Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, you were getting ready to bounce. According to Google Analytics, we have a big problem with 'bouncing' on this URL, so I am pulling over everybody who seems to be in a hurry, reminding them that this essay makes some crucial points about drug prohibition, however unpromising it may seem to you on first glance. Take for instance the caption for the movie poster for "Moonfall" shown below. That provocative caption alone should keep university students arguing for an entire class period -- and then debating with their fellows AFTER class at some local hamburger joint or other.
What's that, your lawyer says you have a right to bounce from any web page you please? Suit yourself. But can you at LEAST read that caption I mentioned and see if it is not productive of lively discussion! I mean, presumably you came here to learn why drug prohibition is absolutely nuts, and that is something that the caption in question decisively proves with the help of the philosophical strategy of reductio ad absurdum.
Okay, off you go, then. There's a line forming behind you and these people are not going to hassle THEMSELVES!
Incidentally, if you're a sci-fi fan, you should also be interested in the two-minute sci-fi play that the Drug War Philosopher wrote back in 2019. He called it Fahrenheit 452, aka Pity the Time Traveler.
The Essay Proper
I watched Moonfall last night. Or rather I watched most of it. I cut the film off in disgust when the know-it-all clone of astronaut Brian Harper's six-year-old kid Sonny started a pedantic and self-congratulatory discourse about how his own society had transcended war. Yeah, it seems that the alien's 'peeps' were living together in perfect harmony, thank you very much, unlike certain other societies that the little ET could mention. (Hint: the hate-filled creatures in question live on a planet that starts with the letter E!)
Earth... We have a problem. These creatures are freely using psychoactive substances to improve their minds and inspire religiosity. Should we kidnap them and bring them back to Earth for trial? Over.
'Not bloody likely,' I said to myself, as I indignantly closed the PC window upon which I was watching the film on Vudu. If the humanoids of which the tweenager speaks are anything like we Homo sapiens from planet Earth, they would destroy themselves 20 times over rather than condescend to use psychoactive medicine to bring about world harmony, and let's face it, that's the only way such a utopia is ever going to come about for any species even remotely resembling the spite-filled and self-interested Homo sapiens of Planet Earth and their penchant for blind nationalism and the eternal demonization of 'the other.'
Now, if the self-satisfied clone had told me how his alien world had abolished the Drug War and learned how to use substances wisely to promote world peace, then I would have gladly watched the film to the end. I could easily believe that a society could transcend violence in that way. We have proof that it works. Look at the Ecstasy-fueled British rave scene of the 1990s, where there was multiethnic peace on the dance floor, an El Dorado of lovey-dovey diversity completely unprecedented in human history. But don't take my word for it, read what the DJs of the time said about the rave scene in the documentary United Nation by Terry Stone1:
"Everyone's loving each other, man, they're not hating." - DJ Mampi Swift."
"It was black and white, Asian, Chinese, all up in one building," -- MC GQ.
"It was the first time that black-and-white people had integrated on a level... and everybody was one." -- DJ Ray Keith.
But of course westerners never consider unprecedented peace, love and understanding as a benefit of drug use. And so the UK Parliament cracked down on the use of Ecstasy2 in response to one single raver death, which was itself the fault of the Drug War for suppressing the research and education that would have resulted in safe-use guidelines for the drug. Turns out ravers have to remain hydrated while using the substance! Who knew? (Answer: no one, thanks to the Drug Warriors, who ask us to fear and demonize psychoactive medicines rather than to understand them.)
I repeat: in response to one single death, and this in a world where aspirin kills 3,000 a year in the UK alone3 and alcohol... why, alcohol kills 178,000 a year in the United States alone4.
So Earth to the alien know-it-all: Don't tell me that a species resembling drug-hating humans has transcended war -- unless maybe you've got the population so doped up on dependence-causing Big Pharma meds that no one has the gumption to fight anymore. 56
Oh sure, humanoids will tell you that they want peace, but if they're anything like us purebred human beings, peace comes in a distance second to their real priority, a priority before which every other goal must give way (including everything from curing Alzheimer's 7 to saving humanity from extinction): namely, the goal of demonizing godsend psychoactive medicines in a racist and unscientific war on the politically created boogieman called 'drugs.'
