
On these mornings when I cannot seem to get my thoughts in order, I silently curse all the Drug Warriors who have denied me my right to every single medicine that could help me focus my mind and get things done. Could there be any greater injustice in the world than to outlaw all the substances that could help me in so basic a task as thinking straight and getting things done in life -- nay, in WISHING to get things done, for the drugs that they are denying me serve to motivate as well as focus? Why, I ask myself, am I not a stakeholder in all their demonizing chatter about drugs? Why are the only stakeholders considered to be the white American young people whom we refuse to educate about safe drug use?
And yet the FDA is working to reclassify the gas as an evil "drug," this despite the fact that it is already, as a practical matter, shamefully unavailable to the suicidal and the depressed -- a fact which helps account for a large part of the 49,000 suicides a year in America alone4. This is the same FDA that actually champions the use of brain-damaging shock therapy5. This is the same FDA that signs off on the use of Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself 6 7. This is the same FDA that looks on complacently as the Jim Beam company targets ads for 80-proof bourbon at young people on prime-time television8.
This complaint is laughable, however, assuming that the plaintiffs are really worried about health in general and not just the health of their own white progeny. While these clowns are telling me of the dangers of re-legalizing drugs, I think of the 67,000 minorities killed in America's inner cities over the last ten years19, of the 60,000 disappeared in the Mexican Drug War20, of the end of the rule of law in Latin America and the end of democracy in America -- all brought about by drug prohibition. When are these worrywarts going to worry about the downsides of NOT re-legalizing drugs?! Such childish and selfish Westerners need to grow up: they need to finally realize that risky activities always have victims -- whether we are talking about horseback riding, car driving, or liquor drinking. We have to jettison the childish idea that the so-called "drug-related" death of a single white American young person constitutes a kind of "knock-down" argument in favor of drug prohibition. Before we pass draconian laws based on that solitary death, we should remember the HALF A MILLION Americans who have been killed thanks to drug prohibition since Nixon launched his War on Drugs in 1971. Half a million21! The Chicken Littles among us need to start putting things in some kind of perspective! The moment they do so, they will start prioritizing education over arrest."In the presentation of a novel outlook with wide ramifications, a single line of communications from premises to conclusions is not sufficient for intelligibility. Your audience will construe whatever you say into conformity with their pre-existing outlook." 24
Indeed, the censorship of contrarian voices has been almost thorough on this topic, as one can tell by entering any library today, wherein books about drug abuse abound while books about safe and beneficial drug use are totally absent25. With this lifelong brainwashing in mind, I conclude this essay with a few first-person accounts of beneficial drug use from "Pihkal" by Alexander Shulgin26, if only to remind the reader that such beneficial drug use is actually possible. "More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."
"A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like."
"I was caught up with the imagery, and there was an overriding religious aspect to the day."
*I should probably refrain from even asking that question lest I put ideas in the heads of our ambitious healthcare establishment, which profits so handsomely from controlling the minutest aspects of our psycho-social lives. I am sure they would be more than happy to turn alcohol into a prescription drug -- since, obviously, they themselves know best whether relaxing "with a cold one" is good for us as mere laypeople. You may THINK that alcohol relaxes you and that said relaxation has obvious knock-on benefits. But didn't you know? only our scientists can tell us if alcohol use is "really" beneficial for you! And, of course, it will take many expensive laboratory studies to make such a determination. And even those determinations will only apply to one demographic at a time. The scientific establishment will first have to see if alcohol use can benefit day laborers between 20 and 40 years old; then white-collar workers between 30 and 50; then aristocrats between 40 and 60.
I trust the reader grasps the take-home message from this argumentum ad absurdum that I have postulated here. It is merely this: that we say goodbye to common sense the moment that we put medical science in charge of pronouncing on the propriety of our personal use of psychoactive substances.



America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.
Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.
If NIDA covered all drugs (not just politically ostracized drugs), they'd produce articles like this: "Aspirin continues to kill hundreds." "Penicillin misuse approaching crisis levels." "More bad news about Tylenol and liver damage." "Study revives cancer fears from caffeine."
Americans HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control their pain relief and how and how much they can think and feel in this life.
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 MAPS wants to make progress with MDMA they should start "calling out" the FDA for judging holistic medicines by materialist standards, which means ignoring all glaringly obvious benefits.
There is something wrong with a country that thinks it can decide what human beings around the world are allowed to ingest.
Democratic societies need to outlaw prohibition for many reasons, the first being the fact that prohibition removes millions of minorities from the voting rolls, thereby handing elections to fascists and insurrectionists.
The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
If opium were legal, then most of the nostrums peddled by drug stores today would be irrelevant. (No wonder the drug war has staying power!)

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