Drug prohibition is a meta-injustice. It seeks to get inside our very biochemistry and control the way that we think and feel about the world around us. How does it do this? By denying us all the godsend medicines that could give us a blessed respite from ourselves, from our negative inner voices, drugs which could open up new worlds for us and keep us from being psychologically lorded over, night and day, by an oppressive psychological status quo. The Drug War politician is like a despot who is not satisfied with simply oppressing his people by denying them their inalienable right to Mother Nature's bounty: he wants to make sure that his people never successfully "rise above" this oppression, even in their own minds. He wants them to eat their hearts out, to always recognize their subservient status in the world. He wants a total psycho-political victory over his people, one in which each and every one of them are forever consciously aware of the government's ownership of their very minds and moods.
In the anglophile tradition, one's home is said to be one's castle -- a sanctuary into which government dare not intrude -- and yet one's body clearly belongs to the state in the age of the Drug War, right down to the chemicals that course through that body at any given moment. This is the apotheosis of the nanny state. And yet this enormously invasive status quo is championed by conservatives who claim to be enemies of Big Government? What?! Please! These are the guys who tool around in cars with license plates reading "Don't tread on me," meanwhile encouraging the use of government to decree how and how much we are each allowed to think and feel in this life. Talk about TREADING!? That is downright stomping!
It is as if the conservative were telling government: "Don't tread on me! However, please keep limiting my ability to transcend negative mental states by outlawing the kinds of medicines that have inspired entire religions in the past. Please keep telling me which plants and fungi I may access as a resident of planet Earth. Please keep telling me how and how much I can think and feel in this life. Other than that, you'd better keep your hands off me. Oh, except for drug testing 1 , of course. Feel free to keep me from earning a living in the United States if my urine should be found to contain godsend medicines of which racist and fearmongering politicians disapprove."
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It is a truism to say that we cannot change the world and that therefore we have to change ourselves -- but the Drug War outlaws even this latter option for most people. How? By denying them the kinds of substances that alone could help them transcend the status quo.
And so drug prohibition is not just an example of a bad social policy: it is the ne plus ultra of bad social policies. It is the ultimate tyranny. It not only puts oppressive power in the hands of the government, but it limits our ability to make our peace with that injustice. And so the Drug Warrior can not only pass oppressive legislation, but they can demand through drug prohibition that we feel as badly as possible, as often as possible, about that legislation.
This is what happens when we allow the government to limit our mental flexibility and resilience through the unprecedented wholesale criminalization of psychoactive medicine.
And yet this disempowerment is just the beginning of the downsides of the racist policy of drug prohibition -- which include the destruction of inner-cities, the mass arrest of minorities and the end of the rule of law in Latin America -- not to mention the election of Donald Trump himself, who is only in office today because drug law has effectively removed over a million minorities from the voting rolls.
This is the real reason why drug use is outlawed in historically despotic countries today. Our modern mandarins do not simply want to control the lives of their fellow human beings -- they want it to be UNDERSTOOD that they exercise such control. That is why they favor drug prohibition: they want to outlaw the use of all drugs that could help the hoi polloi to inhabit mental realities in which the government does not even exist, or else exists only as a kind of comic relief, worthy only of magnanimous and good-natured scorn. In short, such Drug War despots reason as follows: "WE are the ones calling the shots in this world -- and the people must be made to understand that fact and to FEEL IT to be true, 24/7."
A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Performers can lose their livelihood if they become too self-conscious. We only call such use "recreational" because we are oblivious to the common-sense psychology.
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.
I've always wondered why we don't just let heroin users be -- or better yet, re-legalize drugs and give them choices. Why are they punished for using heroin daily while we praise 1 in 4 women for taking an even more dependence-causing drug every day of their life?
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.
SWAT raids have increased by 15,000 percent from the late 1970s to today, resulting in 50,000 to 80,000 SWAT raids annually in the US alone. --War On Us
As great as it is, "Synthetic Panics" by Philip Jenkins was only tolerated by academia because it did not mention drugs in the title and it contains no explicit opinions about drugs. As a result, many drug law reformers still don't know the book exists.
I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful.
Outlawing drugs is outlawing obvious therapies for Alzheimer's and autism patients, therapies based on common sense and not on the passion-free behaviorism of modern scientists.
The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.
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