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!
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
Just saw a People's magazine article with the headline: "JUSTICE FOR MATTHEW PERRY."
If there was true justice, their editorial staff would be in jail for promoting user ignorance and a contaminated drug supply.
It's the prohibition, stupid!!!
The drug war tells us that certain drugs have no potential uses and then turns that into a self-fulfilling prophecy by outlawing these drugs. This is insanely anti-scientific and anti-progress. We should never give up on looking for positive uses for ANY substance.
The prohibitionist motto: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."
Americans have learned nothing but half-truths and lies about cocaine and opium thanks to the total censorship of drug benefits.
America never ended prohibition. It just redirected prohibition from alcohol to all of alcohol's competitors.
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful.
Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity. It is the outlawing of our right to take care of our own health.
The healthcare industry turns all the emotional downsides of drug prohibition into "illnesses."
It is evil to give the depressed drugs to help them die while barring them from using drugs that could make them wish to live.
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