've already found leisure to dilate on the anti-democratic impact of drug-war movies like 'Running with the Devil,' in which the DEA agent is the (ahem) 'hero' who combats those bad guy plant sellers by torturing them and shooting them in cold blood. Although this kind of movie deserves to be panned for its ideological toxicity, don't hold your breath waiting for movie critics to bash the movie on that score. And as far as parental watch dog groups are concerned, count on them to lambaste such pics for nudity, violence, and naughty words, but don't expect to hear a peep from them about the pro-fascist message of such DEA propaganda. Johnny must not swear, of course, but if he wants to torture and murder folks who traffic in Mother Nature's plants, more power to him.
But there is another genre of pictures that helps sell the pro-fascist Drug War sensibility to gullible Americans: namely, comedies such as 'Harold & Kumar go to White Castle,' in which illegal plant substances are uniquely associated with sexual abandon and blatant irresponsibility. Such films would be innocuous enough in a culture that spoke honestly about drugs -- that recognized both their benefits and ills -- but in our drug-war society, which dogmatically recognizes only the misuse of outlawed substances, such movies reinforce the Drug Warrior supposition that there is no sensible reason to use the plants that the government has chosen to criminalize. So as Neil Patrick Harris snorts cocaine off the tush of a pole dancer while driving Harold's car through off-road vegetation, one can just hear the 'lock-em-up' conservative in the audience saying to himself: 'You see? Aren't drugs just the worst thing in the world?!' And so we lie to ourselves to keep this Drug War myth going. We ignore responsible use of banished plants and erase such use from history.
Nowhere is this historical revisionism more striking than in the case of Freud's use of cocaine, because, properly considered, Freud's cocaine use calls into question most of modern psychiatry's pieties (such as 'no pain, no gain,' 'we must treat the REAL causes,' 'feel-good drugs are bad,' etc.) It begs the question: if Freud fought off fatigue and depression with cocaine, abjuring theoretical psychoanalysis for that purpose, and thereby amassing a prolific vocational output that led to an unprecedented degree of self-actualization in his life, why should the rest of us be forced by law to treat our similar problems with the latest popular theoretical therapy? Why can't we, too, avail ourselves of the real politik of plant-based therapy to attain self-fulfillment?
Of course, the modern psychiatrist will chide: 'But that's just treating the symptoms, that's not treating the REAL illness,' to which we say 'So what?' Despite materialist claims to the contrary, we do not know any one single cause for depression and fatigue, and indeed it is thanks to our determination to find this highly improbable El Dorado that we now have a nation of addicts, addicted to pills that claimed (falsely as it turns out) to correct a chemical imbalance peculiar to the depressed.
Besides, isn't the goal of psychiatry to grant the patient a life of self-actualization? In that case, cocaine worked a treat for Freud, not by giving him that self-fulfillment directly (not by targeting some supposititious self-fulfillment chemical!), but by arousing in him the psychophysical baseline condition that permitted him to succeed on his own. That was not a copout for Freud, but if we insist on calling it so, then God grant us all such a copout that leads to professional self-fulfillment in life.
Back to H&K:
A cop says: 'I just found enough dope in the car to put these skateboard punks in jail for the next couple of years.'
And the Drug Warrior in the audience cheers.
But think how costly this sense of satisfaction is : By putting away punks, we have denied godsend medicines to the elderly, the depressed, the victims of PTSD.
It's this focus on punishing (and/or protecting) punks through substance prohibition -- aided by Hollywood's selective depiction of drug use as exclusively hedonistic -- that denies the psychologically desperate the plant medicines that could make their lives livable, often enjoyable, again.
God grant Americans can someday be satisfied with punishing a punk's bad actions alone, not their mere possession of plants. That way, when we do punish them, we're not also punishing the psychologically needy as we do today, forcing them by law to eschew mother nature's therapies in favor of addictive Big Pharma pills that need to be taken every single day for life.
The protection and/or punishment of the punks of the world must stop taking precedence over the psychological needs and, indeed, rights of the vast majority of humanity, for we're not talking about privileges here: we're talking about the resurrection of the earthling's natural birthright to the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet.
