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.
If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol slaughters. Drug prohibition is the real killer.
Yeah. That's why it's so pretentious and presumptuous of People magazine to "fight for justice" on behalf of Matthew Perry, as if Perry would have wanted that.
It wasn't until western prudery and racism came along that we started to judge people by the substances that they chose to ingest, rather than by their actual behavior in the world.
Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.
When Americans "obtain their majority" and wish to partake of drugs safely, they should be paired with older adults who have done just that. Instead, we introduce them to "drug abusers" in prerecorded morality plays to reinforce our biased notions that drug use is wrong.
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.
So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.
The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.
Drug warriors think only about young people misusing drugs. They never think about the millions of the depressed whom they're condemning to a lifetime of totally unnecessary misery by outlawing drugs.
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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