Substack is so full of people pompously purporting to give us the final word about drugs and their downsides that I have to take a Pepto-Bismol by way of prophylaxis every time I sit down to read platform notes. I am all in favor of free speech, of course, but I think that every single American should recuse themselves from drug-related discussions altogether until they have signed a form acknowledging that they have been shielded from hearing or reading about drug benefits for their entire lifetime by a media determined to turn all Americans into drug-hating Christian Scientists. All these cocksure founts of wisdom consider that life in Drug War America gives them a normal baseline from which to draw conclusions about drugs, and yet pardon me, but this is just not true. Suppose your friend had been rescued from a cult devoted to the demonization of the Japanese after three years of indoctrination therein. After returning to this country, he promptly opens a website devoted to telling everybody "the truth" about the Japanese people. We would object, of course, saying to the piker, "Dude, your viewpoint on that topic has been so twisted and distorted by propaganda and strategic censorship that you are the last person on earth who should be setting themselves up as an expert on such a subject!" Well, this is exactly what I think every time a brainwashed westerner decides to lecture me about the evils of drugs. "Dude," I tell them, "your viewpoint on that topic has been so twisted and distorted..." and so forth.
"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. The very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.
It's funny to hear fans of sacred plants indignantly insisting that their meds are not "drugs." They're right in a way, but actually NO substances are "drugs." Calling substances "drugs" is like referring to striking workers as "scabs." It's biased terminology.
In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan says psychedelic legalization would endanger young people. What? Prohibition forces users to decide for themselves which mushrooms are toxic, or to risk buying contaminated product. And that's safe, Michael?
As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.
The massive use of plea deals lets prosecutors threaten drug suspects into giving up their rights to a fair trial.
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
I thought mycology clubs across the US would be protesting drug laws that make mushroom collecting illegal for psychoactive species. But in reality, almost no club even mentions such species. No wonder prohibition is going strong.
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.
I've always wondered why we don't just let heroin users be -- or better yet, re-legalize drugs and give them choices. Why are they punished for using heroin daily while we praise 1 in 4 women for taking an even more dependence-causing drug every day of their life?
"Chemical means of peering into the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine exordia in man’s quest for the beyond... before the coarseness of utilitarian minds reduced them to the status of 'dope'." -- Eric Hendrickson
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