The DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in violation of the natural law upon which he founded America. As John Locke states in his Two Treatises on Government, the bounty of nature is the heritage of the human race. It does not belong to government to parcel out or withhold, let alone to make us urinate to prove that we have had nothing to do with mother nature. But racist fearmongers outlawed opium in 1914, which set the precedent for government to use drug laws to attack minorities. It's a huge billion-dollar scam that provides the DEA with jobs for life and makes the depressed and anxious go without godsends -- this in a nation in which 1 in 4 women are dependent on mind-numbing big pharma meds for life.
The Drug War has infantilized Americans about drugs, giving them teddy bears in grade school for dissing them, even though "drugs" like soma have inspired entire religions, coca was divine to the Inca, and opium was loved by Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The government never had a right to outlaw nature -- and look at the whirlwind we have reaped by doing so. We have destroyed the rule of law in Latin America and created entire no-go zones in inner-city neighborhoods. Instead of talking about safe use, we have fomented fear and an unsafe drug supply, leading to the invention of drugs that are thousands of times more risky than opium. It's called the iron law of prohibition: crackdowns lead to more lethal drugs. 35,000 people die each year in car accidents, but we don't need a war on cars. A fraction of that amount die from "drugs," but we don't need a War on Drugs. To the contrary, almost all drug deaths are a result of prohibition and the fact that it corrupts drug supply and encourages fear and ignorance over knowledge about safe use.
The real den of iniquity was Congress in 1914.
Author's Follow-up: December 26, 2024
Americans WANT drugs like opium to be a problem. It provides easy answers to social problems and let's them lock up millions of minorities, thereby handing elections to fascist drug-war conservatives like themselves. But if Americans are prone to misuse a godsend like opium, that is a problem with America, not with opium. Americans do not want to make that link because it would mean they would have to spend money on real education -- and not just drug education classes that indoctrinate young people in the tenets of the drug-hating religion of Christian Science, but education about how to live wisely and fully and to pursue what philosophers call "the good life." To the extent that drug education was necessary, it would involve teaching young people how to avoid unwanted dependence, not by preaching, but by showing the life stories of those who have managed to use drugs wisely.
The problem is, hypocritical Americans do not WANT to call "dependency" a problem. Why not? Because Big Pharma is all about rendering users dependent -- and so a fair evaluation of drug dangers would end up in a renunciation of such drugs, insofar as dependency for them is a feature, not a bug.
Of course, the real potential problem with drug use is UNWANTED dependency.
But once all drugs are RE-legalized and we stop the fearmongering and speak honestly about drugs, then humanity will be able to find hundreds of creative ways to avoid unwanted dependency by fighting drugs with drugs1. This will come about when we jettison the hateful doctrine of behaviorism2, according to which mind and mood are thought to be the bailiwick of emotion-free scientist, and turn to pharmacologically savvy empaths instead for guidance. These new shamans, combining the best of the west and east, would then teach human beings to use substances wisely for the purpose of obtaining maximum emotional, mental and spiritual health3. The focus then would be on helping human beings to thrive in life, and not merely turning them into drug-free Christian Scientists.
If hand-wringing conservatives still want to sate their propensity to worry, they should wake up and smell the nuclear arsenals that their antipathy to peace, love and understanding have foisted upon us. Give me a world full of starry-eyed Flower Children any day over the type of uptight and intolerant conservatives who have hated their way into a world full of thermonuclear weapons: thousands of them, which are, even now, poised to fire on hair-trigger alert4. These are the same conservatives who demonize the kind of entheogenic drugs that inspire unprecedented peace, love and understanding, such as the drug Ecstasy, which inspired unprecedented multi-ethnic peace on British dance floors in the 1990s5.
As far as personal peace of mind, Jean de La Bruyère got it right:
Tout notre mal vient de ne pouvoir être seul.
All evil comes from our inability to be alone, i.e., to live with ourselves.
Well, the world is full of psychoactive drugs that make that possible when used wisely -- and thereby give humanity better things to do than to shoot up grade schools and to amass world-destroying nuclear arsenals.
But the simpleton haters whom we call Drug Warriors would rather that we all become fanatical Christian Scientists instead and superstitiously blame all social problems on the inanimate objects that they have chosen to call -- or rather to denigrate as -- drugs.
December 27, 2024
Marco's article promotes the Drug Warrior's belief that substances are evil. This is a superstitious way to look at the world. Thousands of young people are dying on the streets thanks to the Drug Warrior's refusal to teach safe use and to regulate drugs such that overdoses need not occur. But then I've always said that being a Drug Warrior means never having to say you're sorry: not for the drive-by shootings, not for the civil wars overseas, not for the destruction of American democracy or the censoring of academia.
We have no more reason to outlaw drug use than we have to outlaw rock climbing or driving a car. Prohibition represents a modern superstition. It would have us believe that inanimate substances called "drugs" are evil. It tells us that if a drug can be misused by a white American young person, even in theory, then it should not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason, ever. Imagine all the unnecessary emotional suffering and stifled creativity that results from that brainless dictum, all of it off the radar of the Drug Warrior, who has no concern for those suffering in silence behind closed doors.
The Drug Warrior outlaws godsends for billions and keeps us from even thinking of a host of positive drug uses that make perfect psychological sense and are limited only by our imaginations. They censor history, refusing to even let us know that Ben Franklin loved opium or that the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the poppy plants of Thomas Jefferson himself. They stifle religiosity and academic freedom, with their only concern being to triumph in the next election -- and that's while we still have elections, since the Drug War is all of a piece with mob-empowered fascism: it is, after all, the ultimate example of strategic fearmongering by self-interested politicians.
And those of them who are sincere are loaded to the gills with false assumptions about drugs that have been instilled in them since grade school, failing to realize that we are propagandized 24/7 with TV scripts checked by the White House for conformity to drug-war doctrine, which values fear over education. We are never allowed to see or read about positive uses for drugs. It is an anti-scientific cultish scam that conservatives have used to destroy American democracy.
Open Letters
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
The drug war encourages us to judge people based on what they use and in what context. Even if the couch potato had no conscious health goals, their use of MJ is very possibly shielding them from health problems, like headaches, sleeplessness, and overreliance on alcohol.
The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.
"The Legislature deliberately determines to distrust the very people who are legally responsible for the physical well-being of the nation, and puts them under the thumb of the police, as if they were potential criminals."
-- Aleister Crowley on drug laws
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
The FDA approves of shock therapy and the psychiatric pill mill, but they cannot see the benefits in MDMA, a drug that brought peace, love and understanding to the dance floor in 1990s Britain.
Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.
I think many scientists are so used to ignoring "drugs" that they don't even realize they're doing it. Yet almost all books about consciousness and depression (etc.) are nonsense these days because they ignore what drugs could tell us about those topics.
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.
Drug warriors do not seem to see any irony in the fact that their outlawing of opium eventually resulted in an "opioid crisis." The message is clear: people want transcendence. If we don't let them find it safely, they will find it dangerously.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, In Defense of Opium: Open letter to Marco Margaritoff, published on July 12, 2023 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
You have been reading an article entitled, In Defense of Opium: Open letter to Marco Margaritoff, published on July 12, 2023 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
