efore the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, American citizens could manage their own pain. They could make life livable with the occasional use of opium during their "down time." (Imagine that: no geriatric wards need be full of moaning seniors!) This allowed the user to make their peace with life by occasionally seeing past their own limiting mental constructs (what we today call the "default mode network") and then come back to "life" mentally refreshed and with the will and perspective to carry on. Nor did opium require increased doses over time to maintain this invigorating effect, nor were there negative physiological effects associated with the daily use of these drugs. At worst, the drug created habituation in daily users (what we now moralistically call "addiction"), but even this addiction could be conquered in one agonizing week -- one week -- whereas it is almost impossible to withdraw from many popular SSRIs (as can be clearly seen by reading addict testimony after searching the words "withdrawal" and Effexor" on Google).
After the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, American citizens could no longer manage their own pain. Instead, they had to make regular expensive pilgrimages to the doctors, where they were prescribed far more dangerous drugs than opium, drugs that were more addictive and brought no pleasant dreams by way of compensation, but rather worked to essentially tranquilize the patient into blandly accepting the status quo. Typically these drugs had to be increased over time to maintain efficacy. Nor have they ever been studied for long-term negative effects, meaning today's patients are essentially guinea pigs: guinea pigs in a test trial that is failing, given the fact that many veteran users of these "silver bullets" are reporting increased depression over time as well as an increasing unhappiness with the emotional flat-lining that is associated with daily use of SSRIs.
PICTURE0017
There is ample evidence that the Harrison Narcotics Act was a racist political stratagem directed at Asians. But even if we assume that the act was a high-minded attempt to fight addiction, consider the actual outcome:
There are more addicts in America than ever after 1914: it's just that now the addiction is being managed by the American Psychiatric Association and the pharmaceutical industry.
Patients are now worse off than ever -- not only have we deprived them of blissful occasional relief from their pain and sorrows, but we have made them wards of the state, forcing them to visit health-care clinics for a lifetime to ask permission for the relief that was theirs by right just over a hundred years ago -- to pay through the nose for medications that are less effective and far more addictive than opium ever was.
Speaking of which, if anyone manages to conjure Francis Burton Harrison via Ouija board, give him a message for me, would you? Tell him I said, "Thanks for nothing!!!"
PS But even these powerful arguments are beside the point. The fact is that the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act was a violation of natural law because it deprived Americans of their birth right as mere human beings, namely their free access to the plants and medicines that grow at their very feet. It was a power grab by government and the therapeutic industry, both of which would hitherto decide, from their lofty and well-remunerated bureaucratic thrones, of which plants and fungi the will deign to let us partake and precisely at what exorbitant price and in precisely what strictly limited amount. The Drug War is thus anti-American in the extreme, as it elevates common law over natural law. Little wonder then that the architect of American independence should himself become a posthumous victim of the Drug War several decades ago when the jackbooted DEA trespassed on Monticello to confiscate their benefactor's poppy plants.
Rather than being appalled, Americans aid and abet the outrage to this very day by cheering on the DEA in those Drug War movies in which that cowardly agency, runs roughshod over rights that were taken for granted, not only in Jefferson's times but a mere 100 years ago.
{^Jefferson was rolling over in his grave in the 1980s when the DEA stomped onto Monticello to steal the founding father's poppy plants. It's a wonder they didn't seize Monticello itself under the legal fiction that it was a public nuisance. Lord knows police departments have earned millions by such ploys in the past. Big Liquor must be thrilled at this war on the poppy, especially when America goes overseas and burns the plants in countries where it has been used responsibly for millennia.}{
People
about whom and to whom I've written over the years...
There are endless common-sense treatments for depression. They are all outlawed thanks to two things: 1) drug laws and 2) the scientific belief in the passion-scorning tenets of reductionism and behaviorism.
Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?
Drug War censorship is supported by our "science" magazines, which pretend that outlawed drugs do not exist, and so write what amount to lies about the supposed intransigence of things like depression and anxiety.
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.
Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.
Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Some fat cat should treat the entire Supreme Court to a vacation at San Jose del Pacifico in Mexico, where they can partake of the magic mushroom in a ceremony led by a Zapotec guide.
Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug:
Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Screw You, Francis Burton Harrison published on January 13, 2019 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
efore the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, American citizens could manage their own pain. They could make life livable with the occasional use of opium during their "down time." (Imagine that: no geriatric wards need be full of moaning seniors!) This allowed the user to make their peace with life by occasionally seeing past their own limiting mental constructs (what we today call the "default mode network") and then come back to "life" mentally refreshed and with the will and perspective to carry on. Nor did opium require increased doses over time to maintain this invigorating effect, nor were there negative physiological effects associated with the daily use of these drugs. At worst, the drug created habituation in daily users (what we now moralistically call "addiction"), but even this addiction could be conquered in one agonizing week -- one week -- whereas it is almost impossible to withdraw from many popular SSRIs (as can be clearly seen by reading addict testimony after searching the words "withdrawal" and Effexor" on Google).
You have been reading an article entitled, Screw You, Francis Burton Harrison published on January 13, 2019 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
