I thought I'd watch "Smile 2" last night since I had found "Smile 1" reasonably enjoyable. This was a mistake, however, because the opening scene was pure Drug War agitprop. It was clearly written to advance the notion that drugs are the problem, not prohibition.
The movie begins with the efforts of a livid vigilante to punish a drug dealer whose recent gunplay had inadvertently killed a woman and her young child. Sure, that's evil -- no one likes a wanton killer. But how much more evil were the politicians and other demagogues who created a world in which such people do such things?!
We did not have Americans torturing each other and firing guns carelessly in public before the War on Drugs incentivized such extreme violence. And yet movies like "Smile 2" keep reinforcing the idea that drugs and drug dealers are the problem, not prohibition, that we have only to crack down hard enough -- with vigilantes, if needed -- and the problem will go away, nay, that it is our duty to crack down and to erase drug dealers from the face of the earth.
Just think about what the Drug War has done here. Think about the movies that you've seen which feature extreme torture and extreme disregard for human life. Chances are that the vast majority of their plots concerned drug dealing.
Does anyone see what's going on here? Substance prohibition has created the violence on which these movies are all-too-accurately based. And this is inexcusable because common sense psychology tells us that prohibition would do precisely this. People like to get rich and there will always be a morally challenged minority which will go to extreme measures when extreme incentives are offered thanks to insane social policies like prohibition.
This is another reason why the FDA is enormously biased when it comes to drug approval. Not only do they ignore the obvious positive effects of the drugs that they bash, but they also ignore the obvious negative effects of outlawing drugs. The FDA is supposedly all about keeping us safe, right? And yet by outlawing drugs, they are enabling torture and wholesale murder!
And yet no one sees this -- nor will they ever see this thanks to movies like "Smile 2"!
Schopenhauer says that the truth will eventually be known, but I am beginning to wonder.
I never thought of myself as a great genius, but the idiocy of the vast majority on these topics is beginning to swell my head. Either I am a genius, being the only one to recognize these obvious syllogistic truths, or there are a fair percentage of people out there who "get this" but are just not speaking up -- or else they are hiding their knowledge in academic-speak. Academic Philip Jenkins wrote about the Drug War in "Synthetic Panics1" in reasonably lucid prose, but his work has had limited effect for two reasons: 1) He refrained from drawing any overt conclusions from the data that he had amassed, and 2) He gave his book a title that did not even mention "drugs." In other words, he shielded himself from mainstream criticism, but only at the cost of diminishing the impact of his book.
Even factual and assumption-free movies about drug-related deaths are propaganda in the age of the Drug War. They may not be propaganda "in and of themselves," but collectively they are part of an obvious propaganda campaign -- a campaign of censorship designed to make us associate drugs with nothing but death, dying and dead-end streets.
The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.
Ketamine is like any other drug. It has good uses for certain people in certain situations. Nowadays, people insist that a drug be okay in every situation for everybody (especially American teens) before they will say that it's okay. That's crazy and anti-scientific.
Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.
Americans have learned nothing but half-truths and lies about cocaine and opium thanks to the total censorship of drug benefits.
Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
DEA Stormtroopers should be held responsible for destroying American Democracy. Abolish the American Gestapo.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
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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