Enjoying your book on the Enlightenment, but I believe the latest news about empathogenic medicines (like MDMA and psilocybin) shows that Hobbes' belief about a fixed and combative "human nature" was misinformed. In the 1990s, MDMA 1 brought unprecedented peace, love and understanding to the British dance floor among dancers of all ethnicities, religions and skin colors -- until Drug Warriors criminalized the substance after one single well-publicized death, which was the result of Drug War prohibitions, which prioritized fear over education when it comes to psychoactive substances. Why don't we have a peaceful world, then? Not because human beings are naturally combative and restless but because we westerners prioritize a know-nothing War on Drugs over having a peaceful world. I invite you to see my essay entitled and ended the peaceful Rave scene. To this day, philosophers "reckon without their host" when they ignore the Drug War while speculating on the "true nature" of human beings, which turns out to be quite pharmaceutically pliable indeed. For this reason, no modern speculation about human nature is complete without mentioning the Drug War and how it prevents us from treating "haters" with empathogenic substances - thus possibly even preventing school shootings.
Americans were always free to take care of their own health -- until drug warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine.
It is folly to put bureaucrats in charge of second-guessing drug prescriptions: what such bureaucrats are really doing is second-guessing the various philosophies of life which are presupposed by the way we use psychoactive drugs.
The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.
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.
The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.
Irony of ironies, that the indignant 19th-century hatred of liquor should ultimately result in the outlawing of virtually every mind-affecting substance on the planet EXCEPT for liquor.
When is the Holocaust Museum going to recognize that the Drug War has Nazified American life? Probably, on the same day that the Jefferson Foundation finally admits to having sold out Jefferson by inviting the DEA onto his estate in 1987 to confiscate his poppy plants.
Researchers insult our intelligence when they tell us that drugs like MDMA and opium and laughing gas have not been proven to work. Everyone knows they work. That's precisely why drug warriors hate them.
Endless drugs could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for materialists and drug warriors to understand -- let alone materialist drug warriors!).
Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.
(up)