In 1905, amidst the largest drug epidemic in American history, a teenage Alice has just moved to the Pacific Northwest. She follows a mysterious man down a rabbit hole, leading her into Wonderland; a dark and curious world inhabited by characters from turn-of-the-century America and the Pacific Northwest. - Anonymous
The anonymous reviewer says "In 1905, during America's largest drug epidemic..." That is Drug War propaganda. There wasn't a drug epidemic in 1905, except in the minds of racists, who associated opium 1 use with the Chinese, marijuana use with Mexicans, and cocaine 2 3 use with blacks. America's largest drug epidemic is RIGHT NOW, when 1 in 8 American males, and 1 in 4 American females, are addicted to Big Pharma 4 5 antidepressants 6, many of which are harder to kick than heroin 7 (SOURCE: Psychiatrist-author Julie Holland). Moreover, this addiction was caused by the Drug War itself (which began in 1914 with the Harrison Narcotics Act) and its criminalization of far less addictive therapeutic godsends from Mother Nature.
The best harm reduction strategy would be to re-legalize opium and cocaine. We would thereby end depression in America and free Americans from their abject reliance on the healthcare industry, meanwhile ending gang violence and restoring the rule of law in Latin America.
If we can go overseas to burn poppy plants, then Islamic countries should be free to come to the United States to burn our grape vines.
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
Even prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. We should not drugs "up or down" any more than we should judge penicillin or aspirin in that way.
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
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.
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.
The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.
Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.
I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing "Howl!" while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like "Howl!"
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