"Bootleggers started using denatured industrial alcohol disguised as whiskey - what would be called 'rotgut' for its effect on the drinker's internal organs13 - even in the months before Prohibition took effect. The magazine Literary Digest, in its January 10, 1920 issue, reported that scores of people had recently died, including 57 in Hartford, Connecticut, and hundreds of others blinded after drinking 'alleged whiskey' containing wood alcohol.14
Americans think that fighting drugs is more important than freedom. We have already given up on the fourth amendment. Nor is the right to religion honored for those who believe in indigenous medicines. Pols are now trying to end free speech about drugs as well.
MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. These are the people who think Electro Shock Therapy is not used often enough! What sick priorities.
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.
In fact, there are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.
We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.
Scientists are not the experts on psychoactive medicines. The experts are painters and artists and spiritualists -- and anyone else who simply wants to be all they can be in life. Scientists understand nothing of such goals and aspirations.
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.
Cop and detective shows are loaded with subtle drug war propaganda, including lines like, "She had a history of drug use, so..." The implication being that anyone who uses substances that politicians hate cannot be trusted.
Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.
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