I was sorry to see that you equated the use of submarines for drug dealing with the use of submarines for launching nuclear weapons, as if there's any relationship whatsoever.
Drug prohibition causes thousands of deaths in inner cities every year (almost 800 in Chicago alone in 2021) because prohibition has created drug gangs out of whole cloth in poor neighborhoods. The Drug War has caused civil wars overseas ab nihilo and emboldened a self-described Drug War Hitler in the Philippines. It has disfranchised millions of minorities, thereby ensuring the election of fascists. Nor has it stopped people from using drugs. America is now the most drug-using country in the world. One in 4 American women are chemically dependent upon Big Pharma 12 meds for their entire life, the biggest addiction crisis in world history, many times more than were ever habituated to opium 3 (like Benjamin Franklin) before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 turned them from "habitues" into "addicts" overnight. The Drug War also caused the opioid crisis because its crackdown on less harmful medicines naturally encouraged drug dealers to deal the most readily available controlled substances (like legally prescribed pain killers). On a personal note, as a chronically depressed 64-year-old, I have gone my whole life now without godsend medicines that grow at my feet, all because America violated natural law by criminalizing plants and fungi. (Jefferson was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 4 in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants.)
The nuclear risk is so high today precisely because our presidents were focusing on catching people who were selling godsend plant medicine rather than using the money to fight nuclear proliferation and increase world understanding.
What did Nixon do almost immediately after the Red Star Rogue incident (the near thermonuclear obliteration of Pearl Harbor)? He launched a "War on Drugs," in which he outlawed naturally occurring medicines that had inspired entire religions in the past. What did Reagan do almost immediately after the Air Force almost destroyed half the country in "The Damascus Incident"? He cracked down on psychoactive plant medicine, much of which could help human beings become less belligerent and less reliant on military solutions to world problems, and called on children to turn in their parents for using plant medicine of which he disapproved.
You surely have to admit that the only hope for humanity, considering the facts on the ground that you enumerate, is to have a change of heart - and there is only one way for that to happen: for people to begin USING entheogens and empathogens: substances like MDMA 5 and psilocybin that can actually teach an individual how to love their fellow human beings.
In light of these facts, I found it jarring for you to end your book on the Red Star incident by implying that drug dealing was on a par with blowing up Pearl Harbor or any other city.
"Drugs" is a political term, a scapegoat invention of conservatives that allows them to ignore real social problems and blame all trouble on inanimate substances (while intervening overseas at will, of course, on the pretense of eradicating "drugs"). Until 1914, all intelligent people knew that substances were only good or bad with reference to how they were actually used. But the Drug War tells us that such substances are evil in and of themselves, which is a point of view which has blinded us to endless life-affirming therapies, even preventing us from helping Alzheimer's 6 patients and those with autism, let alone those who are depressed.
If the world is in precarious shape today and under a nuclear sword of Damocles, it is in large part because our leaders (like Nixon and Reagan) have sought to deflect attention from that issue and focus the American mind instead on the political boogieman called "drugs."
So I submit to you that drug dealers with submarines are not the problem.
I just hope America realizes this before my published warnings on this topic become an extant reproof to a future generation that ends up scrounging through the ruins of a burnt-out American city.
I'd personally rather have a flotilla of submarines dealing psychoactive plant medicines hand over fist in every port on earth - than to have even one populous city obliterated by a nuclear weapon.
America has to choose: do we want world peace, or do we want a war on the strategically created boogieman called "drugs"?
Let's hope we make a better choice than the Brits, who shut down the unprecedentedly peaceful rave scene in the 1990s because a "drug" helped inspire the harmony. The result: peace, love and understanding disappeared overnight, as empathogenic Ecstasy was replaced by anger-facilitating alcohol and special forces troops had to be hired to keep the peace. Another "victory" for the addle-brained "War on Drugs."
Some outlawed drugs grow new neurons in the brain. To refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!
The Shipiba have learned to heal human beings physically, psychologically and spiritually with what they call "onanyati," plant allies and guides, such as Bobinsana, which "envelops seekers in a cocoon of love." You know: what the DEA would call "junk."
Why does no one talk about empathogens for preventing atrocities? Because they'd rather hate drugs than use them for the benefit of humanity. They don't want to solve problems, they prefer hatred.
The outlawing of opium eventually resulted in an "opioid crisis"? The message is clear: people want self-transcendence. If we don't let them find it safely, they will find it dangerously.
Psst! Drug use has benefits too. Pass it on!
Prohibitionists think that they merely have to use the word "drugs" to win an argument.
I have dissed MindMed's new LSD "breakthrough drug" for philosophical reasons. But we can at least hope that the approval of such a "de-fanged" LSD will prove to be a step in the slow, zigzag path toward re-legalization.
Jim Hogshire described sleep cures that make physical withdrawal from opium close to pain-free. As for "psychological addiction," there are hundreds of elating drugs that could be used to keep the ex-user's mind from morbidly focusing on a drug whose use has become problematic for them.
Big pharma drugs are designed to be hard to get off. Doctors write glowingly of "beta blockers" for anxiety, for instance, but ignore that fact that such drugs are hard -- and even dangerous -- to get off. We have outlawed all sorts of less dependence-causing alternatives.
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
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