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.
The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.
First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful.
Drugs like opium and cocaine should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
When folks die in horse-related accidents, we need to be asking: who sold the victim the horse? We've got to crack down on folks who peddle this junk -- and ban books like Black Beauty that glamorize horse use.
The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they denote.
Peyote advocates should be drug legalization advocates. Otherwise, they're involved in special pleading which is bound to result in absurd laws, such as "Plant A can be used in a religion but not plant B," or "Person A can belong to such a religion but person B cannot."
When we place the FDA in charge of deciding whether a psychoactive drug should be re-legalized or not, we are asking them to decide on things like the relative importance of appreciating a sunset, a task for which the FDA has no expertise whatsoever.
The MindMed company (makers of LSD Lite) tell us that euphoria and visions are "adverse effects": that's not science, that's an arid materialist philosophy that does not believe in spiritual transcendence.
The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.
(up)