I'm still wrapping my head around the Kafkaesque world faced by so-called drug offenders in America as detailed by Colleen Cowles in "War On Us."1 For merely possessing a few pills, Americans are being charged with felonies. Felonies! An estimated eight percent of Americans have felonies, according to a study cited by Cowles, and thirty-three percent of African Americans. 33%. This means far more than that they can be sent to prison for years. Once out, they can be denied educational loans, evicted from public housing, rendered ineligible for food stamps, and forced to submit to drug testing on demand. Even after they've completed years of harassing parole, the law seeks to prevent felons from getting on with their lives. As felons, they are barred from working in a host of jobs, which Colleen tells us include, but is by no means limited to: childcare worker, electrician, engineer, judge, nurse, manicurist, midwife, optometrist, psychologist, school-bus driver, social worker, teacher... even watchman. It makes you wonder what jobs they ARE allowed to hold: circus clown, perhaps? Ayurveda healer? Video game tester? (full-time pundit against the War on Drugs?)"In 2018, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association mounted an ad campaign against criminal justice reform in that state. The New York City Patrolmen's Benevolent Association campaigned against parole reform. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association spends approximately $8 million annually on lobbying to defeat criminal justice reform, ranging from opposition to reform of three strikes laws to prison expansion."
"First, police departments compete for federal anti drug grants with number of arrests and drug seizures strengthening their application for those grants. The grants also incentivize departments to pay for SWAT team armor and weapons, further militarizing our police forces. Secondly, the ability of police departments to pad their own budgets using civil forfeiture statutes makes drug arrests more lucrative than pursuing other types of arrests."
Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx
Jim Hogshire described sleep cures that make physical withdrawal from opium close to pain-free. As for "psychological addiction," there are hundreds of elating drugs that could be used to keep the ex-user's mind from morbidly focusing on a drug whose use has become problematic for them.
It is evil to give the depressed drugs to help them die while barring them from using drugs that could make them wish to live.
High suicide rates? What a poser! Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the US has outlawed all substances that elate and inspire???
Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.
John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!
When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.
Assisted suicide cannot be discussed meaningfully without discussing the drug prohibition that renders it necessary in the first place.
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