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
Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.
Psychedelics and entheogens should be freely available to all dementia patients. These medicines can increase neuronal plasticity and even grow new neurons. Besides, they can inspire and elate -- or do we puritans feel that our loved ones have no right to peace of mind?
After a long life, I have come to the conclusion that when all the establishment is united, it is always wrong. (Harold MacMillan)
Prohibitionists have the same M O they've had for the last 100+ years: blame drugs for everything. Being a drug warrior is never having the decency to say you're sorry -- not to Mexicans, not to inner-city crime victims, not to patients who go without adequate pain relief...
Problem 2,643 of the war on drugs:
It puts the government in charge of deciding what counts as a true religion.
Psychiatrists prescribe drugs that muck about with a patient's biochemical baseline, making them chemically dependent and turning them into patients for life.
Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.
Drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.
Prohibition never ended. Busybody Americans just gave alcohol a big Mulligan for killing 178,000 a year in America alone and then began fighting to outlaw everything else.
We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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