n the late 20th century, young Brits of every race and social class came together on the dance floor to party, not like it was 1999, but like it was 2099 instead, a time in the distant future when guns and anger had been put aside and people of the world had finally decided to unite. It was the so-called rave scene and America's cousins were resurrecting the ethos of peace, love and understanding from the ashes of '60s idealism in the States, complete with a uniquely British 'summer of Love' in 1988.
The mood of the time is nicely captured by a handful of quotes from the documentary "United Nation" by promoter Terry Stone:
"It was the first time that black-and-white people had integrated on a level... and everybody was one." -- DJ Ray Keith.
"It was black and white, Asian, Chinese, all up in one building," -- MC GQ.
"Everyone's loving each other, man, they're not hating." - DJ Mampi Swift.
In short, everybody just wanted to "cuddle," according to event security expert Adrian Saint.
What's not to like, right? Nonviolent concerts in which Brits come together in colorblind celebration of the drum-and-bass music genre.
You'd think that government would have been delighted to see the emergence of such a non-violent dance genre in our troubled world.
But to the contrary, they were appalled.
Why?
Because much of the camaraderie of the scene had been chemically encouraged with a little help of an illegal drug known as Ecstasy, E, or MDMA, which young people were "popping" at the scene. And this was a complete "non-starter" as far as government was concerned. Why? Because in the age of the Drug War, we do not judge people by how they behave (be they never so law-abiding) but rather by what chemical substances they happen to have in their digestive systems.
Thus Drug War ideology persuaded British parliamentarians to not simply take this new Camelot for granted, but to actively seek to shut it down, a goal that they nearly accomplished in 1994 with the passage of the so-called Criminal Justice Bill, which outlawed all non-licensed parties that featured repetitive dance music.
So far, so bad.
But the coup de grace to the peaceful rave scene was to come one year later, when, in 1995, teenage raver Leah Betts died after taking an E tablet at a rave party.
Of course, everyone immediately placed the blame for this death on E, since Drug War superstition holds that substances are responsible for evil, not government policies that lead to their misuse.
The fact is that Leah's death could have been easily avoided had Drug Warriors legalized E and allowed it to be objectively studied by researchers (only imagine: freeing up scientists to actually do their job!). In that case, Leah could have been told how to avoid the rare side effects of ecstasy by maintaining proper hydration during use (especially when like, Leah, you weigh a mere 100 pounds!). But no. Drug warrior society is so obsessed with demonizing this thing called "drugs," that they do everything they can to make informed use impossible when it comes to criminalized substances, either by banning research on this topic entirely or by tarnishing the reputations of scientists who dare to pursue such information, thereby also ensuring that would-be funders think twice before throwing any money behind such research goals.
And so stark billboards with a black background appeared across Britain, featuring the huge word "Sorted" to the left of a large black-and-white head shot of a smiling Leah Betts, with the caption: "Just one Ecstasy tablet took Leah Betts."
This billboard perfectly illustrates the Drug Warrior habit of confusing cause and effect. To say that the drug Ecstasy killed Leah is like saying that driving a car killed the victim of a traffic accident. In some sense it is true, but it is also beside the point. The real question in the latter case is: "what happened that allowed the victim to be killed while driving in a car?" The question in Leah's case is: "what happened that allowed the victim to be killed by taking Ecstasy?"
But that's an inconvenient question for government because to answer it would be to point the finger of blame at drug policy itself. So politicians bypass the question entirely by scapegoating the drug Ecstasy and shaking their hypocritical beer-guzzling heads about the terrible problem of teenage drug abuse. "Tsk tsk tsk!"
What a joke. It would be funny except for the fact that the otherwise laughable Drug War has been amassing a body count ever since the first outlawing of a plant medicine in 1914. The Drug War has not just killed one single British teenager, either, but kills hundreds around the world every single day through inner city gang violence and civil wars around the globe that have been created out of whole cloth by substance prohibition in previously peaceful countries. Britain would soon run out of billboards if it tried to put a face on all of these victims with roadside signage.
Unfortunately, Leah Betts was not the only victim of the UK's demonization of Ecstasy. The entire peace-and-love ethos of the rave culture disappeared shortly after her death, to be replaced with the violent gangster ethos, as dutifully propagandized Brits renounced Ecstasy in favor of anger-facilitating drugs like alcohol.
Needless to say, violence now spiked at rave parties, forcing promoters like Terry "Turbo" Smith of One Nation to hire whole teams of ex-special forces soldiers to keep the peace at concerts. But the government could apparently live with this new status quo, since the drugs being used now were far more objectionable to government than the hapless E tablet, whose main effect when used wisely was to bring about peace and understanding and make people want to cuddle in colorblind harmony with their music-loving fellows.
