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).
So let's look at what your outlawing of cocaine has done. (I say "your" because odds are that you are a prohibitionist when it comes to cocaine like almost everybody else in the west.)
By outlawing cocaine, you have destroyed inner cities around the world and turned folks like myself into patients for life. Far from keeping folks off drugs, you have forced me to use a drug every single day of my life!
Say, here's an idea: instead of playing a trillion-dollar game of whack-a-mole5 with every new dangerous substance that comes on the public radar, let's treat drug use like every other dangerous activity in the world: let's teach safe use and best practices for achieving various desired results!
I know, it sounds crazy, right? Using education to solve problems?
You guys want to save everybody, and what's the result? Your prohibition has killed millions since 1914 totally unnecessarily6, not only through contaminated product but through lack of education and the eruption of gunfire at country borders and on city streets. And yet you have the nerve to shudder at the election of Donald Trump? You (you prohibitionist) brought him to power by sitting by while prohibition put hundreds of thousands of minority voters in jail for using substances of which politicians disapprove.
I'm picking on independents and democrats here, because the insurrectionists of our time apparently know what they're doing and don't give a damn.
IMAGINE
Imagine if there were a drug that killed 3,000 citizens a year in the United Kingdom alone! Wouldn't we want to ban it at once?!
Er, not exactly. Because the drug in question is called aspirin -- and we all agree that aspirin has positive uses7.
Now, who is telling us that cocaine has no positive uses. Answer: Doctors. No one asked the depressed what they thought about cocaine before doctors started their op-ed demonization campaign.
The premise of the doctors seems to have been this: If we can save 400 people from cocaine issues, then hundreds of millions of the depressed can go to hell8!
This is a calculation that nobody questions.
No other risky activity on earth is evaluated in this puerile way.
Horseback riding could easily be outlawed if we held it to such standards, since horseback-riding is the main cause of sports-related traumatic brain injury in the United States9.
But everyone agrees that freedom is more important when it comes to horse lovers. Somehow, freedom is not important when it comes to the rights of the depressed. We have to remain depressed for life because drug prohibitionists are determined to hold cocaine to unheard-of safety standards.
Sure, cocaine is not for everyone. Neither is penicillin. But it does not follow that it should be for NO ONE. And that is the depressed-damning conclusion that our doctors have reached on behalf of folks like myself. And, of course, my ideas on the subject can be ignored because I am just a patient. What counts are the opinions of those with endless titles beside their names who write papers full of nepotistic footnotes and place them behind expensive academic firewalls. They don't have to take into account anything but their own theories and footnote-supported prejudices -- and to hell with the depressed.
By placing scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine, the whole discussion on such topics has moved to the ivory tower -- giving Google and everyone else an excuse to ignore the people who suffer based on the prejudices of academia -- based on their absolute refusal to hear from those who pay the price for their assumption-laden ideas about mind and mood.
Cocaine is one obvious treatment for depression. Obvious! And yet when I search the web for "cocaine and depression," what do I see? There is nothing about using cocaine for depression -- but rather I find wild speculation about how cocaine might actually CAUSE epression.
But then drug law does everything it can to make cocaine a problem drug -- by refusing to educate, refusing to regulate, and refusing to offer other drug choices for those who don't really need cocaine or who (for whatever reason) cannot "handle" cocaine.
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.
Our government treats drugs like uranium and spends hundreds of billions of dollars trying to scare us about them.
If America cannot exist without outlawing drugs, then there is something wrong with America, not with drugs.
There are endless creative ways to ward off addiction if all psychoactive medicines were at our disposal. The use of the drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin could combat the psychological downsides of withdrawal by providing strategic "as-needed" relief.
Healthline posted an article in 2021 about the benefits of getting off of antidepressants. They did not even mention the biggest benefit: NO LONGER BEING AN ETERNAL PATIENT -- no longer being a child in the eyes of an all-knowing healthcare system.
"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud
Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.
The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.
A generally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear. --James B. Stockade.
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.
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).
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