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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.
Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.
The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.
By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.
If politicians wanted to outlaw coffee, a bunch of Kevin Sabets would come forward and start writing books designed to scare us off the drink by cherry-picking negative facts from scientific studies.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
"My faith votes and strives to outlaw religions that use substances of which politicians disapprove."
I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.
The worst form of government is not communism, socialism or even unbridled capitalism. The worst form of government is a Christian Science Theocracy, in which the government controls how much you are allowed to think and feel in life.
Outlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.
(up)