One of my guilty pleasures is watching episodes of Court Cam to see what serial killers are up to these days in the courtrooms of America. The show reminds me that there are plenty of folks out there who could use a healthy dose of MDMA 1 combined with talk therapy to teach them how to love their fellow human beings, not just so that they could behave themselves in court but so that they could refrain from beheading their friends and loved ones in the first place. That's really not too much to ask, after all. And of course there is the occasional bailiff or judge who could benefit from the same no-brainer treatment as well, so that they too could comport themselves like actual Americans rather than as petty unchecked tyrants from South America. That said, I always fast-forward through the scenes in which the criminal protagonist has been charged with so-called "possession." Watching those segments makes me feel like a real voyeur, indeed, because the arrestee is appearing on charges that are more criminal than the "offense" itself. Little wonder then that the accused might "lose it" in the courtroom when the entire legal system has "lost it" with respect to common sense, not to mention the natural law upon which the republic was founded.
But there is always a silver lining. The mere presence of such "criminals" on Court Cam has inspired me with a new sketch for "Sesame Street," which I hope the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will consider running until such time as substance prohibition is consigned to the trash bin of history.
One of these things is not like the other, One of these things just doesn't belong, Can you tell which thing is not like the other By the time I finish this song?
Beheading one's mother and throwing her body in the Tennessee River
Killing a 4-year-old child and then mutilating her corpse
Possessing a plant medicine that was considered divine by the Incas
The drug war is laughable -- or it would be if the drug warriors hadn't deprived us of laughing gas, the substance that William James himself used to study alternate realities.
Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.
Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.
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.
"Like Christians burning mosques and temples to spread the word of Jesus, modem drugabuseologists burn crops to spread the use of alcohol." -- Ceremonial Chemistry, p. 48
In the board game "Sky Team," you collect "coffees" to improve your flying skills. Funny how the use of any other brain-focusing "drug" in real life is considered to be an obvious sign of impairment.
Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.
Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.
America never ended prohibition. It just redirected prohibition from alcohol to all of alcohol's competitors.
Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.