I don't mean to scare you, but you are reading an essay by a ghost. Yes, I have been ghosted so often when writing to others about drugs that I believe it is now time for me to embrace the identity that my reluctant interlocutors have tacitly chosen for me. We will all be ghosts soon enough, so I suppose that there is no harm in embracing that condition proactively, as it were. Not that my phantasmal status is going to shut me up, mind. On the contrary, I consider it my first official duty as a ghost to haunt those who have saddled me with this status in the first place, and what better way to do that than by publicizing their neglect of me online? This is not really about payback, however. My real goal in calling these people on the carpet is simply to demonstrate the extent to which drug prohibition has shut down free speech in America on a wide range of important topics.
CNN reporter Lisa Ling has been ghosting me ever since May 13, 2022, when I wrote her to suggest that she should have mentioned the Drug War in her documentary about Chicago gun violence 1 .
See Open Letter to Lisa Ling. BR>
Matthew K. Nock, chair of the Harvard Psychology Department, has been ghosting me since May 11, 2025, when I wrote to suggest that his university's bio about William James should reflect James's interest in altered states.
See How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James.
Mitch Horrowitz, author of "Uncertain Places, has been ghosting me since March 2, 2025, when I wrote to suggest that facts about beneficial drug use are the most "damned" facts in the world today, in the Fortean sense of that word.
See Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation.
Francis Fukuyama has been ghosting me since May 20, 2022, when I wrote him to suggest that the Drug War is the problem with inner-city neighborhoods, not drugs. Liquor and drug prohibition brought gunfire to American streets, not drugs.
See Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama.
San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins has been ghosting me since November 8, 2023, when I wrote her suggesting that drug prohibition is the problem 2 , not the drug dealers whom she makes such a fuss about catching. She should do us a favor and arrest all the Drug Warriors who set up all this violence in the first place, first with liquor prohibition and then with substance prohibition.
See Prohibitionists Never Learn.
Variety Critic Owen Glieberman has been ghosting me since May 23, 2021, when I wrote him suggesting that his review of the movie "Four Good Days" was warped by Drug War presumptions and biases.
See Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman.
Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has been ghosting me since September 1, 2024, when I wrote her complaining about her use of drug law to cover up societal problems, such as a lack of affordable housing and affordable medical care, etc.
See Regulate and Educate.
The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., has been ghosting me since September 9, 2020, when I first wrote to ask them to condemn the Nazification of America via drug law.
See Why the Holocaust Museum must denounce the Drug War.
In the age of the Drug War, the Hippocratic Oath has become "First, do no good."
In "Psychedelic Refugee," Rosemary Leary writes:
"Fueled by small doses of LSD, almost everything was amusing or weird." -- Rosemary Leary
In a non-brainwashed world, such testimony would suggest obvious ways to help the depressed.
Musk vies with his fellow materialists in his attempt to diss humans as insignificant. But we are not insignificant. The very term "insignificant" is a human creation. Consciousness rules. Indeed, consciousness makes the rules. Without us, there would only be inchoate particles.
"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann
ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."
I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."
When is the Holocaust Museum going to recognize that the Drug War has Nazified American life? Probably, on the same day that the Jefferson Foundation finally admits to having sold out Jefferson by inviting the DEA onto his estate in 1987 to confiscate his poppy plants.
Outlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.
Psst! Drug use has benefits too. Pass it on!
There are neither "drugs" nor "meds" as those terms are used today. All substances have potential good uses and bad uses. The terms as used today carry value judgements, as in meds good, drugs bad.
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