Let's rephrase the headline in equivalent language in order to illustrate my concerns:
America wants to dominate South America by outlawing the coca leaf that the Peruvian Indians have used long before the Spanish arrived to enslave them (the health-giving coca leaf that is demonized today based not on its effects, but rather on the fact that it contains an alkaloid called cocaine 5 6 -- which is kind of like demonizing peaches because they contain prussic acid). Americans are willful idiots when it comes to drug policy who have swallowed Drug War propaganda hook, line and sinker. So instead of educating the public, they've been taught to divide it by creating scapegoats for our anti-scientific views of medicine. There are many professors today in academia who actually agree with the anti-scientific notion that there are such things as "drugs": namely, substances for which there is no good use: not now, not ever, not anywhere. But the fact is that there are no such substances on the planet. Even deadly Botox has wise, rational uses."Gee, should we execute people for selling the kind of plant medicine that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson loved and which inspired the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius himself? Should we execute people for selling the plant medicine that grows at our very feet and which has inspired entire religions around the world?"
"What a poser!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
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!
Prohibitionists will me that we're all children when it comes to drugs, and can never -- but never -- use them wisely. That's like saying that we could never ride horses wisely. Or mountain climb. Or skateboard.
We live in a make-believe world in the US. We created it by outlawing all potentially helpful psychological meds, after which the number-one cause of arrest soon became "drugs." We then made movies to enjoy our crackdown on TV... after a tough day of being drug tested at work.
If we cared about the elderly in 'homes', we would be bringing in shamanic empaths and curanderos from Latin America to help cheer them up and expand their mental abilities. We would also immediately decriminalize the many drugs that could help safely when used wisely.
The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.
A company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.
If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
"Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?
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