Cynicism -- that refuses to see any good in spiritual states -- indeed that refuses to see any spiritual states at all, referring all good feelings to "getting high."
Scientism -- that associates plant-induced mystical states with unscientific tribal life, insisting instead that folks take scientifically approved medications developed on reductive criteria, ignoring all such obvious benefits of substance use as ecstasy and the psychologically beneficial anticipation of the same.
Racism -- that, consciously and/or subconsciously, seeks to fashion laws that impact minorities, the racism being evident in the fact that white Anglo Saxon drugs of tobacco and alcohol receive zero state punishment, while far less dangerous substances which are associated with non-whites and foreigners are demonized and criminalized to the point that Anglos even travel overseas in an attempt to eradicate such plant medicine from the face of the earth.
Author's Follow-up:
June 01, 2025
Another problem with the status quo is the Drug Warrior's inability to wait for delayed gratification. The Drug Warriors never look ahead at the long-term totalitarian consequences of their drug laws. Like a blissful canine, the Drug Warrior lives forever in the present, wielding drug laws to achieve immediate social goals, totally oblivious of the consequences of their principle-free policymaking. What? You say that drug panic has destroyed the first and fourth amendments to the Constitution? "Who cares?," quoth the Drug Warrior, "our drug laws have helped us to cut down on minority voting in the here and now, and that is all that matters to us." And if the Drug Warriors were honest, they would add: "Besides, who needs democracy, anyway, when rich white people should be running the show?"
If we "listen to the Drug War," we will realize that it is based on the following absurd idea:
If a psychoactive substance can cause problems for white American young people when used at one dose for one reason, then it must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
This is nothing less than a bar on human progress. It is a racist and xenophobic attempt to withhold medicines from everybody in the world merely because immature Americans might find a way to misuse them. This outcome is especially galling considering that American Drug Warriors refuse "on principle" to educate their citizens about the safest and wisest methods for using the psychoactive medicines with which we are surrounded as human beings. It is as if a bunch of ignorant juvenile delinquents had injured themselves while playing with knives and then blamed their injuries on the knives themselves rather than on their own ignorance about knives. And so these delinquents become politicians and craft laws to outlaw knives, not simply in America, but around the world, as if to say, "If our uneducated white American young people cannot use these things safely, then clearly nobody in the world can." A more cavalier attitude could not be imagined. America wants to "save" its own undereducated citizens from the dangers of drugs by depriving the entire world of all the benefits of using them.
For more on this selfish and massively counterproductive idiocy, see my essay entitled The Bill Clinton Fallacy.
Someday, the First Lady or Man will tell kids to "just say no to prohibition." Kids who refuse will be required to watch hours' worth of films depicting gun violence, banned religions, civil wars, and adults committing suicide for want of medicine that grows at their very feet.
Alexander Shulgin is a typical westerner when he speaks about cocaine. He moralizes about the drug, telling us that it does not give him "real" power. But so what? Does coffee give him "real" power? Coke helps some, others not. Stop holding it to this weird metaphysical standard.
It is a truism to say that we cannot change the world and that therefore we have to change ourselves -- but the drug war outlaws even this latter option.
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."
We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.
No drug causes addiction after one use. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis.
I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.
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.
This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.
Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."
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.
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