I was quite shocked to see your article entitled "Should Drug Dealers Be Charged with Murder?"
Let's rephrase the headline in equivalent language in order to illustrate my concerns:
"Should Plant Dealers be Charged with Murder?"
"Should a Person Be Charged with Murder for selling plant medicine of which politicians disapprove?"
The whole idea of executing drug dealers only arises because of America's policy of Demonizing and Criminalizing Psychoactive Plant Medicine. This is what incentivizes drug dealing, which is hugely profitable thanks to prohibition.
If we're going to charge anyone with murder, it should be the Drug Warriors whose policies, even as we speak, are causing civil wars in South America, drive-by shootings in inner cities, and empowering a self-proclaimed DRUG WAR HITLER in the Philippines. Yes, charge the Drug Warriors, whose laws create the drug dealers out of whole cloth, incentivizing them to sell the most addictive drugs possible without regard for substance quality.
Then we should charge the DEA with lying about plant medicine for the last 50 years and with poisoning Americans with Paraquat, a weed killer that causes Parkinson's disease -- and with criminalizing one of the safest drugs known to man, MDMA, against the recommendations of their own counsel, thereby forcing American soldiers to go without godsend treatment for PTSD for the last 40 years. The Prohibitionists are responsible for 797 deaths in Chicago alone last year, for as Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014, the kind of gun-related deaths we see today in downtown areas would be impossible without the war on drugs.
The fact that we ask such questions as yours in modern-day America shows how far the Drug War has led us in the direction of fascism. Witness all the movies in which the DEA agents are heroes for shooting unarmed drug suspects at point-blank range ("Running with the Devil") and considering SWAT raids to be a success even when they kill black teenager "scumbags" (Jason Chase's "The Runner").
Please avoid headlines that would encourage folks like Trump to start killing people for selling plant medicine of which politicians disapprove.
Thomas Jefferson used to be a dealer, too, you know, selling poppies to "scumbags" like Benjamin Franklin, right?
The real scumbags were the Drug Warriors, who told the entire world that we had to adopt the jaundiced Christian Science attitude toward a boogieman called "drugs," rather than learning how to use naturally occurring substances as safely as possible -- through education, not fear and criminalization.
Still believe in the Drug War approach?
Then how about we charge the liquor industry with murder for killing 100,000 Americans a year?
How about we remove those who drink from the workforce through drug testing?
Drug warriors say no to that. Why? Because the Drug War is meant to crack down on those other guys, not on the Drug Warriors themselves.
America wants to execute people for selling the kinds of medicines that have inspired entire religions. 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 -- 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.
The Drug War, in short, represents all that is wrong with America, including wilful stupidity on the part of a censored Academia (an Academia that doesn't even recognize or care that it's censored), racism and the enforcement of Christian Science as America's -- and now the world's -- official religion, at least when it comes to psychoactive medicine.
Author's Follow-up: October 11, 2022
Why doesn't Connecticut 'get real' and charge Phillips Morris International with murder or their American spinoff called Atria? That's revenge for their killing half a million Americans a year. Why don't they hang the Big Pharma execs who turned American women into Stepford Wives by addicting 1 in 4 to their tranquilizing "meds." Why don't they hold Anheuser Busch to account for killing 90,000 a year?
Or better yet, why don't they wake up and start educating their residents about all psychoactive substances without regard for the hypocritical Chicken Little squawking of Drug Warriors? Why don't they end the substance prohibition which incentivizes bad actors to sell bad drugs in the first place?
Why? Because residents of The Nutmeg State have swallowed the Drug Warrior lie that we are to fear and demonize psychoactive substances rather than to understand them.
I wonder how many Nutmeggers realize that nutmeg itself is a psychoactive drug at the right doses. Perhaps they'll want to boycott Indonesia and change their state nickname. That may sound rash, but then the Drug War is all about hysteria, not rational thought. Maybe execute the head of McCormick Brands as a warning to all evil-bad-horrible drug pushers.
The '50s had its communists, the 2020s have their drug dealers. The more things change...
Boycott Connecticut: whose nickname is Nutmeg, a psychoactive drug!!!
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
Folks like Sabet accuse folks like myself of ignoring the "facts." No, it is Sabet who is ignoring the facts -- facts about dangerous horses and free climbing. He's also ignoring all the downsides of prohibition, whose laws lead to the election of tyrants.
And so, by ignoring all "up" sides to drugs, the DEA points to potential addiction as a knock-down argument for their prohibition. This is the logic of children (and uneducated children at that). It is a cost-benefit analysis that ignores all benefits.
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.
Until we get rid of all these obstacles to safe and informed use, it's presumptuous to explain problematic drug use with theories about addiction. Drug warriors are rigging the deck in favor of problematic use. They refuse to even TEACH non-problematic use.
I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.
This is why America is creeping toward authoritarianism -- because of the prohibitionists' ability to get away with everything by blaming "drugs." The fact that Americans still fall for this crap represents a kind of collective pathology.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
Problem 2,643 of the war on drugs:
It puts the government in charge of deciding what counts as a true religion.
Listen to the Drug War Philosopher as he tells you how you can support his work to end the hateful drug war -- and, ideally, put the DEA on trial for willfully lying about godsend medicines! (How? By advertising on this page right c'here!)
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Connecticut Drug Warriors want to charge drug dealers with murder published on April 27, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
You have been reading an article entitled, Connecticut Drug Warriors want to charge drug dealers with murder published on April 27, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)