And so government drug policy not only killed Leah Betts, but it shut down the new British Camelot as well, replacing it with a new Wild West in which machine guns and AK-47's took the place of six-shooters and Winchester rifles. Worse yet, British politicians soon began pointing to this violence that they themselves had created as "proof" that the Drug War needs to continue.
If the British government wants to save the Leah Betts of the future, they will start "saying yes" to peace, love and understanding and applaud cultural phenomena such as the rave scene for facilitating that goal.
Until then, we have a new answer to the question posed by Rodney King, in the wake of the violent response to the mauling that he received from racist police officers in Los Angeles in 1991:
Q: Why can't we all just get along?
A: Because Drug Warriors won't allow us to.
AFTERTHOUGHTS: Growing up stateside, my school teachers would often favorably compare the education of British kids to that received by their American counterparts, and I was always tempted to believe them -- until, that is, the Drug War came along and showed me that the Brits will lap up Drug War propaganda just as eagerly as everyone else in the world. Just imagine: the British people can demonize a love-promoting chemical substance because it "caused" one death -- one death -- meanwhile considering the violence-provoking alcohol to be a bargain when it only causes thousands of deaths each year. What's more, the Ecstasy that they demonize would not have even caused the death in question had the Drug War not made it impossible to learn and spread accurate information about its use. The Drug War thus ensures that criminalized substances will be given damning PR, thereby seeming to "prove" that the Drug Warrior's fetishization of chemical substances actually makes sense, when in reality it represents the triumph of a new modern superstition, a superstition which holds that substances can be sufficiently characterized without regard for the context and social environment that surrounds their use.
LINKSMDMA
May 9, 2022
The world has drugs exactly backward. The species Homo sapiens NEEDS mood medicine if the very world is to survive. It's hip these days to mock the "Flower Children" of yore, but they were "onto" something in spite of themselves: namely, the fact that we human beings belong to a flawed species. Our distrust for "the other" has led us into a dark corner from which there is now no escape except Armageddon -- nuclear, biological or otherwise -- unless... we stop ignoring the need for "peace, love and understanding" (as British politicians so glaringly did viz. the 1990s rave scene) and start doing everything we can to foster those emotions through god-sent pharmacology: medicines like E which can turn haters into friends of humanity.
Do you Drug Warriors hate the boogieman of "drugs" so much that you would turn down the one and only way to end school shootings and prevent nuclear war? So far, astonishingly, the answer seems to be yes, just as you'll gladly tolerate Alzheimer's disease in your parents (or autism in your kids) rather than legalize the research and use of substances that show tantalizing promise for treating such conditions.
If anyone thinks I'm sappy or out of line here, fine: but I'll bet they don't have a better idea for avoiding Armageddon.
We need a new worldwide politics, made up of one simple proposition: namely, that all Homo sapiens must be taught to love their fellows on principle -- and that the guided use of empathogens like Ecstasy and psilocybin must be mandatory in cases where any human being remains negatively disposed toward "the other" (the other color, the other religion, the other ethnicity, the other political party, etc.).
This goes double for politicians, who, like Polynesian tribal leaders and their kava, should be required to hold meetings with their foreign counterparts while under the influence of friend-making drugs like Ecstasy.
It's our last best hope as a species, reader.
Please don't wait until you're reading this post in a fall-out shelter to recognize this fact!
Related tweet: October 16, 2022
The Brits have zero credibility when it comes to 'drugs' since they cracked down on ultra-safe Ecstasy, which brought peace to the dance floor -- until the Drug War policy of mandated ignorance resulted in the death of Leah Betts by dehydration.
Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.
Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.
America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
There are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
Think you can handle a horse? So did Christopher Reeves. The fact is, NOBODY can handle a horse. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
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.
The idea that "drugs" have no medical benefits is not science, it is philosophy, and bad philosophy at that. It is based on the idea that benefits must be molecularly demonstratable and not created from mere knock-on psychological effects of drug use, time-honored tho' they be.
Did the Vedic People have a substance disorder because they wanted to drink enough soma to see religious realities?
It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.
Listen to the Drug War Philosopher as he tells you how you can support his work to end the hateful drug war -- and, ideally, put the DEA on trial for willfully lying about godsend medicines! (How? By advertising on this page right c'here!)
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 Drug War killed Leah Betts: and ended the peaceful rave scene, published on July 26, 2020 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)
n the late 20th century, young Brits of every race and social class came together on the dance floor to party, not like it was 1999, but like it was 2099 instead, a time in the distant future when guns and anger had been put aside and people of the world had finally decided to unite. It was the so-called rave scene and America's cousins were resurrecting the ethos of peace, love and understanding from the ashes of '60s idealism in the States, complete with a uniquely British 'summer of Love' in 1988. 
You have been reading an article entitled, How the Drug War killed Leah Betts: and ended the peaceful rave scene, published on July 26, 2020 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)