hen you're a preteen, the state enrolls you in "just say no" classes, in which you receive an award from the local police force for renouncing your right to godsend mind medicine. Then in your teens, you watch endless cop shows in which those who use mind medicine are depicted as scumbags and filth, shows in which you never see the positive, responsible use of such medicine. You watch movies like "Running with the Devil" in which "drug suspects" are hung from meat hooks and shot at point-blank range for dealing in mind medicine, often by a DEA agent who herself is smoking the hell out of a pack of cigarettes. Then you go for your first job interview as a young adult and find that you are not even eligible for employment in America unless you show proof via urinating that you have renounced your right to godsend mind medicine. Meanwhile, the media, both local and national, show you lurid stories of kids misusing psychoactive substances, but never -- no never -- report on the positive use of such substances. And the academic world dutifully follows suit, publishing thousands of papers on the abuse of psychoactive medicine but never -- no never -- reporting on the positive, responsible use of the same (which, if they'd care to look, goes back to the use of soma which inspired the Vedic religion and psychedelics which inspired Plato's views of the afterlife).
You're primed for more such indoctrination after seeing the shamelessly mendacious ad by the Partnership for a Drug Free America which warns us that substances fry the brain the moment that they are criminalized by racist politicians -- this despite the fact that HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their best stories on coca wine and that Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius loved their opium dreams.
Well, this all gets a bit much for you. It depresses you. So you go to a psychiatrist to get some legal medication that will help you steer clear of this politically created boogieman called "drugs" that you have been taught to fear since birth. And what does the psychiatrist do? He or she starts you off on a regimen of expensive, habit-forming, and ultimately ineffective mood medicine that you will have to take every day for the rest of your life (thanks to the shamelessly hushed-up chemical dependency that it creates in users). What's more, this legal medicine doesn't inspire you the way that the outlawed medicine could, but rather deadens you to the outside world, making you a good consumer, perhaps, but not exactly a self-fulfilled human being, one able and willing to accomplish their most desired goals in life. As you reach your 60s, in fact, after 40 years of such legally sanctioned pill-popping, you can't help but think that you inadvertently signed up for a lobotomy on the installment plan when you first entrusted your happiness to psychiatrists.
The state has won: You are now another pharmalogically cowed American who acknowledges the right of the state to control how -- and how much -- you're allowed to think and feel in this life.
How? By a lifelong campaign of propaganda. By shamelessly lying to you, both explicitly and above all implicitly, about so-called "drugs", first by telling you that such substances fry the brain, and second by insisting that drugs are bad in and of themselves, without regard for the way that they are used, and that such use always lead to addiction and sorrow.
How's that for irony? The psychiatric pill mill has rendered 1 in 4 American women dependent on Big Pharma meds in life, and yet we're told that the real villains of the piece are godsend medicines that have been used responsibly for millennia by human beings seeking self-improvement and self-transcendence in life, drugs which are all easier to kick than SSRIs, which muck about with brain chemistry, eventually establishing new psycho-chemical baselines that the long-term user finds it hard if not impossible to shake (as, for instance, the recidivism rate of long-term Effexor users who renounce the drug is 95% according to the NMIH).
Welcome to America's Drug War -- friend of the Stock Market and friend of law enforcement, but enemy of real living human beings with aspirations and hopes in life. It's the enemy of education as well, for it seeks to have us fear "drugs" rather than to understand how to use them as wisely as possible. Worse yet, it's the enemy of America, insofar as Jefferson founded this country on Natural Law, which gives us a right to the use of what Locke called "the earth and all that lies therein." That's why Thomas Jefferson was rolling in his grave when Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the ex-president's poppy plants.
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.
Over 45% of traumatic brain injuries are caused by horseback riding (ABC News). Tell your representatives to outlaw horseback riding and make it a federal offence to teach a child how to ride! Brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
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.
Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.
What attracts me about "drug dealers" is that they are NOT interested in prying into my private life. What a relief! With psychiatry, you are probed for pathological behavior on every office visit. You are a child. To the "drug dealer," I am an adult at least.
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.
ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."
Drugs are not the enemy, ignorance is -- the ignorance that the Drug War encourages by teaching us to fear drugs rather than to understand them.
That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.
M. Pollan says "not so fast" when it comes to drug re-legalization. I say FAST? I've gone a whole lifetime w/o access to Mother Nature's plants. How can a botanist approve of that? Answer: By ignoring all legalization stakeholders except for the kids whom we refuse to educate.
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, Cradle to Grave with Drug War Propaganda published on May 7, 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)
hen you're a preteen, the state enrolls you in "just say no" classes, in which you receive an award from the local police force for renouncing your right to godsend mind medicine. Then in your teens, you watch endless cop shows in which those who use mind medicine are depicted as scumbags and filth, shows in which you never see the positive, responsible use of such medicine. You watch movies like "Running with the Devil" in which "drug suspects" are hung from meat hooks and shot at point-blank range for dealing in mind medicine, often by a DEA agent who herself is smoking the hell out of a pack of cigarettes. Then you go for your first job interview as a young adult and find that you are not even eligible for employment in America unless you show proof via urinating that you have renounced your right to godsend mind medicine. Meanwhile, the media, both local and national, show you lurid stories of kids misusing psychoactive substances, but never -- no never -- report on the positive use of such substances. And the academic world dutifully follows suit, publishing thousands of papers on the abuse of psychoactive medicine but never -- no never -- reporting on the positive, responsible use of the same (which, if they'd care to look, goes back to the use of soma which inspired the Vedic religion and psychedelics which inspired Plato's views of the afterlife).
You have been reading an article entitled, Cradle to Grave with Drug War Propaganda published on May 7, 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)
