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.
I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.
If I have no right to mother nature's bounty, then I surely have no right to manmade guns. If hysterical fearmongering justifies the eradication of the Fourth Amendment, then the Second Amendment should go as well.
I've always wondered why we don't just let heroin users be -- or better yet, re-legalize drugs and give them choices. Why are they punished for using heroin daily while we praise 1 in 4 women for taking an even more dependence-causing drug every day of their life?
Timothy Leary's wife wrote: "We went to Puerto Rico and all we did was take cocaine and read Faust to one another." And there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with that!!! The drug war is all about scaring us and making illegal drug use as dangerous as possible.
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.
In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.
I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.
I've found that almost no one in the medical establishment has a clue about the endless positive uses that there would be for drugs in a world in which we decided to use them as wisely as possible for human benefit.
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.
Americans have learned nothing but half-truths and lies about cocaine and opium thanks to the total censorship of drug benefits.
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