"I am under the impression the Philosopher is speaking of improving the mind directly with drugs, consciousness expansion, that sort of thing. I don't buy into that anymore.
Insomnia sucks, it's why I'm drinking beer in a hotel bathroom at 4:40am."
If they're going to throw doctors in jail for prescribing too much pain medication, they should also throw them in jail for prescribing too LITTLE.
The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.
Racist drug warriors make cities dangerous with drug prohibition -- then they use that danger as an excuse to send in the National Guard.
We should not be talking about the potential harm of drugs -- we should be talking about the well-established harm of drug PROHIBITION.
If MAPS wants to make progress with MDMA they should start "calling out" the FDA for judging holistic medicines by materialist standards, which means ignoring all glaringly obvious benefits.
When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
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