This is an open letter to Richard (and to you, too, reader) on the subject of drug prohibition, as I attempt to flesh out some of the many important issues that he raised in our recent exchange of messages on his Substack 1, particularly with regard to how the end of drug prohibition might work in the real world. This is a question that I have been avoiding over the years because, in a sense, I did not consider it to be my problem. When it came to the Drug Warriors, my attitude was basically, "You guys got us into this mess, now it's up to you to get us out of it." You were the ones who decided to unconstitutionally outlaw Mother Nature by rashly assuming that there were no other stakeholders in drug prohibition except for vulnerable young people. You were the ones who chose to demonize extraordinary substances a priori, without even deigning to consider their endless psychological, philosophical, spiritual and aesthetic implications and potential. You were the ones who said "Drugs kill!" in the exact same superstitious spirit as our prehistoric ancestors once said "Fire bad!" When the western world woke up to the fact that it was living on a planet full of powerful psychoactive medicines in the 19th century, you were the ones who decided that the best way to deal with this fact of life in a free world was to arrest rather than to educate, was to demonize rather than to understand.
Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.
The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.
The fact that some drugs can be addictive is no reason to outlaw drugs. It is a reason to teach safe use and to publicize all the ways that smart people have found to avoid unwanted pharmacological dependency -- and a reason to use drugs to fight drugs.
Drug Warriors should be legally banned from watching or reading Sherlock Holmes stories, since in their world, it is a crime for such people as Sherlock Holmes to exist, i.e., people who use medicines to improve their mind and mood.
It's just plain totalitarian nonsense to outlaw mother nature and to outlaw moods and mental states thru drug law. These truths can't be said enough by us "little people" because the people in power are simply not saying them.
Big pharma drugs are designed to be hard to get off. Doctors write glowingly of "beta blockers" for anxiety, for instance, but ignore that fact that such drugs are hard -- and even dangerous -- to get off. We have outlawed all sorts of less dependence-causing alternatives.
Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"The Oprah Winfrey Fallacy": the idea that a statistically insignificant number of cases constitutes a crisis, provided ONLY that the villain of the piece is something that racist politicians have demonized as a "drug."
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.
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