
In re-reading this essay of mine on New Year's Eve 2025, I was unhappy with the way that I seem to have "dived right in" to the shortcomings of Singer's book without first giving credit where credit's due. Singer is one of the least bamboozled drug pundits in America today. The reader should take that as a "given" as far as I am concerned. He certainly beats out a long list of rivals for that title, including DJ Nutt, Michael Pollan, Rick Strassman, Ralph Metzner, and Andrew Weil. Singer is that rare author who understands that drug prohibition is nothing less than the outlawing of our right to heal -- of our right to take care of our own health as we see fit, than which no other right can be more basic and fundamental. 
"Much evidence confirms that long-term treatment with the opioid agonists methadone and buprenorphine is the most effective treatment for OUD [Opioid Use Disorder]." --Jeffrey A. Singer, from Your Body, Your Health Care, p. 1436
"The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people."
"It was a glorious feeling, and beauty was everywhere enhanced."
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."
This government-supplied drug will keep you from becoming a lazy Chinese a la the racist picture painted for us by mendacious missionaries in the 19th century, whose Big Lies about opium use in China taught us to mistrust and hate the drug in the first place, even though opium smoking in the west would cut down on alcohol use and so bring wife beating to an end.
"Sadly, staff at a London, Ontario, OPC experienced their first overdose fatality in early October 2024 after being unable to resuscitate an overdose victim." --Jeffrey A. Singer, from Your Body, Your Health Care, p. 14214
"The DEA added MDMA to Schedule I in 1985, after the drug became popular among rave concertgoers who called the drug 'ecstasy.'" --Jeffrey A. Singer, from Your Body, Your Health Care, p. 9618
"[Ketamine] creates a dissociative state by disconnecting patients' mental processes from their pain perception." --Jeffrey A. Singer, from Your Body, Your Health Care, p. 9521
"This feeling of detachment is the most important feature of opiate analgesia. As a deadening agent, opium has almost no effect. If measured purely for its ability to alleviate the sensation of pain, morphine 22 , opium, or any of the others would score no better than aspirin. It is the perception of pain that opium alters, and that makes all the difference in the world." --Jim Hogshire, from Opium for the Masses: Harvesting Nature's Best Pain Medication23
"The strong craving that characterizes opiate addiction has inspired many critics of the drugs to suggest that narcotics destroy the will and moral sense, turning normal people into fiends and degenerates. Actually, cravings for opiates are no different from cravings for alcohol among alcoholics, and they are less strong than cravings for cigarettes, a more addictive drug." --Andrew Weil, from From Chocolate to morphine 24 : Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs25
"Journalists, commentators, and lawmakers should use terminology more accurately and precisely, and resist the temptation to confer legitimacy on an unproven addiction." --Jeffrey A. Singer, from Your Body, Your Health Care, p. 11827
"No China resident believes in the terrible frequency of the dull, sodden-witted, debilitated opium smoker met with in print. " --William H. Brereton, from The Truth About Opium, quote from Dr. Ayers, the Surgeon General of Hong Kong in the early 19th century28
"The government forces thousands of Chinese whom it labels 'internet addicts' into psychiatric boot camps. It subjects them to forced medication and, sometimes, electroshock therapy." --Jeffrey A. Singer, from Your Body, Your Health Care, p. 11729
"It is much less harmful to consume cannabis than it is to consume alcohol. There is no lethal dose of cannabis, and no history of anyone dying from consuming too much of it. Cannabis is also less likely to lead to violent behavior than alcohol." --Jeffrey A. Singer, from Your Body, Your Health Care, p. 9332
"It is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens...." --GK Chesterton, from Eugenics and Other Evils35
"Imagine how many people would have benefited during the past half-century had the government respected their autonomy and their right to self-medicate." --Jeffrey A. Singer, Your Body, Your Health Care --p. 9736
"You have taken away my right to heal by outlawing drugs like cocaine that could have cured my depression in a trice, and instead shunted me off onto Big Pharma drugs that can NEVER be kicked 41. Where is your concern for the Big Pharma patients who can never get off their "meds", you who have always made such a big fuss about the evils of drug dependency?! How can you sit there and support a policy that has turned me into a drug user for life -- meanwhile denying me the obvious cure for depression that was championed by Sigmund Freud himself 42-- until self-interested doctors ignored the interests of hundreds of millions of the depressed by focusing only on the rare downsides of use? You have outlawed my most fundamental human right: my right to heal! And how? By taking away another equally fundamental right: my right to benefit from the bounty of Mother Nature!"
Even fans of sacred medicine have been brainwashed to believe that we do not know if such drugs "really" work: they want microscopic proof. But that's a western bias, used strategically by drug warriors to make the psychotropic drug approval process as glacial as possible.
Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs.
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?
National Geo published an article entitled "Coca: a Blessing and a Curse." Coca was never a curse. Most people used it wisely, just as most people drink wisely. Doctors demonized it because it really worked and it could put them out of business. https://abolishthedea.com/sigmund_freuds_real_breakthrough_was_not_psychoanalysis.php
Self-medication is not a dirty word. It has always been a fundamental right to take care of one's own health -- until the medical establishment demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.
Drug warriors have taught us that honesty about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.
When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia:
OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
There are hundreds of things that we should outlaw before drugs (like horseback riding) if, as claimed, we are targeting dangerous activities. Besides, drugs are only dangerous BECAUSE of prohibition, which compromises product purity and refuses to teach safe use.
The proof that psychedelics work has always been extant. We are hoodwinked by scientists who convince us that efficacy has not been "proven." This is materialist denial of the obvious.

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