I read a short story last night entitled "Tomorrow" by Eugene O'Neill. As might be expected from that author, it was touching and yet extremely depressing. The title "Tomorrow," of course, refers to the eternally renewed resolution of the drunkard to reform tomorrow, which is, of course, a tomorrow that will never come.
If Americans truly felt that laws had to be concocted to protect Americans from substances, then the story would read as a clarion call for the outlawing of liquor. But it will never be read that way by Americans today, subject as they are to the media's constant whitewashing of liquor and their constant demonization of all of liquor's many less dangerous alternatives. How? By lies, half-truths and (above all) censorship, thanks to which one never sees a demonized drug used responsibly and efficaciously on TV or in the movies 12 . Said use is always either portrayed as a dead-end street or a childish undertaking worthy of laughter and, ultimately, disdain, at least from the grown-ups of the world. Meanwhile, the very fact that drugs were used efficaciously by folks like Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius is routinely suppressed from biographies.
This negative attitude toward drugs is beginning to recede today when it comes to psychedelic substances. In fact, while I was writing this blog entry, I received a heads-up about a brand-new article in the New York Times entitled "The C.E.O.s Are Tripping. Can Psychedelics Help the C-Suite?".
But the penny still has not dropped for the western world. The real problem is prohibition itself, which advances the absurd and cruel proposition that a drug that can be used problematically by white American young people must not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason whatsoever. The world is full of silent and unnecessary suffering thanks to that anti-scientific postulate -- not just because of the withholding of existing protocols but because of the vast array of imaginative empathic/shamanic protocols that we dare not even imagine today thanks to the Drug War orthodoxy of substance demonization.
And so Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but the real headline is that drugs have never been evil at all, that the evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about them. And how do we talk about them today? With the superstitious and self-serving hypocrisy promoted by cynical politicians.
Someone should stand outside Jefferson's estate and hand out leaflets describing the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello to confiscate poppy plants. That raid was against everything Jefferson stood for. The TJ Foundation DISHONORED JEFFERSON and their visitors should know that!
Imagine if we held sports to the same safety standard as drugs. There would be no sports at all. And yet even free climbing is legal. Why? Because with sports, we recognize the benefits and not just the downsides.
The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that signs off on Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself.
Here is a typical user report about a drug that the DEA tells us has no positive uses whatsoever:
"There is a profoundness of meaning inherent in anything that moves." (reported in "Pikhal" by Alexander Shulgin)
Med-dependent patients of the world, unite -- to end drug prohibition, that is. You have nothing to lose but your prescription bottles and your status as a ward of the healthcare state.
Our government treats drugs like uranium and spends hundreds of billions of dollars trying to scare us about them.
The proof that psychedelics work has always been extant. We are hoodwinked by scientists who convince us that efficacy has not been "proven." This is materialist denial of the obvious.
When people tell us there's nothing to be gained from using mind-improving drugs, they are embarrassing themselves. Users benefit from such drugs precisely to the extent that they are educated and open-minded. Loudmouth abstainers are telling us that they lack these traits.
The DEA is gaslighting Americans, telling them that drugs with obvious benefits have no benefits whatsoever. Scientists collude in this lie thanks to their adherence to the emotion-scorning principles of behaviorism.
It wasn't until western prudery and racism came along that we started to judge people by the substances that they chose to ingest, rather than by their actual behavior in the world.
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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