Yesterday I traveled to Blue Plate Books in Winchester, Virginia, one of the largest used bookstores in the region. My plan was to buy books that would help me flesh out my understanding of drug-related issues. This was naive of me, however. Even though the store features tens of thousands of books, the vast majority of the authors of those books ignore the fact that drug prohibition even exists. The few books that treat of demonized drugs do so from the point of view of addiction and abuse. There are no books about how opium can improve your love of nature or about how phenethylamines can make the suicidal wish to live or about how the use of laughing gas can change your views of reality -- as the use of laughing gas eroded William James's dogmatic fealty to passion-scorning materialism and behaviorism.
Visiting Blue Plate Books merely reminded me of how censored Americans are when it comes to drugs. There is almost a total censorship in America on the topic of drug benefits -- with all censorship working to ensure that we consider drugs a problem rather than a solution.
Someday, in a sane world, there will be plenty of book titles like the following:
"How I used opium wisely to improve my life."
"How I used morphine wisely to improve my love of Mother Nature."
"How I got off of cigarettes and alcohol through the safe and informed use of phenethylamines."
"How I rose from my depression with the wise use of a variety of drugs, including opium, coca, and phenethylamines."
Author's Follow-up:
June 17, 2025
The closest thing I found to drug praising was a copy of Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind." It is telling, however, that even Michael does not champion drug re-legalization -- but instead frets about how the free use of Mother Nature is still just too dangerous for our poor little vulnerable young people -- you know, those young people whom we refuse "on principle" to educate about wise drug use in the first place. Indeed, with friends like Michael in the drug re-legalization debate, we scarcely need enemies. With all due respect to the talented author, I cannot understand how a botanist (amateur or otherwise) can believe in the outlawing of Mother Nature, can believe that the government has the right to tell us which plant medicines we can access and study. If drug prohibition were wrong for no other reason, it is clearly wrong for this reason: that it censors science in a supposedly free country. And yet I have to turn to Michael for my one example of a drug-friendly book in this library of 70,000 tomes? I am not exactly spoiled for choice, am I?
We are living the plot of Fahrenheit 451, in which we burn all books that speak of the positive uses of drugs -- or at least we would burn them if our bookstores ever bothered to stock them in the first place. Fortunately for the government, self-censorship is the order of the day in the age of the Drug War, so if a politically motivated Fire Brigade were to arrive on scene, they would find little use for their flame throwers. They might want to singe the corners of Michael's book, just so that they don't feel like they have traveled to the store in vain.
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.
What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.
Science keeps telling us that godsends have not been "proven" to work. What? To say that psilocybin has not been proven to work is like saying that a hammer has not yet been proven to smash glass. Why not? Because the process has not yet been studied under a microscope.
I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."
Drug warriors aren't just deciding for us about drugs. They're telling us that we no longer need Coleridge poems, Lovecraft stories, Robin Williams, Sherlock Holmes, or the soma-inspired Hindu religion.
The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.
Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."
This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.
What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.