COUNSELOR RICK: Kids, gather around, I have a good horror story for you.
KIDS: Oooh!
COUNSELOR RICK: That's right, ears in the full upright position. This one's downright eerie.
Now then, once upon a time, there were these godsend plants that could help people get over depression and conquer loneliness.
ANTOINE: THAT'S not scary!
COUNSELOR RICK: Oh, just you wait, Antoine. See, these plants grew all around us, they were our natural birthright as Earthlings, but then these bigoted people known as "Drug Warriors" decided that these plants were somehow evil.
SALLY: That's silly, Counselor Rick. Plant medicines can't be evil, only people can be evil.
ANTOINE: That's right. Medicines can be good OR bad: it all depends on how they're used.
COUNSELOR RICK: You know that, kids, and I know that, but these people were... well, how should I put this...?
ANTOINE: Dumb as crap?
COUNSELOR RICK: Well, let's just say they were superstitious.
SALLY: Sounds like they were regular cretins to me.
COUNSELOR RICK: Now, now, Sally, be nice.
ANTOINE: Counselor Rick! Counselor Rick!
COUNSELOR RICK: Yes, ANTOINE?
ANTOINE: I think I've heard this one before.
COUNSELOR RICK: Oh, really?
ANTOINE: Oh, yeah, you're talking about that science-fiction story called "Fahrenheit 452," where the government burns plants in order to stop citizens from improving their mental focus and expanding their minds!
COUNSELOR RICK: Antoine shoots and scores!
SALLY: Ooh, Counselor Rick, I don't want to hear that story. It scares me.
ANTOINE: Me too, Counselor Rick. Just imagine a government that is so evil that it bars its own citizens from accessing the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet. I don't think I'm gonna be able to sleep tonight just thinking about it!
COUNSELOR SUE: Now you've done it, Rick, the kids are all going to have nightmares about DEA fascists kicking down their doors in order to rob them of naturally occurring godsends.
COUNSELOR RICK: Relax, kids. We're living in the 22nd century, remember? The DEA was abolished over a hundred years ago.
[kids crying]
COUNSELOR SUE: Rick, exactly how long have you been a camp counselor?
COUNSELOR RICK: Sorry, Sue. I guess I forgot just how scary the old Drug War days really were.
COUNSELOR SUE: You think?
COUNSELOR RICK: Well, it could have been worse.
COUNSELOR SUE: How's that, Rick?
COUNSELOR RICK: I could have told them about the bad old days when all the big corporations forced employees to undergo the indignity of drug testing 1 without any probable cause, all in order to enforce the government's Sharia against the use of naturally occurring substances.
COUNSELOR SUE: Brrr! Now that really IS scary!
COUNSELOR RICK: I know, right?
COUNSELOR SUE: Thanks for bringing that up, Rick. Now I too won't be able to get to sleep tonight!
COUNSELOR RICK: That is pretty lame indeed, the government essentially forcing people to become Christian Scientists when it comes to psychological healing.
COUNSELOR SUE: You're not helping matters, Rick.
What Have We Learned?
Select the appropriate takeaway message from the above admittedly charming satire.
Some plants are just plain bad and kids should be taught that from the git-go!
Submitting to a drug test is a patriotic responsibility.
The therapeutic needs of the suffering must be ignored so that we can carry on a full-scale Drug War. Grrr! (This answer recommended by the National Association of Prison Guards)
Plant medicines can be good or bad, depending on their specific use.
Answer: That's right, kids, the answer is 4: "Plant medicines can be good or bad, depending on their specific use." Unfortunately you'll never learn this from the Drug Warriors, whose patronizing MO is to insist that plant substances are bad in and of themselves. That's why we have no godsend medicines today for depression and other psychological maladies: because the unscientific Drug Warriors believe that plants are bad without regard to how they're used... which is a fib, kids, okay? And you can tell those typically Caucasian anti-scientific so-and-so's that I said so, too! Humph!
The drug war is laughable -- or it would be if the drug warriors hadn't deprived us of laughing gas, the substance that William James himself used to study alternate realities.
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
Musk and co. want to make us more robot-like with AI, when they should be trying to make us more human-like with sacred medicine. Only humans can gain creativity from plant medicine. All AI can do is harvest the knowledge that eventually results from that creativity.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."
The existence of a handful of bad outcomes of drug use does not justify substance prohibition... any more than the existence of drunkards justifies a call for liquor prohibition. Instead, we need to teach safe use and offer a wide choice of uncontaminated psychoactive drugs.
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
Cop and detective shows are loaded with subtle drug war propaganda, including lines like, "She had a history of drug use, so..." The implication being that anyone who uses substances that politicians hate cannot be trusted.
In the 19th century, author Richard Middleton wrote how poets would get together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses."
I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
I know. I'm on SNRIs. But SSRIs and SNRIs are both made with materialist presumptions in mind: that the best way to change people is with a surgical strike at one-size-fits-all chemistry. That's the opposite of the shamanic holism that I favor.
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
