Let's rephrase the headline in equivalent language in order to illustrate my concerns:
America wants to dominate South America by outlawing the coca leaf that the Peruvian Indians have used long before the Spanish arrived to enslave them (the health-giving coca leaf that is demonized today based not on its effects, but rather on the fact that it contains an alkaloid called cocaine 5 6 -- which is kind of like demonizing peaches because they contain prussic acid). Americans are willful idiots when it comes to drug policy who have swallowed Drug War propaganda hook, line and sinker. So instead of educating the public, they've been taught to divide it by creating scapegoats for our anti-scientific views of medicine. There are many professors today in academia who actually agree with the anti-scientific notion that there are such things as "drugs": namely, substances for which there is no good use: not now, not ever, not anywhere. But the fact is that there are no such substances on the planet. Even deadly Botox has wise, rational uses."Gee, should we execute people for selling the kind of plant medicine that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson loved and which inspired the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius himself? Should we execute people for selling the plant medicine that grows at our very feet and which has inspired entire religions around the world?"
"What a poser!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
The prohibitionist motto: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."
"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
The DEA is gaslighting Americans, telling them that drugs with obvious benefits have no benefits whatsoever. Scientists collude in this lie thanks to their adherence to the emotion-scorning principles of behaviorism.
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.
If they're going to throw doctors in jail for prescribing too much pain medication, they should also throw them in jail for prescribing too LITTLE.
The December Scientific American features a story called "The New Nuclear Age," about a trillion-dollar plan to add 100s of ICBM's to 5 states, which an SA editorial calls "kick me" signs. This Neanderthal plan comes from pols who think that compassion-boosting drugs are evil!
In the 19th century, author Richard Middleton wrote how poets would get together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses."
Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
(up)