If you search the term "cocaine" on the site of a stock photo company such as Shutterstock, you'll be bombarded with photographs of white powder sprinkled around blood-covered money with a revolver lying nearby for good measure. This is all Drug War propaganda designed to villainize a substance that posed a threat to Big Liquor. The coca plant has been used historically by South American peoples for ages. Writers and musicians used coca wine religiously, including HG Wells, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen. Freud considered cocaine to be a godsend for depression 1 2 . Hundreds of millions go without blessed relief today because self-interested doctors decided to judge the drug by its worst possible use, exactly as if they were to judge alcohol by only looking at alcoholics. They thereby threw a world of depressed people under the bus-- denied them the right to heal. They then acquired them as patients for life by shunting them off onto Big Pharma drugs that caused lifelong dependency 3 .
I was recently browsing Board Game Arena and I came across a game called Sky Team 4. The website describes it as a cooperative game "in which you play a pilot and co-pilot at the controls of an airliner." The players take turns rolling dice and placing them on spaces with names like "engines," "landing gear," "brakes," and so forth. The values of the dice determine the performance of the plane in the relevant categories. The goal is to keep the plane "in trim" during flight and to land safely in the seventh and final round. Now, I'm not a pilot, but I play one in my dreams, so I made a note of this board game, resolving to introduce it to my sister on our next virtual game night. Scarcely had I placed the sticky note on my laptop, however, when I noticed a number of coffee-cup icons in the rule book. I immediately became intrigued... and a little suspicious. What are coffee-cup icons doing in a game about flying a plane? I would not want MY pilot to have the jangled nerves of a caffeine junkie! I thought the FAA required a drug-free cockpit these days! 
And it worked – to put it mildly. Not only has caffeinated coffee drinking become normalized in America, but coffee is no longer even considered to be a drug. That is why the producers of Sky Team felt free to sneak a coffee cup into the cockpit: because they knew that the brainwashed public would be completely blind to the irony of their doing so.
If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"
The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.
Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that drug 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."
The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."
Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!
The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they denote.
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.
In the 2015 movie "No Escape," the only place that was safe from anti-American hysteria was an opium den. How ironic that the U.S. forced Iran to outlaw opium.
If fearmongering drug warriors were right about the weakness of humankind, there would be no social drinkers, only drunkards.
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