In his class entitled Natural Law and Human Nature, Professor Joseph Koterski reminds his students that early thinkers were blind to the injustice of slavery because they lived in a culture that held a variety of unfounded assumptions on that subject.
I recently e-mailed the professor, suggesting that modern Americans have the same kind of blind spot when it comes to the Drug War: we cannot see the injustice in IT because WE live in a culture that holds a variety of unfounded assumptions on THAT subject.
I have yet to hear back from Professor Koterski, but that's probably to be expected. After all, if my theory is right, then my ideas about the Drug War will seem as crazy to most people living today (professors included) as the abolitionist viewpoint would have seemed to an ancient Greek or Roman philosopher.
I'll give the professor a few more weeks to respond before publishing my e-mail to him as an "open letter." Meanwhile, here are a few of the harebrained American cultural assumptions that let the Drug Warrior get away with murder, literally speaking, fomenting completely unnecessary violence overseas in the name of protecting the American people from plants.
FALSE ASSUMPTIONS HELD BY MODERN AMERICANS
False Assumption One: It is legitimate to criminalize plants in the first place. COMMENT: Wrong. They are the birth right of human beings under natural law. As John Locke writes: we have the right to the use of the earth "and all that lies therein."
False Assumption Two: It makes sense to punish pre-crime: namely, the possession of substances that have become linked in the popular imagination with violence. COMMENT: Americans assume that pre-crime is an injustice limited to the plots of Philip K. Dick novels, but the punishment of pre-crime began in 1914 with the Harrison Narcotics Act. For the first time in American history (or in English history, for that matter), a person could be punished for something other than the way that they actually behaved. Now one merely had to possess a substance that had been linked in the modern imagination with evil.
False Assumption Three: Psychoactive substances have no function except as a "crutch" or to make a person "high." COMMENT: Entire books could be written to annihilate these assumptions on philosophical grounds. Suffice it here to say that early Vedic religion was inspired by psychedelics, the discovery of DNA was inspired by psychedelics, great literature was inspired by a wide variety of psychedelics and other psychoactive plants. Meanwhile, science has finally been granted just enough freedom from our aptly named Drug Czars to establish that psychedelics can be powerful therapeutic medicines for overcoming depression and PTSD. The notion that "drugs" - i.e. psychoactive plants - can only be used for sordid goals is, at best, a Christian Science superstition or at worst, a Drug Warrior lie, persisting for the sake of its propaganda value.
False Assumption Four: a country has the right to go overseas and burn plants that induce psychological states of which American politicians disapprove. COMMENT: If we have the right to travel overseas in order to burn plants that we hold responsible for American addictions, then surely other countries have the right to come stateside to burn tobacco and grape vines. This is why assumption number one must be overthrown. Once we criminalize plants in violation of natural law, we open up a Pandora's box full of ways for politicians to corrupt our democracy and destroy American values. American politicians inevitably use our crazed drug-war mentality as an excuse to give monopolies to Big Liquor and Big Pharma 12 when it comes to providing transcendence and psychological treatment. And if that means burning plants that have been used responsibly overseas for millennia, then so be it. And so colonialism thrives under the Drug War, where it can now fly below the radar of our usual moral distaste for that practice. Meanwhile, torture and murder become the new American values, as we so demonize plant users as to call for their execution. Behold, the anti-nature Drug War run amok.
Author's Follow-up: October 31, 2024
Father Koterski has the best excuse for ignoring me of all my reticent interlocutors. He passed away, bless him, on August 9, 2021!
Author's Follow-up: January 5, 2025
Speaking of drug czars, the very title should be anathema to a freedom-loving people. When we create a "czar" in America, we are basically saying the following:
"Constitutional protections are all well and good, and so is the rule of law, but this problem is so huge that we need to start playing dirty to achieve our ends!"
And it should be no surprise that drug czars would try to live up to that understanding. Drug czar William Bennett proposed the beheading of drug dealers -- BEHEADING, for a crime that never existed before -- beheading, for selling plant medicine. And Americans wonder how they lost their freedom3. They were cheering on the barbarians as they wrecked the place under cover of strategically created drug hysteria.
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
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.
As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
Drug warriors are too selfish and short-sighted to fight real problems, so they blame everything on drugs.
Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that drug prohibition is wrong.
My cousin says we should punish drug dealers. I say we should punish those politicians who created those drug dealers out of whole cloth by passing unprecedented laws against the use of Mother Nature's bounty.
Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs.
"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. The very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.
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.
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