One of the best ways to demonstrate the hateful prejudices of drug prohibition is to compare America's drug laws with the Penal Laws created in Ireland by English protestants between the 16th and 18th centuries.1 In the time of the Protestant Ascendancy, the British Government in Ireland sought to marginalize Catholics with what Dublin Professor Charles Ivar McGrath has described as a "rag-bag" of tyrannical laws, designed (at least in theory) to harry Catholics to the point that they finally renounced their Catholic faith in favor of Protestantism.2 In the time of the American Drug War, the U.S. government seeks to marginalize drug users with its own rag-bag of tyrannical laws, designed (at least in theory) to harry drug users to the point that they finally renounce their belief in Mother Nature's medicines and live instead according to the drug-hating dictates of the Christian Science religion. In both cases, the government's legislators sought (and seek) to outdo themselves in devising new and creative ways to treat their enemies like dirt while evincing a cavalier disregard for the "rights of man," or what we moderns might refer to as the rights of the human being qua human being.
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.
Americans HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control their pain relief and how and how much they can think and feel in this life.
The evidence has been in for well over a century now: people want to use psychoactive substances to transcend the rational mind. It's about time we stopped punishing them for that.
Amphetamines are "meds" when they help kids think more clearly but they are "drugs" when they help adults think more clearly. That shows you just how bewildered Americans are when it comes to drugs.
I knew all along that Measure 110 in Oregon was going to be blamed for the problems that the drug war causes. Drug warriors never take responsibility, despite all the blood that they have on their hands.
I have nothing against science, BTW (altho' I might feel differently after a nuclear war!) I just want scientists to "stay in their lane" and stop pretending to be experts on my own personal mood and consciousness.
Drug War propaganda is all about convincing us that we will never be able to use drugs wisely. But the drug warriors are not taking any chances: they're doing all they can to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I knew democracy was in trouble when most Americans in the '80s saw no problem with allowing drug testers to go on a fishing expedition in their bodily fluids for substances of which politicians disapprove.
Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs.
The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for withholding godsend medicine from the depressed. Here is just one typical drug-user report that appeared in "Pihkal": "A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."
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