{^A hundred and fifty years ago, the mob was worried about Frankenstein. Today they're worried about devil plants. That's why millions around the globe have to go without Mother Nature's godsends, to cater to the superstitious and anti-scientific fears of the masses, dutifully propagandized by politicians and lobbyists for Big Liquor, the American Psychiatric Association, law enforcement, and the corrections industry.}{
Drug testing should be for impairment only. It should not be an extrajudicial fishing expedition to identify Americans who use botanical medicines of which Congress disapproves. The plants and fungi that we criminalize today have inspired entire religions. Stop the witch hunt. Stop this cruel and unusual punishment whereby we remove Americans from the work force for using the freely given plants of Mother Nature. Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with me. He was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 2 and confiscated his poppy plants in violation of the natural law upon which he founded America. For as John Locke wrote, "The Earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." As for preventing drug misuse, try education, not criminalization; try facts, not fear.
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
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 drug war is is a multi-billion-dollar campaign to enforce the attitude of the Francisco Pizarro's of the world when it comes to non-western medicine. It is the apotheosis of the colonialism that most Americans claim to hate.
Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.
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.
"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.
Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.
The benefits of outlawed drugs read like the ultimate wish-list for psychiatrists. It's a shame that so many of them are still mounting a rear guard action to defend their psychiatric pill mill -- which demoralizes clients by turning them into lifetime patients.
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