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.
Notes for essay entitled Identity Politics and the War on Drugs: Why America is living in a self-imposed Dark Age:
If opium and cocaine were re-legalized, hospital buildings would no longer be the secular cathedrals of our time. Some of that wealth would actually go to healthy people.
It is a truism to say that we cannot change the world and that therefore we have to change ourselves -- but the drug war outlaws even this latter option.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
In response to a tweet that "some drugs cannot be used wisely for recreational purposes": The problem is, most people draw such conclusions based on general impressions inspired by a media that demonizes drugs. In reality, it's hard to imagine a drug that cannot theoretically be used wisely for recreation at some dose, in some context.
Q: Why are we never told about the potential benefits of drugs?
A: Follow the money.
The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."
Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.
Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.
If NIDA covered all drugs (not just politically ostracized drugs), they'd produce articles like this: "Aspirin continues to kill hundreds." "Penicillin misuse approaching crisis levels." "More bad news about Tylenol and liver damage." "Study revives cancer fears from caffeine."
The FDA will be accepting comments through September 20th on the subject of ways to fight PTSD.
PTSD@reaganudall.org
Ask them why they support brain-damaging shock therapy but won't approve drugs like MDMA that could make ECT unnecessary.
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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