Author's Follow-up: September 10, 2022
It will be objected that Freud himself renounced cocaine after his excessive use of the drug became habit-forming and so cocaine really is devil spawn -- but this is typical drug-war reasoning. One begins by using a substance without proper knowledge of it, and then when downsides ensue, the user blames them on the drug rather than on their lack of education about the substance in question. Thus Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an inveterate explorer of the psychoactive world, blamed opium for his addiction after he began engaging in the excessive use of laudanum. Again, this is typical drug-war mentality: we place the blame for our bad outcomes on substances rather than on the ignorance that rendered the substances harmful. This leads to a vicious circle in which we begin outlawing all kinds of psychoactive substances, thereby outlawing meds which, in a sane world, could be used by an empathic and pharmacologically savvy empath to counter the habituating effects of the drugs upon which we have become reliant.
Anyway, there are plenty of well-known coca users who used the drug wisely and did not become addicts -- or, if they did, they found the coca use to be no more problematic than their daily cup of coffee. Such users should really be referred to by the non-judgmental term of 'habitue,' not the censorious and hence political term 'addict.' HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their beloved stories 'on' coca wine, a drink which was also a favorite of Henrik Ibsen and Alexandre Dumas, and Arthur Conan Doyle produced a beloved superhero sleuth whose laser-like mental focus was unapologetically ascribed to the wonders of the coca plant (the same kind of medicine that the Partnership for a Drug Free America tells us will fry our brains!) Yet America leads the world in dogmatically eschewing this godsend plant medicine under the anti-scientific theory that medicines like that are somehow bad in themselves, without regard for how they are used. For what is the definition of 'drug' in modern times but 'a substance that has no justifiable uses: not here, not now, not for you, not for me, not for anyone, ever, at any time whatsoever.'
The fact is there are no such substances in the entire world -- even the deadly Botox can be beneficial in specific cases -- and until the world wakes up to this obvious truth, Drug Warriors will continue to militarize the world in their Quixotic attempt to outlaw psychoactive godsends.
Drug War Movies
Hollywood supports the war on drugs by refusing to show wise use while always depicting drug use in the worst possible light. Like all media, they refuse to show beneficial use -- and if they're not depicting drugs as dangerous dead-ends, they're at least showing use to be frivolous and dangerous. The producers kowtow to drug warrior sensibilities.
In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.
This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.
How do I know this?
Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.
More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?
This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."
Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!
At best, antidepressants make depression bearable. We need not settle for such drugs, especially when they are notorious for causing dependence. There are many drugs that elate and inspire. It is both cruel and criminal to outlaw them.
My local community store here in the sticks sells Trump "dollar bills" at the checkout counter. I don't know what's worse: a president encouraging insurrection or an electorate that does not see that as a problem.
They still don't seem to get it. The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.
I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful. Wrong. Substance demonization is wrong, root and branch. It always causes more suffering than freedom.
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
I looked up the company: it's all about the damn stock market and money. The FDA outlaws LSD until we remove all the euphoria and the visions. That's ideology, not science. Just relegalize drugs and stop telling me how much ecstasy and insight I can have in my life!!
Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.
Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy.
It is based on the following crazy idea:
that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War published on November 12, 2019 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
've already found leisure to dilate on the anti-democratic impact of drug-war movies like 'Running with the Devil,' in which the DEA agent is the (ahem) 'hero' who combats those bad guy plant sellers by torturing them and shooting them in cold blood. Although this kind of movie deserves to be panned for its ideological toxicity, don't hold your breath waiting for movie critics to bash the movie on that score. And as far as parental watch dog groups are concerned, count on them to lambaste such pics for nudity, violence, and naughty words, but don't expect to hear a peep from them about the pro-fascist message of such DEA propaganda. Johnny must not swear, of course, but if he wants to torture and murder folks who traffic in Mother Nature's plants, more power to him.
You have been reading an article entitled, Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War published on November 12, 2019 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
