend plant medicine. And that's not surprising, really. If the one country based on natural rights says that the citizen no longer has a right to the bounty of Mother Nature's pharmacy, then we cannot expect less-enlightened countries to stand up for such rights, especially since it's hard for any government to pass up a chance to monitor their own citizens more closely.
If anyone's searching for proof of the Drug War's hideous impact on democracy, they have only to look at the election of Donald Trump.
In 2016, there were more than five million Americans who had lost the right to vote, most of them minorities and most because of so-called drug offenses. Russian interference may have helped push Trump over the top, but the real reason for his election was the sidelining of millions of voters thanks to the Drug War, which was implemented for that very purpose: to sideline minority voters and empower law-and-order conservatives. And now this same Trump is running again, this time on a platform of executing those minorities whom his drug-warrior predecessors were content with merely disenfranchising.
That's why I'm looking forward to a day when the Drugs Reddit disappears, when the world stops demonizing psychoactive substances in lockstep with our racist forebears, and the word "drugs" once again becomes a neutral judgment-free term embracing all substances from sugar to opium, a world in which we stop demonizing substances for political purposes and start learning about them instead, with a view toward developing novel therapies and safe use guidelines for all time-honored plant medicines.
Editor's Note (Nov. 2021): Of course I was banned from the Drugs Reddit shortly after posting these comments. But that only shows you that I'm on the right track. I'd be suspicious if I wasn't banned, considering the fact that most westerners have been taught from grade school to despise plant-based psychoactive medicine, to call it "junk" and "dope," and to "just say no to mother nature's godsend medicines!" Why should the moderators at the Drugs Reddit be an exception to the rule? They've been taught since kindergarten to tilt at the politically created windmill of "drugs" and I expect to have no more success in changing their minds than the curate had in getting Don Quixote to stand down in his battle against his own imaginary foes.
Just be thankful that I'm not paranoid, because then I would also suspect the moderators of purposefully promoting the fearmongering status quo viz. drugs in order to curry favor with Big Pharma, from whom they (the moderators) might even be taking kickbacks!
But I suppose that the principle of Occam's Razor obliges me to assume that the Drugs Reddit moderators are merely dupes of the Drug War ideology like almost everybody else these days, thoroughly bamboozled westerners who, having been successfully brainwashed in the Cult of the Drug War with its lies (about plant medicine frying brains, etc.), now hold inanimate substances responsible for all the evils of the world.
Author's Follow-up: October 3, 2022
In a way, though, the Drug War makes Reddit "drug" groups inevitable, because by outlawing all of mother nature's godsend psychoactive medicines, the Drug War creates problems to talk about in Reddit groups. Without the Drug War, in a land where Mother Nature was free and pharma-savvy shaman were free to use them strategically on behalf of clients, addiction would not exist, or else would be embraced in cases where it fit a person's lifestyle, as coca fit the lifestyle of HG Wells, opium fit the lifestyle of Benjamin Franklin, and coffee and beer fit the lifestyles of modern drug-war Americans.
When fully armed with Mother Nature's vast array of psychoactive medicine, a creative shaman (who is both pharmacologically and socioculturally savvy) could help a client "get off" any drug whatsoever, without making it the great moral struggle which the modern 'addiction expert' expects it to become. For the shaman's goal would be different than that of the modern 'addiction therapist,' who seeks the Christian Science outcome of making the patient 'sober' as that term is hypocritically defined by Drug Warriors. The shaman's goal would be to give the 'client' what THEY want in life, whether it be self-transcendence or merely the ability to stand up in front of a crowd without 'choking.' He would fight conditions like depression in ways that the Drug War could never even imagine, with a multitude of therapies that become obvious to us once we stop demonizing psychoactive medicine. He might have the depressive drop by for weekly DMT sessions, using cocaine the next week, opium the next week and so on, according to a schedule that will not addict the client but merely give them something positive to look forward to, which is the best way to beat any depression. Meanwhile, the patient's weekday life could be emotionally, spiritually and vocationally enhanced by the daily chewing of the coca leaf, a benign custom that bound the Peruvian Indian culture of happy camaraderie together for millennia, in the same way that coffee unites the westerner in their culture of grim competition.
Fearmongering
The drug war is the ultimate case of fearmongering. And yet academics and historians fail to recognize it as such. They will protest eloquently against the outrages of the witch hunts of yore, but they are blind to the witch hunts of the present. What is a drug dealer but a modern service magician, someone who sells psychoactive medicine designed to effect personal ends for the user? They are simply providing an alternative to materialistic medicine, which ignores common sense and so ignores the glaringly obvious value of such substances.
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.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.
In a sane world, we'd package laughing gas for safe use and give it to the suicidal -- saying, "Use before attempting to kill yourself." But drug warriors would rather have suicide than drug use.
How else will they scare us enough to convince us to give up all our freedoms for the purpose of fighting horrible awful evil DRUGS? DRUGS is the sledgehammer with which they are destroying American democracy.
The so-called "herbs" that witches used were drugs, in the same way that "meds" are drugs. If academics made that connection, the study of witchcraft would shed a lot of light on the fearmongering of modern prohibitionists.
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.
"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary
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.
All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.
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, Why the Drugs Reddit should not exist published on October 27, 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)
n the age of the opium-smoking Marco Polo, there were no such things as drugs in the evil sense in which we use the word today. "Drugs" just referred to all body-affecting substances, from sugar to opium. A Reddit on drugs could not have existed at that time, not just because the Internet did not exist, but because the topic of "drugs" would have been far too broad and open-ended to foster a meaningful discussion.
You have been reading an article entitled, Why the Drugs Reddit should not exist published on October 27, 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)