Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.
Prohibitionists think that they merely have to use the word "drugs" to win an argument.
Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).
The courts ignore the 1st and 4th amendments when it comes to drugs; why are they not ignoring the 2nd amendment when it comes to guns?
The DEA stomped onto Thomas Jefferson's estate in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And the TJ Foundation helped them! They sold out Jefferson.
Drug warriors are too selfish and short-sighted to fight real problems, so they blame everything on drugs.
We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
There would be almost no relapses for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.
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.
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