Though the Drug War originally targeted hippies, its real victims have been patients suffering from PTSD, depression, and anxiety. It is this latter demographic that the Drug War has truly cracked down on by denying us access to powerful and time-honored psychoactive medicines over the last 50 years, thereby forcing us to rely on SSRIs: drugs that create dependence, turn the depressed person into a lifelong patient, and eventually produce the drowsy symptoms of anhedonia in the lifelong user 1 . At best, such legal treatments make one's life bearable, while drugs like LSD and psilocybin open the mind to possibilities to which a depressed mind was otherwise blinded. The latter drugs, in fact, empower the patient to start unlearning the damaging lessons of negative experiences by giving the user new ways to look at life: in other words such drugs are the Holy Grail of psychopharmacology - or they would be if skeptical materialists and political fascists would merely allow these drugs to do their job.
A good step in this direction would be for purportedly "free" peoples to reject the notion that government can rightfully declare Mother Nature's output to be "illegal" (a usurpation of power that Terence Mckenna rightfully called "ridiculous and obnoxious") 2 . For if I have a birthright to anything in a free country, it is surely to the bounty of Mother Nature that grows freely at my feet 3 . This is especially so in America, where the very constitution grants me "the pursuit of happiness" and then the government turns around and criminalizes precisely those plants that could bring me that very happiness. Moreover, the right to Mother Nature's bounty is specifically guaranteed in America by the Natural Law upon which Jefferson founded our country. That's why Jefferson was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 4 in 1987 and confiscated the garden-loving president's poppy plants 56 .
Imagine, that the one country founded upon Natural Law should end up being the one country to set the pernicious example of criminalizing plants around the entire globe!
The International Observer says the "core issues" causing Mexican drug violence are: "corruption, inequality, and the demand for narcotics in the U.S." Wrong, wrong, wrong. The core issue is DRUG PROHIBITION.
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks. People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!
I'm looking for a United Healthcare doctor now that I'm 66 years old. When I searched my zip code and typed "alternative medicine," I got one single solitary return... for a chiropractor, no less. Some choice. Guess everyone else wants me to "keep taking my meds."
The addiction gene should be called the prohibition gene: it renders one vulnerable to prohibition lies and limitations: like the lack of safe supply, the lack of choices, and the lack of information. We should pathologize the prohibitionists, not their victims.
The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.
We should place prohibitionists on trial for destroying inner cities.
Mad in America solicits personal stories about people trying to get off of antidepressants, but they will not publish your story if you want to use entheogenic medicines to help you. They're afraid their readers can't handle the truth.
If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.
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?
High suicide rates? What a poser! Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the US has outlawed all substances that elate and inspire???
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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