This is perhaps the most irritating essay of all in the entire "Hallucinogen" reader2. Ralph Metzner demonstrates clearly that he is completely bamboozled by Drug War propaganda. He agrees with the Drug Warrior notion that drugs can be judged up or down, outside of all context, especially by westerners who have never used them before and who have been blocked from reading positive usage reports for their entire lifetime! And so he tells us that the time-honored panacea called opium3 can have no legitimate uses for anybody, anywhere, ever - except when administered for physical pain by a board-certified doctor. WHAT?! Ralph is thereby signing off on drug prohibition which brought incredible gunfire to inner cities and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America. A substance that might be misused by a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reasons.
"One of the problems in the United States is that psychedelics have been mistakenly lumped together with the addictive drugs -- heroin, cocaine, and crack."
"I only wish we could turn our drunkards into opium smokers. If the change would only save those wretched wives and their helpless children from ill-treatment by their husbands and fathers, we should have secured one valuable end." --William Brereton, The Truth about Opium / Being a Refutation of the Fallacies of the Anti-Opium Society and a Defence of the Indo-China Opium Trade17
"My impression has been that the use of cocaine 18 over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine19 20
As Carl Hart reports21, most people use drugs wisely, despite the government's ongoing attempts to make drug use as dangerous as possible, by discouraging honest drug education, refusing to regulate product, and refusing to allow for drug choice."It is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens...." --GK Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils30
Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.
We give kids drugs to improve their concentration -- but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.
When Americans "obtain their majority" and wish to partake of drugs safely, they should be paired with older adults who have done just that. Instead, we introduce them to "drug abusers" in prerecorded morality plays to reinforce our biased notions that drug use is wrong.
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.
Almost every mainstream article about psychology and consciousness is nonsense these days because it ignores the way that drug prohibition has stymied our investigation of such subjects.
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.
Ann Lemke's case studies make the usual assumptions: getting free from addiction is a morality tale. No reference to how the drug war promotes addiction and how banned drugs could solve such problems. She does not say why daily SSRI use is acceptable while daily opium use is not. Etc.
It's almost impossible not to have a problem with drugs in a world in which the government is spending over $50 billion a year to render drug use problematic.
Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.
If I should die of some unusual concatenation of circumstances, I want my survivors to pass "Brian's Law," a law stating that we will no longer pass laws based on hard cases and so needlessly fill our prisons by taking common-sense discretion out of the hands of judges.
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