This morning I searched the vast image catalog of Shutterstock for some photographs that illustrated the general concept of abolishing the Drug War. I was sure I'd find something since the site has over a billion images submitted by well over half a million contributors.
To my dismay, there were very few if any images that suggested, even obliquely, that the Drug War was folly. Instead, the site was full of propaganda images that associated cocaine in particular with all manner of vice. First we see an image of a white tabletop littered with bloody bullet casings and a credit card half covered with cocaine . Next we see a handgun lying in front of a half-dozen plastic bags full of white powder. One row down, there are the trademark lines of cocaine starkly displayed on a black tabletop, just waiting for some hedonist hit man to snort, no doubt before taking a scantily clad mistress in his arms and lavishing her with a highly salacious kiss. (Needless to say there are no images of Sherlock Holmes, using related substances to hone his observational skills, nor of Freud, using such substances to ensure the prolific output whereby he achieved self-actualization in life.)
Coca was a god to the Incas, and a godsend to authors like Jules Verne and HG Wells, and yet drug-war propaganda has convinced Shutterstock (and no doubt most of its contributors) to depict the plant as if it were the drug from hell. Moreover, the dystopia thus depicted is a result of the Drug War itself, which refuses to educate users about safe drug use, preferring to arrest them instead. As for the guns and violence that we associate with cocaine , that's a direct result of prohibition, not of the coca plant. Just as Prohibition created the Mafia, so the Drug War has created cartels and gangs, thus turning inner cities into shooting galleries, thanks to which thousands of minorities were killed in 2021 alone.
The answer is obvious: decriminalize drugs, cocaine first and foremost, since it seems to be the natural substance of choice for marketing illegally.
Meanwhile, take all the billions that is currently going into the fascist militarization of our police forces and give that money to clinics that will treat drug addiction rationally, rather than throwing a million people a year into jail merely for possessing natural substances. Such treatment will be far more effective than the current status quo when we allow clinicians to use any psychoactive substance in the world, rather than tyrannically limiting them to a handful of addictive medicines supplied by Big Pharma . The current criminal approach is just a make-work program for law enforcement, after all, and turns America into a police state, as our record-breaking prison population testifies loudly and clearly to the dismayed champions of freedom around the world. Besides, all the problems that we associate with so-called drug use are actually caused by the Drug War itself, starting with the fact that the Drug War demonizes illicit substances, thereby denying would-be users the objective knowledge they could use to partake wisely.
Meanwhile those who fret about the addictive potential of substances like cocaine should drop their hypocritical hand-wringing, since almost all of them are ignoring the big addiction of our time: namely the fact that 1 in 8 American men and 1 in 4 American women are hooked on Big Pharma 12 antidepressants 3, many of them harder to quit than heroin 4. But the Drug Warrior doesn't even notice this problem, let alone wring their hands about it. What Drug War hypocrisy. What a clear sign that the Drug War is not about the health of Americans' bodies, but rather about the health of Americans' wallets -- or rather the wallets of the so-called 1% who are getting filthy rich on drug profits from addicting America to legal antidepressants.
Not only is the fascist Drug War unfair to minorities who constitute the predominant arrestees, but it results in a perversion of our electoral system, since it all but guarantees the election and re-election of fascist Drug War advocates. Why? Because those who would vote them out of office are in jail, many having lost their right to vote thanks to their possession of proscribed natural substances.
America is seeing the ascendancy of anti-democratic forces, and the evidence is not just on Shutterstock.
Hollywood 5 releases more movies 67 every year whose plots seek to justify torture and premeditated murder as reasonable means of fighting so-called drug trafficking. In the 2019 movie 'Running with the Devil,' the self-righteous DEA 'hero' cold-bloodedly murders a man who had the temerity to sell naturally occurring substances. What's more, she murdered the 'drug dealer' while she herself was smoking a cigarette containing tobacco, one of the most harmful drugs in the world.
Hypocrite, America! Wake up! We're knowingly heading down the path of fascism, dimming the beacon of freedom that we had once hoped to be to the world.
PS How can we look Chinese President Xi Jinping in the eye and criticize his anti-democratic measures when we are arresting Americans for merely possessing the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet?!
