Breaking News: Scientists Realize That Marijuana may not be Evil Incarnate After All!
More Glacial Progress in the war against Substance Prohibition
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 13, 2024
A friend of mine just forwarded me a link to a NY Times article suggesting that the penny has finally dropped for scientists on the subject of marijuana1. I responded as follows:
Thanks. Yeah, I saw the headline. Actually, the article will probably just depress me. To me it's all about the GLACIAL progress of materialist science when it comes to "drugs." We've had 100+ years of prohibition and they're only now starting to apologetically say that marijuana might not be devil spawn -- but in saying that, they're taking a swipe at heroin 2 as being worse, thereby betraying their ongoing belief that the problem is drugs and not prohibition. Even heroin has positive uses -- and its popularity is due to the outlawing of opium 3 . So such "reads" are depressing to me, reminding me how far away we still are from looking at these matters sensibly.
At this rate, scientists may realize that laughing gas 4 could help the depressed in, say, 20 more years or so5!
Meanwhile, the status quo has not changed: scientists still believe in the anti-scientific doctrine that drugs can be voted up or down and that a cost-benefit analysis of prohibition need not include the hundreds of thousands of collateral deaths that this hateful policy has racked up over the years, and continues to rack up to this day in inner cities and in Latin America6. For prohibition is the entrapment of the poor: it presents that the opportunity for huge sudden profit -- then when young people jump at the bait, the feds step in to remove them from American life and take them off the voting rolls. Hateful, hateful, hateful.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx
Alcohol makes me sleepy. But NOT coca wine. The wine gives you an upbeat feeling of controlled energy, without the jitters of coffee and without the fury of steroids. It increases rather than dulls mental focus.
Using the billions now spent on caging users, we could end the whole phenomena of both physical and psychological addiction by using "drugs to fight drugs." But drug warriors do not want to end addiction, they want to keep using it as an excuse to ban drugs.
People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.
The Drug Warriors say: "Don't tread on me! (That said, please continue to tell me what plants I can use, how much pain relief I can get, and whether my religion is true or not.)"
I agree that Big Pharma drugs have wrought disaster when used in psychotherapy -- but it is common sense that non-Big Pharma drugs that elate could be used to prevent suicide and obviate the need for ECT.
How would we even KNOW that outlawed drugs have no positive uses? We first have to incorporate them in a sane, empathic and creative way to find that out, and the drug war makes such a sensible approach absolutely impossible.
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
(There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)
Katie MacBride's one-sided attack on MAPS reminds me of why I got into an argument with Vincent Rado. Yes, psychedelic hype can go too far, but let's solve the huge problem first by ending the drug war!!!
Many articles in science mags need this disclaimer: "Author has declined to consider the insights gained from drug-induced states on this topic out of fealty to Christian Science orthodoxy." They don't do this because they know readers already assume that drugs will be ignored.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx
