Of course, in one sense, the Drug War IS working. It is working by empowering racist politicians and by disempowering minorities and the poor. It is working by bringing gunfire to inner cities and destroying the rule of law in Latin America. It is working by eroding American freedoms in the name of fighting a political scapegoat called drugs. It is working by handing otherwise close elections to Drug Warriors thanks to the imprisoning of over a million minorities.
As Thomas Szasz wrote in Our Right to Drugs:
"If we argue from principle, then it is moot whether drug prohibition works, because it is problematic what should count as its ‘working.’ The very existence of such a mass movement of scapegoating- uniting a diverse people in a common hatred– may be regarded as evidence that, simply put, it is working."
SITE: X
DATE POSTED: June 11, 2025
IN RESPONSE TO TWEET READING: "We keep getting told that psychiatrists have never seen antidepressant withdrawal or that is at best minimal."
They do not see the patient alone at 2 a.m. in the morning, wishing that they were dead -- and knowing that all drugs that could have helped him or her have been ruthlessly outlawed by the chemical state.
SITE: Reddit/GenZ
DATE POSTED: May 18, 2025
IN RESPONSE TO: Reddit post reading: "I hate how doing drugs is normalized" posted by Loud_Assistant472 2
With respect, you have been brainwashed your entire lifetime by Drug War censorship. You have never been allowed to see or read about the many positive uses for drugs.
The Hindu religion owes its existence to the use of a drug called Soma. Soma inspired and elated. This means that drug prohibition is the outlawing of religion -- of the religious impulse itself.
One in four American women take Big Pharma drugs every day of their life. Are you against THOSE drugs? Alcohol is a drug. Are you against THAT drug? Sugar is a drug. Caffeine is a drug. Jesus Christ himself had plenty of drugs in his earthly body, including DMT.
Drugs can stop people from committing suicide. Check out the drug-user reports in the book "Pihkal" by Alexander Shulgin. William James told us to use substances like laughing gas to understand reality. Yet drug prohibitionists have outlawed all such research. Drug prohibitionists are seeking to treat laughing gas like a "drug." In a sane world, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal, just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.
The FDA will not approve of laughing gas for the depressed, but they actually ENCOURAGE the use of brain-damaging SHOCK therapy for the depressed. Something is terribly wrong with this picture.
CONCLUSION: America is all screwed up because of the harebrained ideology of the prohibitionists. Prohibition never ended in 1933. We just appeased the prohibitionists by letting them outlaw all of liquor's less dangerous competitors.
The problem is that we are normalizing drug prohibition by ignoring all of its negative consequences, including:
the outlawing of religion, the end of academic freedom, the disappearance of 60,000 Mexicans over the last two decades, the death of 67,000 Blacks in inner-city America because liquor and drug prohibition armed the 'hood to the teeth.
The Drug War even led to the election of Donald Trump by removing over a million minorities from the voting rolls. (But then, of course, that was the real point of the Drug War in the first place, to disempower minorities and get rid of American democracy and democratic norms of all kinds.)
Drug prohibition has placed the government in charge of pain relief. It has placed the government in charge of what substances we can have in our digestive systems. It has placed the government in charge of deciding how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in life.
Drug prohibition is therefore the biggest power grab by government in world history. It seeks to control how citizens are allowed to think about the world. It is a meta injustice.
It's time that we stopped normalizing drug prohibition.
Meanwhile, Americans need to grow up. Saying things like "Fentanyl kills!" makes as much sense as saying "Fire bad!" Both are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.
Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal in America. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that. How? By refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate product as to quantity and quality, and refusing to re-legalize the many opiate alternatives, like phenethylamines and laughing gas, etc.
SITE: UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Psychedelics
DATE POSTED: May 8, 2025
IN RESPONSE TO: "The potential of psychedelic medicine - A personal account"3
This shutting down of psychedelic research was based on the following crazy and anti-scientific idea:
"If a drug can pose a danger for white American young people when used at one dose for one reason, it must not be used by anyone at any dose for any reason."
This idea is especially crazy when one considers that Drug Warriors refuse "on principle" to educate these young people about safe use. The Drug Warrior actually believes that ignorance is the best policy when it comes to drugs.
Meanwhile, the FDA approves of Big Pharma drugs whose published side effects include death itself. Aspirin kills 3,000 a year in the UK alone4. Liquor kills 178,000 a year in the US5. Clearly the outlawing of psychedelics is completely irrational given this backstory. And yet folks like Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman support drug prohibition. They claim to be interested in safety — but whose safety? Not the safety of the 60,000 who have been disappeared in Mexico over the last two decades thanks to the War on Drugs6. Not the safety of the 67,000 minorities who have been killed by gun violence over the last ten years in America's inner cities7. Not the safety of the folks who have to dangerously synthesize DMT with powerful chemicals because DMT has been outlawed. Not the safety of inner city kids like 15-year-old Niomi Russell who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2024 in Washington, D.C., thanks to the fact that drug prohibition had armed inner city neighborhoods to the teeth8. Not the safety of the many young people who use alcohol only because we have outlawed almost all the obvious alternatives. Not the safety of the suicidal who kill themselves because we have outlawed all substances that inspire and elate.
The FDA also approves of shock therapy, by the way. They would rather that we knowingly damage the brains of the depressed9 than to let them use the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions, as Soma inspired the rishi of the Punjab in 1500 BCE10. This results in part from the materialist approach to mood medicine, which scorns anecdote, history and common sense and looks instead for "cures" under a microscope. The goal is not really to help the patient but rather to prove the relevance of materialist science in the realm of mind and mood medicine. It was, however, a category error to place scientists in charge of such things. It is like placing Dr. Spock of Star Trek in charge of a study about the benefits of hugging. He just would not "get it." Neither do materialist scientists "get it" when it comes to holistic-acting drugs like psychedelics.*
I am talking here of scientists qua scientists, of course. There are many scientists who do indeed "get it." The point is that they "get it" in spite of their vocational indoctrination in materialist principles, not because of those principles.
This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own pain by making opium illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.
The drug war is a big scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.
Most prohibitionists think that they merely have to use the word "drugs" to win an argument. Like: "Oh, so you're in favor of DRUGS then, are you?" You can just see them sneering as they type. That's because the word "drugs" is like the word "scab": it's a loaded political term.
Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.
"The Legislature deliberately determines to distrust the very people who are legally responsible for the physical well-being of the nation, and puts them under the thumb of the police, as if they were potential criminals."
-- Aleister Crowley on drug laws
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
Mad in America publishes stories of folks who are disillusioned with antidepressants, but they won't publish mine, because I find mushrooms useful. They only want stories about cold turkey and jogging, or nutrition, or meditation.
The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.
That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.
This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.