By clicking here, I acknowledge that I am going to read the text that follows with an open mind, secure in the knowledge that the guy who wrote it believes in equality for all people and that, yes, he's fully aware that Native American people, like most other minority groups in the world, have gotten a raw deal so far from the powers-that-be...
The following is a hot-button email that I sent to a friend of mine this morning in Northern Virginia. Hopefully, it was inspired by a misunderstanding of a national news story that I browsed a few days ago -- in which case, like Roseanne Roseannadanna on Saturday Night Live, I will soon be posting an apologetic addendum to this page featuring her trademark disclaimer, reading: "Never mind." But even if I have misunderstood the story in question, this email should convey my misgivings of what I take to be the current left-wing excesses, bearing in mind that the author thinks that the greatest current threat, by far, is not from the left but rather from the right: viz. the desire to get rid of democracy and replace it with a cult of "personality" (for want of a better word) by empowering the one man in this world who has apparently never done anything wrong in his entire life: "Donald 'the Infallible' Trump."
Okay, I've done my best to soften the blow, so read on! [sigh]
Speaking of left-wing overreach, what's this talk about getting rid of Native American exhibits at the Smithsonian? It sounds to me like the rationale is as follows: "Only Native Americans can tell us about Native Americans." So why then does the Smithsonian purport to tell us about the Finns and the Russians?
I can see why the Smithsonian would want to employ Native American advisors in staging such exhibits, but it seems like the worst kind of identity politics to say that non-Natives can have no input on such things. We certainly do not say that Caucasians would be better off if they did not get the viewpoints of other cultures. Moreover, the most insightful book about Americans was written by a Frenchman1. There are certain benefits to being an outsider.
To me, it's another sign that America is living through a self-imposed Dark Ages of its own. When it comes to drugs, we think that the best policy is to lie. (That's why we have a National Institute on Drug ABUSE rather than a National Institute on Drug USE.) We think the same thing when it comes to history. And why? Because the affirmation of identity has become more important to us than mere facts -- and particularly facts that might suggest that a given minority group (like any group, minority or not) is less than perfect. We thus get a warped view of our history, through the lens of a psychologically dishonest sanctification of the people concerned.
But then such politicization of history probably comes naturally to a people who have been brainwashed by the cult of the Drug War, which is all about politicizing the subject of drugs.
Author's Follow-up: January 28, 2024
This identity politics is even more directly related to the War on Drugs than I've suggested, since even as I type, Caucasians are not allowed to use peyote in America while Native Americans are2. Thus identity politics collaborates in the racist and xenophobic ideology of the Drug War. It makes one ask: how anti-American does a law have to become before it will be rejected by our courts? This is clearly a direct blow at my freedom of religion 3 -- and yet no one is pointing this out. This should be front page news. But then this is the same Supreme Court, ideologically speaking, that told us in the '90s that merely riding a Greyhound Bus constituted probable cause for a drug search4.
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.
The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.
In a compassionate world, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.
Today's doctors are "quacks" because they fail to see any of the many obvious uses for psychoactive substances.
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???
If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.
The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.
The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.
Psychiatrists never acknowledge the biggest downside to modern antidepressants: the fact that they turn you into a patient for life. That's demoralizing, especially since the best drugs for depression are outlawed by the government.
Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.
This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."
This is the only full-cast recording of Aleister Crowley's 1922 classic paeon to common sense. It is the first book -- and so far almost the only book -- to stake out a philosophy of drug use that is compatible with human freedom, one in which we learn to use drugs as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. This recording was produced by the Drug War Philosopher and your purchases help support his effort to push back against the tragically counterproductive policy of drug prohibition, in the name of human freedom and of humanity's right to heal.
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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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