As a newcomer to Substack, I have been attempting to seek out Substack leaders in the realm of healthcare freedom and the field of so-called mental health. I am told that this is how one makes friends and grows one's Substack audience in one's chosen niche, by finding such movers-and-shakers and commenting usefully on their own posts and notes. "Fine," I think to myself, "let's get to work, then, shall we? We've got this." And yet in trying to stick to this sensical protocol, I am discovering a big problem. It seems that my outlook on these topics is so far ahead of the curve that any comments I might make on the work of my mainstream contemporaries are sure to "come off" as sounding like a reproach. This is because I have yet to find one psychiatrist or psychologist who sees -- or is willing to admit to seeing -- any connection between drug prohibition and the disempowerment of the depressed in the age of the psychiatric pill mill. Imagine that: no one can see why folks like you and I should have the right to take care of our own health as we see fit. Alas, Drug Warriors understood all too well that propaganda works, especially when the conglomerate media refuses to publish any stories about the wise, positive and beneficial use of demonized substances.
Prohibition never ended. Busybody Americans just gave alcohol a big Mulligan for killing 178,000 a year in America alone and then began fighting to outlaw everything else.
In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.
So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.
The war on drugs has destroyed America's faith in the power of education. In fact, it has made us think of education as WRONG in and of itself. It has made us prefer censorship and fear-filled ignorance to education!
Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.
I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.
We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.
No wonder conservatives are terrified of drugs. It is not safety that worries them, else they would demand education. They are terrified of new ways of seeing life. The outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of whole mindsets. It is a meta injustice.
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.
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