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
A company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.
Cop and detective shows are loaded with subtle drug war propaganda, including lines like, "She had a history of drug use, so..." The implication being that anyone who uses substances that politicians hate cannot be trusted.
No drug causes addiction after one use. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis.
Health is not a quality, it's a balance. To decide drug legality based on 'health' grounds thus opens a Pandora's box of different points of view.
"Can I use poppies, coca, laughing gas, MDMA?" "NO," says the materialist, "We must be SCIENTIFIC! We must fry your brain and give you a lobotomy and make you a patient for life with the psychiatric pill mill! That's true SCIENCE!"
The Drug War treats doctors like potential criminals and it treats the rest of us like children. Prohibition does not end drug risks: it just outsources them to minorities and other vulnerable populations.
Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.
Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."
I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.
Almost every article about suicide is shallow because it takes drug prohibition as a natural baseline, even though drug prohibition outlaws substances that could so clearly elevate mood.
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