My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine, 1884
The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.
America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.
"All these anti-opium articles... are based upon the same model. They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts." --William Brereton
Drug warriors are too selfish and short-sighted to fight real problems, so they blame everything on drugs.
What attracts me about "drug dealers" is that they are NOT interested in prying into my private life. What a relief! With psychiatry, you are probed for pathological behavior on every office visit. You are a child. To the "drug dealer," I am an adult at least.
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.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
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.
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.
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