ow can a great botanist like Michael Pollan agree with the Drug War proposition that folks should be arrested for accessing the bounty of Mother Nature?
It's very simple. Like the majority of academia these days, Michael recognizes only one stakeholder in the War on Drugs: namely, the anxious American parents who don't want their Johnny to have a bad trip.
Of course, even if this were the only concern, it's not clear how the Drug War is going to help Johnny, since the policy of the Drug War is to demonize certain politically chosen substances, not to teach about them. That's why Leah Betts died after taking Ecstasy in 1995, not because Ecstasy was a horrible drug (in fact, it's one of the safest psychoactive substances on the planet) but because the Drug Warriors never told the 100-pound raver that she needed to stay hydrated while using it. Indeed, the original charter of Biden's Office of National Drug Control Policy tells members to avoid all mention of safe and beneficial uses of "drugs," for fear of "sending the wrong message," and so it's government policy itself which keeps folks like Leah in the dark.
But granting that Johnny would be harmed by re-legalizing all plant medicine, and granting that we don't have what Locke called a "natural right" to the use of the land "and all that lies therein," our hapless Johnny is not the only victim of the prohibition that Michael continues to champion (albeit reluctantly).
There are millions, if not billions, of silently suffering victims of the Drug War, who cannot reach down and use the medical bounty that grows at their feet, those "mass of men" who, according to Thoreau, "live lives of quiet desperation." But such stakeholders in the Drug War have no front page articles written about them, describing their desperation and desire for positive change. Their silent halfhearted wish to die is never chronicled on the evening news. Meanwhile, the Drug Warrior need dig up only one hapless, drug-addled ex-hippy to scream triumphantly in a front-page article in the New York Times that psychedelics are drugs from hell and that we must slow still further our glacial progress toward their re-legalization in America.
And yet these are not the only stakeholders that Michael and company overlook in advocating continued prohibition. Scientists are adversely affected stakeholders as well, since the Drug War forbids and otherwise discourages them from finding cures for Alzheimer's and autism. Yes, scientists are censored by the Drug War, though, unlike Galileo, they do not acknowledge such censorship, having been so thoroughly indoctrinated in the Drug War habit of demonizing medicines. There is, nonetheless, a prima facie case that psychedelics in particular, which can promote neuronal growth, could play a huge role in fighting conditions like Alzheimer's, and yet American scientists are afraid to go there -- or else they are daunted by the psychological and financial hurdles of pursuing such research, research that reputation-conscious funders are afraid to support.
There are still other stakeholders in the Drug War: the blacks who die yearly in inner cities from the gangs that were armed by prohibition. The kids who die in the civil wars in Mexico and Colombia, etc. The once law-abiding citizens who are denounced as "scumbags" for dealing in plant medicines that were considered divine by previous civilizations.
I could go on and on enumerating the unmentioned stakeholders in the Drug War whom Michael ignores. I might even mention the one in four American women who are chemically dependent on Big Pharma for life, since the Drug War gave a monopoly to the psychiatric pill mill.
But surely I've made my case already: that there are more stakeholders involved in drug-war prohibition than are dreamt of in Michael Pollan's philosophy.
Author's Follow-up: December 17, 2022
I've hitherto refrained from pointing this out, because Michael Pollan seems like a genuinely good guy, not to mention the fact that he is a writer who is many orders of magnitude in advance of my own feeble achievements. But the fact is that I find it irritating for any writer to use psychoactive substances themselves while yet telling us that we must keep these substances illegal for the masses. It smacks of hypocrisy and elitism, saying in effect, "I am, of course, intelligent enough to use these substances wisely, but the average Jane and Joe will never be able to do so." And this is, in fact, the pernicious party line of the Drug Warrior, who is constantly telling us by implication that the average human being will always be a baby when it comes to psychoactive medicine -- which, of course, is a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the government is officially pledged to the goal of scaring us about such medicines, not teaching us about them, let alone telling us how to use them as wisely as possible should we decided to partake.
America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.
Getting off antidepressants can make things worse for only one reason: because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help with the transition. Right now, getting off any drug basically means becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist. No wonder withdrawal is hard.
Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.
The FDA will be accepting comments through September 20th on the subject of ways to fight PTSD.
PTSD@reaganudall.org
Ask them why they support brain-damaging shock therapy but won't approve drugs like MDMA that could make ECT unnecessary.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
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.
We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.
Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" are horrible because they encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.
The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.
The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Michael Pollan and the Drug War published on October 17, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
ow can a great botanist like Michael Pollan agree with the Drug War proposition that folks should be arrested for accessing the bounty of Mother Nature?
You have been reading an article entitled, Michael Pollan and the Drug War published on October 17, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
