In "The Nitrous Gas Philosopher," published in 1996 by the Atlantic, Dmitri DmiTymoczko1 tells us that our courts have decided that we have a right to religious beliefs but not to religious freedom. We have a right to believe that substances like the Vedic Soma juice inspire a religious state, but we have no right to act on that belief by ingesting the Soma juice. This is how conservatives have done an end run around our basic freedoms, by insisting that a still more basic freedom, the right to consume what we wish, is not a right at all but rather a privilege to be doled out or withheld by the state. The courts are basically saying thereby that the Vedic people of the Punjab in 1500 BC would have had a right to believe in the power of the Soma juice but that they would have had no right to practice that faith by actually consuming the Soma juice. The malignity of this judicial algorithm in a democratic country is clear given the fact that its end result in practice is to outlaw religions. Actually, the algorithm is worse than that: it serves to outlaw the substance-aided inspiration that can inspire the creation of new religions.
Who would have thought back in 1776 that Americans would eventually have to petition their government for the right to even possess a damn mushroom. The Drug War has destroyed America.
There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill.
Getting off some drugs could actually be fun and instructive, by using a variety of other drugs to keep one's mind off the withdrawal process. But America believes that getting off a drug should be a big moral battle.
Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.
This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
Philip Jenkins reports that Rophynol had positive uses for treating mental disorders until the media called it the "date rape drug." We thus punished those who were benefitting from the drug, tho' the biggest drug culprit in date rape is alcohol. Oprah spread the fear virally.
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
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.
Almost every article about suicide is shallow because it takes drug prohibition as a natural baseline, even though drug prohibition outlaws substances that could so clearly elevate mood.
It's almost impossible not to have a problem with drugs in a world in which the government is spending over $50 billion a year to render drug use problematic.
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