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.
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.
People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.
If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.
The press once again hauls out the easy answer. Reiner's son was using drugs! Aha! Of course, that explains EVERYTHING! [sigh]
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 knows nothing of the human spirit and of the hopes and dreams of humankind. Science cannot tell us whether a given drug risk is worthwhile given the human need for creativity and passion in their life. Science has no expertise in making such philosophical judgements.
When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
FDA drug approval is a farce when it comes to psychoactive medicine. The FDA ignores all the obvious benefits and pretends that to prove efficacy, they need "scientific" evidence. That's scientism, not science.
My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine, 1884
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