If I had this to write over again, I would replace the term "liberal" below with "neo-liberal." I do not believe in bashing liberal norms -- I am just trying to unearth the erroneous assumptions held by seemingly good people on the subject of drugs.
Dear Editors of the Atlantic:
If you are in any way sympathetic with correspondent Graeme Wood's misleading musings on the Drug War (in his July 2019 homage to Mark Kleiman), then I plead with you to read the following, and read it with an open mind. I write this because I'm an enemy of America's Drug War, and I'm convinced that its "staying power" is due far more to liberal confusion on this topic than to conservative recalcitrance. As you must know, the Drug War was commenced by Richard Nixon as a means of silencing his critics by turning them into felons and removing them from the voting rolls. It was not set up with America's health in mind. Yet Nixon's Drug War remains entrenched in the American zeitgeist today. Why? Because even those who oppose it put forward weak and contingent arguments that unnecessarily yield ground to the Drug Warrior's bogus concerns and justifications.
To make my points as clearly as possible, I will proceed by citing a variety of well-meaning liberal assumptions about the Drug War, followed by my explanation of why they are misleading. Let me assure you in advance that this is not an exercise in liberal bashing, since I consider myself a liberal as well, albeit one in the stamp of GK Chesterton.
1) Liberals generally share the conservative viewpoint that human beings should not use mother nature's bounty in order to improve their mental health. Such a viewpoint, however, is nothing less than the theology of Christian Science as applied to mental health. As such, it is a religious tenet, not a view based on scientific facts.
2) Liberals tend to talk about the misuse of drugs in isolation. Thus, if they see teenagers misusing drug A, they write movingly of the problem, considering that they are advancing an implicit knock-down argument for the criminalization of drug A. This kind of argument completely ignores the needs of millions (perhaps even billions) of human beings who could benefit from the responsible use of drug A. Furthermore, it ignores the millions of innocents who will be made homeless or killed on behalf of making drug A illegal, victims on both the domestic and foreign front, caught up in violence so prevalent that it has spawned an entire new genre of movies: the Drug War genre. This genre includes films like Clockers, American Gangster, Empire, Cocaine Cowboys, L.A. Wars, etc., films in which self-righteous Americans gleefully violate the U.S. Constitution to "take down" Russian and South American "scumbags" (our custom-made bad guys created by the Drug War out of whole cloth).
3) Liberals tend to take the criminalization of Mother Nature's bounty as common sense. What they fail to realize is that this criminalization is a modern invention, established by corrupt and bigoted politicians, politicians who don't so much object to drugs as to the folks who use them. Many, including myself, would make the argument that government had no right to outlaw the God-given medicinal bounty of Mother Nature that grows at our very feet - especially in a country where we're granted the right to pursue happiness. America is a country built on natural law, and natural law has always supposed an Earthling's right to the plants and fungi that grow at his or her very feet. In the Jefferson America envisioned in the Declaration of Independence, there is no legitimate way for government to infringe upon our access and use of the plants of Mother Nature, a viewpoint clearly stated by John Locke, Jefferson's political inspiration, in Two Treatises on Government.
4) Liberals have rolled over and played dead when it comes to drug testing, to which no one seems to object today. In short, it is a total victory for Nixon's know-nothing Drug War. For what is drug-testing? It is the extrajudicial enforcement of Christian Science as applied to mental health. It is the punishment of a misdemeanor offense* with starvation, because anyone who dares use the medical bounty of Mother Nature is deprived of a job - in the absence of proof that said drug use would have impeded their job performance.
*Actually, it's the punishment of a non-offense, since the law does not generally punish the mere presence of illegal substances in the bloodstream.
5) Liberals tend to associate psychedelic plant medicines with hippies. They are thereby ignoring almost 2,000 years of western history, in which a who's who of Ancient Greeks and Romans (Plato, Cicero, Plutarch, Aristophanes...) attended the yearly Eleusian mysteries, where they "communed with the goddess" with the help of a psychedelic substance, a secretive ritual which many participants later described as the most important event of their life. The ceremony was held yearly until it was tellingly shut down by a Christian emperor as a threat to religion. Just so we banish psychedelics today as a threat to the modern state religion of Christian Science as applied to mental health.
6) Liberals like Kleiman believe that we should legalize only SOME plants, and then do so "ever so carefully." It's as if the freedom of speech had been taken away from us by corrupt politicians and now liberals are advocating that we restore those rights "ever so carefully." Why "ever so carefully"? Does Kleiman not realize that this is a matter of principle, a wrong that is demanding immediate redress? Kleiman can only draw such meek conclusions because he holds many of the false ideas outlined above. For starters, he bases drug policy on the potential and theoretical ills that it might bring, totally ignoring the enormous ills that the Drug War is already bringing each and every day by ruining lives, overcrowding our prisons, killing inner-city residents, and justifying U.S. intervention in foreign countries.
There is much more to say, but I stop here because, quite frankly, I do not believe that you are going to read this, much less give it an objective hearing. These ideas of mine might have rung a bell with liberals 40 years ago, but it really seems like the drug-war mentality has triumphed in America. That said, I'll assume the best and end by telling you why I feel so strongly on this matter.
As a depressed American, I have spent the last 45 years on the receiving end of psychiatry's addictive nostrums. Like more than 1 in 10 Americans, I have to take an SSRI/SNRI for life, not because I want to but because I have grown to be chemically dependent on the substance. But why did I start on these addictive pills in the first place? Because Nixon's Drug War outlawed the non-addictive psychotherapies that had shown such promise in treating depression in the 1950s. And so I'm forced to remain on these mind-fogging meds for a lifetime thanks to the Drug War. Moreover, I am banned from enjoying the therapeutic benefits of the psychedelic renaissance since most psychedelics are contraindicated for patients taking modern antidepressants.
