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.
There is something wrong with a country that thinks it can decide what human beings around the world are allowed to ingest.
There is an absurd safety standard for "drugs." The cost/benefit analysis of the FDA & co. never takes into account the costs of NOT prescribing nor the benefits of a productive life well lived. The "users" are not considered stakeholders.
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.
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.
I have dissed MindMed's new LSD "breakthrough drug" for philosophical reasons. But we can at least hope that the approval of such a "de-fanged" LSD will prove to be a step in the slow, zigzag path toward re-legalization.
Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.
Ug! Fire bad!
There were 4,731 fire-related deaths in America in 2023.
Learn more at the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.
Self-medication is not a dirty word. It has always been a fundamental right to take care of one's own health -- until the medical establishment demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.
I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.
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