The government study of drugs is HUGELY biased. Their researchers ignore all the benefits of drugs as well as all the downsides of prohibition. Their only job is to demonize drug use by holding it to a safety standard that we apply to no other activity on planet Earth: not to free climbing, not to drag-racing, and certainly not to gun shooting or drinking alcohol. Speaking of alcohol, it kills 178,000 a year according to the CDC3, and yet the government invites us to fear drugs like Ecstasy, which have killed no one. The only deaths related to Ecstasy are those caused by the Drug War, which refuses to educate about safe use and to regulate product.
Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace, love and understanding to the dance floors of Britain in the 1990s, but Drug Warriors do not like peace, love and understanding. And so Drug Warriors cracked down on the use of Ecstasy, after which violence SKYROCKETED at rave concerts as dancers switched to the anger-facilitating drug called alcohol, and concert organizers had to bring in special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces4!
NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition, thanks to which America's inner cities have been turned into shooting galleries and the rule of law is now a joke in much of Latin America. 60,000 Mexicans have been "disappeared" thanks to the Drug War over the last 20 years5, and yet NIDA wants to outlaw a drug whose only crime is that it brought about unprecedented peace, love and understanding.
We don't need a National Institute on Drug Abuse. We need a National Institute on Drug USE -- an agency that recognizes the benefits of drugs and the downsides of prohibition.
There would be almost no relapses for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.
Almost all of today's magazine articles about human psychology should come with the following disclaimer:
"This article was written from the standpoint of Drug War ideology, which holds that outlawed substances can have no beneficial uses whatsoever."
I knew all along that Measure 110 in Oregon was going to be blamed for the problems that the drug war causes. Drug warriors never take responsibility, despite all the blood that they have on their hands.
People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.
When Americans "obtain their majority" and wish to partake of drugs safely, they should be paired with older adults who have done just that. Instead, we introduce them to "drug abusers" in prerecorded morality plays to reinforce our biased notions that drug use is wrong.
Here's one problem that supporters of the psychiatric pill mill never address: the fact that Big Pharma antidepressants demoralize users by turning them into patients for life.
So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.
Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy.
It is based on the following crazy idea:
that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
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