Psychiatry has thus addicted me (first with Valium, later with antidepressants) BECAUSE of the Drug War. Where is the liberal concern for myself and the millions like me, the casualties of Kleiman's "slow and cautious" approach on legalizing psychedelics? And yet liberals like Graeme feel free to flippantly dismiss the value of psychedelics and wholeheartedly accept the fascist notion that plants and fungi can justifiably be criminalized.
Plants and fungi: criminalized! It sounds like a Ray Bradbury science-fiction story to me: a future tyrannical government outlaws plants! And yet this is the "enlightened" public policy that America is following in the 21st century? Unfortunately, humans tend to have myopic vision when it comes to recognizing the blatant injustices of their own time. So I'm not sure you catch the irony here.
But here's hoping that you do! Here's hoping that the Atlantic will think twice in the future before running stories that only serve to philosophically strengthen the Drug War zeitgeist.
If I've convinced you that the default liberal position is blind to certain truths, feel free to forward me an advance copy of your next article in which one of your authors speculates on drug legalization.
I'll be happy to highlight any mistaken philosophical assumptions on which the author is unwittingly basing his or her argument. Because, to repeat, the Drug War remains in place, not because of conservative arguments in favor of it but because of the liberal critic's inability to rebut those arguments clearly and with philosophical rigor.
Author's Follow-up: November 10, 2022
My depression would end overnight and there would be peace in Mexico if we re-legalized mother nature's medicines, especially the coca leaf, which has been chewed by the long-lived Peruvian Indians for hundreds of years. But Drug Warriors would prefer that millions, perhaps billions, like myself should live lives of silent despair rather than letting us use the plant medicine that grows at our very feet. This will be someday be unmasked as the anti-scientific barbarity that is it, and the Atlantic's reputation will suffer accordingly.
Author's Follow-up: February 2, 2025
The very fact that Drug Warriors criticize hippies is telling. What did hippies believe in back in the sixties, after all? Answer: The power of peace, love and understanding. And what did their opponents believe in back in the sixties? Answer: the power of thermonuclear weapons.
The fact is that Drug Warriors hate peace, love and understanding. They cannot deal with such a world. It would give them no chance to use guns and police forces and the military -- in their fight against minorities. They cannot just simply deny rights to minorities: they have to come up with a plausible reason to lock them up by the millions. Their answer: incentivize ridiculously lucrative drug dealing by the poor and disenfranchised by outlawing strongly desired substances.
The Drug Warriors in the UK hated peace, love and understanding in the 1990s when they cracked down on the use of Ecstasy on the dance floor, a drug which had brought unprecedented peace, love and understanding to rave concerts. After the crackdown, dancers switched from E to alcohol, and the dance floors became so violent that concert organizers had to bring in special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces. Yet another "victory" for the Neanderthal Drug Warriors.
The crackdown was ostensibly "justified" by the death of one single dancer by the name of Leah Betts who had died while using Ecstasy1. But that death was clearly a result of prohibition, which refused to regulate product and refused to teach safe use. Had the government valued education over arrest, then dancers would have known to keep hydrated when combining Ecstasy with vigorous activity such as rave dancing, especially when one weighs only 100 pounds, as in Leah's case. Instead, they ghoulishly used Leah's death as a cause célèbre in favor of Ecstasy prohibition. Needless to say, they would have cracked down infinitely harder on drinking had they applied the same "safety standard" to the use of alcohol.
Hypocrisy and lies all down the line!
Let me end this update by restating my crucial apothegm for understanding the evil of substance prohibition, namely:
The Drug War is based on two enormous lies: 1) that there are no upsides to drug use, and 2) that there are no downsides to prohibition.
Mass Media and Drugs
The media have done all they can to support the drug war by holding the use of outlawed substances to safety standards that are never applied to any other risky activity on earth, meanwhile ignoring the fact that prohibition encourages ignorance and leads to contaminated drug supply. Thousands of American young people die each month because of unregulated supply and ignorance, not from drugs themselves.
The media also supports the drug war by failing to hold it accountable for all the problems that it causes. Just read any article on inner-city shootings -- today's journalists will trace the problem to a lack of jobs or to global warming, to anything but the drug war which incentivized violence in the first place. As for violence overseas, we're told that it's caused by evil rotten drug cartels -- without any acknowledgement that it was American drug policy that created those cartels out of whole cloth, just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia here in the States.
Meanwhile, the media have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's fentanyl... It's all part of the DEA's tried-and-true formula to stay relevant, as academic Philip Jenkins clearly demonstrates in "Synthetic Panics": Take a local drug problem and publicize it so that it goes national. Then work with a film crew at "48 Hours" to show that the drug in question threatens the white American middle class. Then go to Congress, hat in hand, and accept billions to 'solve' the latest drug problem.
And Americans fall for it every time. In fact, their gullibility seems to be increasing over time. They love to hate drugs, so much so that drugs have become the new horror trope. Recent movies have taken to personifying "evil" drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. It's sad that America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs -- and the media can take much of the blame.
"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley
To put it another way: in a sane world, we would learn to strategically fight drugs with drugs.
"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud
Pro-psychedelic websites tell me to check with my "doctor" before using Mother Nature. But WHY? I'm the expert on my own psychology, damn it. These "doctors" are the ones who got me hooked on synthetic drugs, because they honor microscopic evidence, not time-honored usage.
The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.
The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.
Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.
Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.
There are endless drugs that could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for drug warriors to understand).
Prohibition is wrong root and branch. It seeks to justify the colonial disdain for indigenous healing practices through fearmongering.
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, How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War Part II published on August 1, 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War Part II published on August 1, 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)
