Do you know that the aptly named National Institute on Drug Abuse has a ground rule that forbids it from ever advocating the legalization of any outlawed substance? The Institute is not allowed to do that. And no wonder. As its very name suggests, the institute is dedicated to drug bashing, to only pointing out the downsides of drug use1. Combine this with the fact that the media refuses to publish positive reports of drug use and the result is that the American population is completely indoctrinated to hate drugs. And perhaps the most hated drug of all is cocaine, which could have cured my depression in a trice2. Instead, I have been shunted off onto a Big Pharma drug that is far harder to kick than heroin 3: one, in fact, which has a 95% recidivism rate 4 for long-term users (a fact of which my ex-psychiatrist informed me shortly before he was terminated by his employer for his honesty on that topic).
Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing.
Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.
Outlawing drugs is outlawing obvious therapies for Alzheimer's and autism patients, therapies based on common sense and not on the passion-free behaviorism of modern scientists.
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."
Opium and cocaine have a vast host of potential rational uses -- yet we all have to pretend otherwise in the age of the Drug War.
If we let "science" decide about drugs, i.e. base freedom on health concerns, then tea can be as easily outlawed as beer. The fact that horses are not illegal shows that prohibition is not about health. It's about the power to outlaw certain "ways of being in the world."
In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.
Thomas Szasz was not an extremist when it comes to drugs. The extremists are those who feel that psychiatrists know more about our mind and mood than we do.
This is the mentality for today's materialist researcher when it comes to "laughing gas." He does not care that it merely cheers folks up. He wants to see what is REALLY going on with the substance, using electrodes and brain scans.
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