Lovecraft's stories are full of opiate imagery. In Celaphais, for instance, his beleaguered and homeless protagonist wanders through 'the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams.' Hear that, Drug Warriors? Many-coloured dreams? This is why your War on Drugs is a war on creativity, because it outlaws the natural plant medicines that can bring many-coloured dreams, the influence of which can inspire great literature, at least in the minds of talented authors who are prepared to profit from such visions.
Just as opium 1 use clearly inspired Lovecraft, Lewis Carroll must have known a thing or two about the effects of psychoactive mushroom consumption when he wrote 'Alice in Wonderland.' And both HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their best stories after taking generous swigs from a bottle of 'coca wine.' And don't even get me started on Edgar Allan Poe. Suffice it to say that he showed how even the hated morphine 2 can bring wonderful, almost surreal visions to an ardent naturalist (see 'Tale of the Ragged Mountains') -- tho' America seems at least a century away from being able to admit this inconvenient truth to its drug-hating self, namely that the ideologically despised morphine 3 , used wisely, can deeply increase our ability to appreciate the natural world around us.
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The fact that the latter drugs can be dangerous is no excuse to outlaw them, least of all in a country in which 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent on Big Pharma 45 meds for a lifetime. Besides, the inspirational 'drugs' that we're talking about here derive from plants, which cannot be justifiably criminalized in the first place, at least if America is to maintain its legacy of natural law upon which the citizen's most basic rights are founded, like the right to what John Locke himself called 'the use of the land and all that lies therein.' (Just ask Jefferson, who was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 6 in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants, in violation of everything that he stood for as a Founding Father.)
August 1, 2022
It never seems to have occurred to westerners that potentially addictive drugs can be used non-addictively. Through a properly scheduled dose therapy, folks can find pharmacologically aided self-transcendence without becoming addicted. Of course, Americans have been browbeaten from birth to believe that this is impossible, thanks to propaganda in the form of teddy bears from DART and hypocritically defined 'drug-free zones' -- and the fact that they never, but never, hear anything about POSITIVE drug use, for the simple reason that the Office of National Drug Control Policy has dictated that no positive uses of 'drugs' can ever be considered.
In a world where substances are legal again and where knowledge, not fear, is encouraged, folks would know how to avoid addictions -- and where to go whenever they begin developing a habit that they dislike. For in such a free world, a pharmacologically savvy empath 7 would be able to steer him or her towards a substance use with which they can live. But the Drug War State does not want rational use. They want to ensure, through public policy, that drugs end up being just as dangerous as propaganda says they should be. And how do they accomplish this? By demonizing drugs rather than teaching about them.
Cocaine use is a blessing for some, just a little fun for most, and a curse for a few. Just like any other risky activity. We need to educate people about drugs rather than endlessly arresting them for attempting to improve their mental power!
The prohibitionist motto: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."
Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.
Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.
A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Performers can lose their livelihood if they become too self-conscious. We only call such use "recreational" because we are oblivious to the common-sense psychology.
The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war.
William James claimed that his constitution prevented him from having mystical experiences. The fact is that no one is prevented from having mystical experiences provided that they are willing to use psychoactive substances wisely to attain that end.
We should not be talking about the potential harm of drugs -- we should be talking about the well-established harm of drug PROHIBITION.
The addiction gene should be called the prohibition gene: it renders one vulnerable to prohibition lies and limitations: like the lack of safe supply, the lack of choices, and the lack of information. We should pathologize the prohibitionists, not their victims.
Pundits tell us that there are medical reasons not to "snort" cocaine. So what? There are medical reasons not to drive a car: you may have an accident. The question is: does cocaine use or car driving make sense in a given case! Details matter!
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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