If America cannot exist without outlawing drugs, then there is something wrong with America, not with drugs.
There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."
If there was free speech in America, we would see billboards demanding freedom to use psychoactive substances for religious purposes, or to heal, or to follow-up on the research of William James regarding the nature of human consciousness.
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!
Freud found that cocaine CURED most people's depression and he "got off it" without trouble.
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.
Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.
Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.
I'm going to get on the grade-school circuit, telling kids to say no to horses.
"You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!"
AI is like almost every subject under the sun: it takes on a very different and ominous meaning when we view it in light of the modern world's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine.
(up)