How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse

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How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 9, 2022

America turns the fate of all supposed 'drug abusers' into a morality tale about the evil of 'drugs' and, by implication, the moral weakness of those who use them. But instead of asking psychologically naive questions like, 'Why did Amy think she needed drugs?' (hint: it's the self-transcendence, stupid), we should be looking in the mirror, asking: 'Why did WE not bother to teach her how to use drugs wisely?' For the villain of this piece is the Drug War itself, a Drug War which 1) limits Amy's available pharmacopeia to the problematic and addictive substances whose sale is incentivized by Drug War prohibition, and 2) discourages the substance-related research that could lead to safe use guidelines for all psychoactive medicines.

Of course, Amy's fate was especially easy for Christian Science America to spin into a Drug War morality tale in which 'drugs' were the bad guy. One of the last songs that Amy sang contained the heretical lyrics: 'He's tried to make me go to rehab, but I won't go, go, go.' And at the Oscars, she was quoted as telling her friend Juliette that, 'This is so boring without drugs.'

When these facts were shown to contestants on Gogglebox in 2014, there was plenty of backhanded sympathy for Amy from the reality-show couch potatoes, with the general consensus being that she had unfortunately caved before the evil temptress known as 'drugs.'

No one ever asked the apparently heretical question: 'What if we had researched all drugs that provided personal transcendence and educated Amy about how to choose among them and use them wisely?'

But Drug Warriors do not think this way because they completely ignore the motivation for drug use, which is self-transcendence. Even if they do recognize the impulse, they insist that self-transcendence must come only from supposedly 'natural' sources, such as church, yoga, meditation, jogging, and the like. (The Drug Warrior might even suggest stoicism as an alternative to drugs, failing to realize that the paragon of that discipline, Marcus Aurelius, was himself a big fan of opium .) But this notion about 'drugs' being unnatural or a 'copout' is a mere Christian Science prejudice and not an ineluctable truth to which all intelligent humans are led upon rational reflection. It's certainly not a 'truth' that would naturally occur to someone who grew up in a botanically rich rainforest.

In point of fact, the mind truly boggles at the plethora of treatment possibilities that would have been open to Amy had she been able to meet with a pharmacologically savvy empath ¹ who had unrestricted access to every psychoactive plant in the entire world. Amy might have been led through an emotionally restorative journey on psylocibin to see the world in a new way, been given something to look forward to in the form of weekly cocaine ² ³ or opium ⁴ use, or provided with morphine ⁵ on special mental 'holidays,' whereby she could see the natural world in exquisite detail a la August Bedloe in 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains' by Edgar Allan Poe. She could have had her head screwed back on straight with the strategic use of the drugs which Americans have been taught to scorn.

But such cures run counter to the Christian Science notion that 'drugs' are evil. And so Drug War society could only sit back impotently and watch Amy's decline, as one watches a slow-motion car crash, unable to offer her anything more enticing than pious suggestions that she renounce her desire for self-transcendence and join a 12-step program instead.

Drug War Ghouls

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes:

1: pharmacologically-savvy empath: this is an empathic individual with an ethnobotanical knowledge of safe and beneficial drug use worldwide, someone who recognizes psychological common sense and can advise on protocols that meet user needs while avoiding unwanted dependency. (up)
2: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
3: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
4: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
5: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)

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against the hateful war on US

The media called out Trump for fearmongering about immigrants, but the media engages in fearmongering when it comes to drugs. The latest TV plot line: "white teenage girl forced to use fentanyl!" America loves to feel morally superior about "drugs."

Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.

The Drug War is based on a huge number of misconceptions and prejudices. Obviously it's about power and racism too. It's all of the above. But every time I don't mention one specifically, someone makes out that I'm a moron. Gotta love Twitter.

Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.

I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they denote.

Americans were always free to take care of their own health -- until drug warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine.

The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?

This is why "rock stars" use drugs: not just for performance anxiety (which, BTW, is a completely UNDERSTANDABLE reason for drug use), but because they want to fully experience the music, even tho' they may be currently short on money and being hassled by creditors, etc.

There are no recreational drugs. Even laughing gas has rational uses because it gives us a break from morbid introspection. There are recreational USES of drugs, but the term "recreational" is often used to express our disdain for users who go outside the healthcare system.

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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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