Addiction Condition brought about by drug prohibition thanks to which users have limited choices and are not educated in the rules of safe drug use. This condition is aggravated by the Iron Law of Prohibition, which states that the outlawing of one drug leads to the sale of more potentially dangerous replacements on the black market1.
Drug A psychoactive substance of which racist and xenophobic politicians disapprove, chiefly because they associate its use with people whom they dislike. As opposed to "med" (which see).
Drug testing A blatant violation of Fourth Amendment rights designed to remove Christian Science heretics from the workforce. Note that this testing is not designed merely to flag impairment: instead it flags the mere trace of substances of which politicians disapprove and uses such findings as an excuse to remove the heretic from the American workforce, through a non-judicial process, without so much as a trial or even the filing of charges. This is cruel and unusual punishment, denying the "flagged" individual the right to earn a living2345.
MDMA A substance that Drug Warriors hate because it brings about nothing but peace, love and understanding, which they cannot abide67.
Med A psychoactive substance of which politicians approve because it turns users into wards of the healthcare state without empowering them to live large8.
Opioid Use Disorder The correct name for this condition is actually Prohibition Disorder, but our government is in denial. Our country does everything it can to make drug use as dangerous as possible and then turns around and blames the victim when they have issues with use: nay, they invent entire new diseases to account for the problems that they themselves are causing with their drug prohibition, their refusal to educate, and their refusal to regulate product as to dosage and quality91011.
Self-censorship Practiced by almost all American authors, especially in the non-fiction genre. This is why one can enter an American library and search in vain for books that speak positively of time-honored panaceas like coca and opium1213.
The DEA The American Gestapo. The DEA uses America's ignorant terror of psychoactive medicines as an excuse to wreck houses, confiscate property and throw otherwise law-abiding citizens in jail141516.
When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!
In the board game "Sky Team," you collect "coffees" to improve your flying skills. Funny how the use of any other brain-focusing "drug" in real life is considered to be an obvious sign of impairment.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
Irony of ironies, that the indignant 19th-century hatred of liquor should ultimately result in the outlawing of virtually every mind-affecting substance on the planet EXCEPT for liquor.
When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia:
OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!
If opium and cocaine were legal again in America, the healthcare industry would suddenly have to undergo extensive downsizing, as Americans were once again put in charge of their own health.
Rick Strassman reportedly stopped his DMT trials because some folks had bad experiences at high doses. That is like giving up on aspirin because high doses of NSAIDs can kill.
There is an absurd safety standard for "drugs." The cost/benefit analysis of the FDA & co. never takes into account the costs of NOT prescribing nor the benefits of a productive life well lived. The "users" are not considered stakeholders.
This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.
The U.S. Congress considered the following to be a scientific fact back in 1924:
"A person taking narcotics regularly impedes evolutionary progress and tends to degenerate backwards toward the brute." -- Richmond Hobson
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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