NOTE: In 1987, the Monticello Foundation invited the DEA onto Jefferson's estate so that they could confiscate the ex-president's psychoactive poppy plants. This was a silent coup against the whole notion of Jeffersonian democracy, according to which human beings have basic freedoms that government cannot usurp on the basis of common law. If any body ever "turned over in its grave" it was the body of Thomas Jefferson in 1987 when his garden was invaded by jackbooted DEA agents, making a beeline for his poppy plants. Yet this shameful event is not even mentioned on the Monticello Foundation's website.
To belatedly protest this situation, the author sent the following e-mail to a non-profit coalition that currently lists Monticello as a "Site of Conscience," a place where visitors are invited to "make connections between the past and related contemporary human rights issues." He pointed out that Monticello is no longer worthy of the label "Site of Conscience" since it has violated the principles that it is meant to be safeguarding and then covered up that violation by failing to even mention it on their Monticello -related websites.
Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, because the Drug War gives me the right to be a noxious busybody. That said, you struck me as the sort who might be interested in these additional essays concerning Thomas Jefferson and the outlawing of plants, which would have driven that garden-loving president nuts, I assure you:
The Drug War is the most important evil to protest, precisely because almost everybody is afraid to do so. That's a clear sign that it is a cancer on the body politic.
Prohibitionists have the same M O they've had for the last 100+ years: blame drugs for everything. Being a drug warrior is never having the decency to say you're sorry -- not to Mexicans, not to inner-city crime victims, not to patients who go without adequate pain relief...
Drug prohibition began as a racist attempt to prevent so-called "miscegenation." The racist's fear was not that a white woman would use opium or marijuana or cocaine, but that she might actually fall in love with a Chinese, Hispanic or Black person respectively.
Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.
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.
Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.
Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal":
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."
Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).
When we place the FDA in charge of deciding whether a psychoactive drug should be re-legalized or not, we are asking them to decide on things like the relative importance of appreciating a sunset, a task for which the FDA has no expertise whatsoever.
Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.
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