May 28, 2022
'Moonfall' was not one of those Drug War movies 8910 in which Drug Warriors give medicine users the Nazi treatment. Nevertheless, like so many movies today (and books, and TV shows 11 ) its plot reads problematically when considered in the light of America's unscientific war on mind medicine. In this case, it begs the question, how did a human-like species learn to live with itself without the aid of empathogenic psychoactive medicine, given the fact that we 'purebred' human beings are busy shooting up schoolyards and preparing for armageddon 12 thanks to our criminalization of the same? The only plausible answer is that the humanoids 'did drugs' (as the demonizing Drug Warrior would put it). But if that's the case, then that self-righteous six-year-old clone should have said so, rather than observing the usual politically correct silence on the topic of mood medicine.
Incidentally, look at that favorite Drug Warrior phrase: did drugs. Anyone who uses that trope without irony has been brainwashed by drug-war propaganda. For did drugs is to 'used mind medicine' as did the nasty is to made love. The purpose of the phrase is to disparage the activity that it describes. It is a political way to talk, as well. When John F. Kennedy and his wife used doctor-prescribed methamphetamine, we feel like they used mind medicine. When a bum on the street uses the same stuff, we say they did drugs. Of course, did drugs is a mild disparagement compared with "snorted cocaine," a phrase that likens the fan of the time-honored coca plant to a pig!
Author's Follow-up: August 28, 2022
It's worth reminding the reader here that there are no such things as 'drugs,' as that word is defined by the Drug Warrior. To them, the word 'drugs' means, 'substances that have no valid use: not here, not there, not anywhere; not now, not ever.'
In fact, there are no such substances on planet earth. No substance is bad in and of itself. Even the highly toxic Botox can be used safely if we put our minds to it.
But so-called scientific America starts with the premise that certain substances are evil incarnate and makes it illegal to actually study them, thereby blocking possible cures for Alzheimer's and autism, not to mention society's one and only realistic hope for world peace: namely, the widespread use of entheogenic substances that literally teach the user how to feel compassion for their fellow human beings.
Author's Follow-up: December 3, 2023
Nor is it just entheogenic drugs that can help save the planet. Viewed psychologically, it is a mere commonplace to say, and say correctly, that drugs can give folks the ability to 'stay the course' and to thereby achieve self-actualization in life, notwithstanding their innate or nature-learned proclivity toward procrastination and unproductive loafing. Those who achieve self-actualization in life typically have no desire (or time for that matter) to shoot up grade schools or plot hideous revenge on a lover. In fact, that's basically the definition of self-actualization: that one has time only for making their life work, not for lashing out at others because they feel like a failure. This is psychological common sense, or at least it would be, if the field of modern psychology was not under the sway of Drug War ideology, which insists that no happy ending can ever be ascribed to the use of the modern scapegoat called 'drugs.'
Of course, the Drug Warrior will make sure that we see lots of movies (and news reports) about such drug use going awry -- but then they are literally spending billions of dollars a year to make sure that such attempts end in as abject a failure as possible.
Attempts to improve one's mind and mood are not crimes. The attempt to stop people from doing so is the crime.
I hated the show "The Apprentice," because it taught a cynical and hate-filled lesson about the proper way to "get ahead" in the world. I saw Trump as a menace back then, long before he started declaring that American elections were corrupt before the very first vote was cast!
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
Peyote advocates should be drug legalization advocates. Otherwise, they're involved in special pleading which is bound to result in absurd laws, such as "Plant A can be used in a religion but not plant B," or "Person A can belong to such a religion but person B cannot."
Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy.
It is based on the following crazy idea:
that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
We don't need people to get "clean." We need people to start living a fulfilling life. The two things are different.
Many psychonauts (like Terence McKenna) praise psychedelics while demonizing other psychoactive substances. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason for some people in some circumstance.
Americans HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control their pain relief and how and how much they can think and feel in this life.
Many people take antidepressants believing their depression has a biochemical cause. Research does not support this belief. --Dr. Noam Shpancer, Psychology Today
Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
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