Nor is it just the minorities that take a hit stateside. The Drug War has inexcusably blocked research on therapeutic drugs, all because of the fascist tendency to place law enforcement above every other consideration, and patients be damned.
June 21, 2022
You rock, Brian. Except don't give that money to clinics -- give it to pharmacologically savvy empaths, who will use nature's medicines as needed to treat everything for which those medicines are suited -- yes, including addictions! Right now, if an addict walks into a clinic, the doc says, 'Now I will do all in my power to help you -- except, of course, for using the thousands of psychoactive plant medicines that are off-limits due to the Drug War.' Docs need to learn that drugs are not the problem, they are often the solution -- and we should not employ them on a niggardly and stinting basis just because the Drug War is bribing our children with teddy bears to get them to stupidly say no to Mother Nature's godsends!
Author's Follow-up: November 17, 2022
AUTHOR'S NOTE, OCTOBER 2025:
I rarely delete entire paragraphs of mine upon re-reading them, but the update that was originally located here is an exception to the rule. It wasn't exactly incorrect -- but it was written in an unnecessarily apologetic tone, at a time when I was still bamboozled by some Drug War lies: especially the lie that cocaine was highly addictive. That is simply not true. Cocaine is misused by some -- for a variety of reasons -- just as alcohol may be misused -- just as any drug may be misused. But the real story about cocaine is that doctors ignored the hundreds of millions of depressed who could have ended their depression with the drug and focused instead on the relative handful of users who could not use wisely -- exactly as if they were to study alcohol by only looking at alcoholics 89. They ignored the needs of hundreds of millions of the depressed. We weren't stakeholders somehow. And they had a reason for this lopsided focus.
They knew that cocaine was a threat to their business model. They did not want to cure depression, after all, they wanted to treat it, ideally with drugs that caused a lifelong dependency. This is how one makes money. By treating conditions, not curing them in real-time. I don't say that doctors were all conscious of this desire, but they certainly knew upon which side their bread was buttered when they slandered and demonized the drug in the many fearmongering op-ed pieces in newspapers around the world, libels which they continue to perpetrate today, while never pointing out, of course, that they have a vested interest in the continued outlawing of the drug.
Author's Follow-up: March 11, 2025
These are not abstract considerations. How many of us know of suicidal friends and loved ones? Well, guess what? Drug warriors would prefer that these unhappy people die rather than use drugs -- otherwise we would make uplifting drugs available to the suicidal. We show by our actions -- our drug prohibition -- that we are Christian Science fanatics. We actually prefer suicide 10 to the use of the many godsend medicines that we have outlawed wholesale.
America has a sick way of looking at the world of mind and mood medicine, based as it is on racism combined with the demonstrably false idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood. As Whitehead pointed out, the proof that a philosophy is wrong resides in the fact that it leads to absurd consequences. And what do we get when we put materialists in charge of mind and mood in fealty to the philosophy of materialism 11? We find that we have experts who are dogmatically blind to common sense. They are dogmatically blind to all reports of positive drug use. They are deaf to anecdote and history and even to psychological common sense, which tells us that feeling good -- and looking FORWARD to feeling good -- actually help. Instead, they tell us that drug efficacy is to be found under a microscope, which in the practical world means that they sign off on the DEA lie that time-honored panaceas have no positive uses whatsoever.
In writing the following, French philosopher Merleau-Ponty recognized the purblind nature of materialist science, although he failed to grasp the obvious connection between this viewpoint and the western world's jaundiced view of so-called "drugs."
"Scientific thinking, a thinking which looks on from above, and thinks of the object-in-general, must return to the 'there is' which underlies it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body -- not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and my acts." --from The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty12
I'm going to get on the grade-school circuit, telling kids to say no to horses.
"You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!"
I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.
Materialists are always trying to outdo each other in describing the insignificance of humankind. Crick at least said we were "a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Musk downsizes us further to one single microbe. He wins!
I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.
In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed. Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.
If opium and cocaine were legal again in America, the healthcare industry would suddenly have to undergo extensive downsizing, as Americans were once again put in charge of their own health.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
My local community store here in the sticks sells Trump "dollar bills" at the checkout counter. I don't know what's worse: a president encouraging insurrection or an electorate that does not see that as a problem.
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
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