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 meds for their entire life, the biggest addiction crisis in world history, many times more than were ever habituated to opium (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 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 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 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."
Open Letters
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
Alcohol makes me sleepy. But NOT coca wine. The wine gives you an upbeat feeling of controlled energy, without the jitters of coffee and without the fury of steroids. It increases rather than dulls mental focus.
Someone should stand outside Jefferson's estate and hand out leaflets describing the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello to confiscate poppy plants. That raid was against everything Jefferson stood for. The TJ Foundation DISHONORED JEFFERSON and their visitors should know that!
Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.
News flash: certain mushrooms can help you improve your life! It's the biggest story in the history of mycology! And yet you wouldn't know it from visiting the websites of most mushroom clubs.
Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.
We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.
So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.
Meanwhile, no imaginable downside could persuade westerners that guns and alcohol were too dangerous. Yet the DEA lies about almost all psychoactive drugs, saying there are no good uses. That's a lie! Then they pass laws that keep us from disproving their puritanical conclusion.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
I have nothing against science, BTW (altho' I might feel differently after a nuclear war!) I just want scientists to "stay in their lane" and stop pretending to be experts on my own personal mood and consciousness.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Open letter to Kenneth Sewell: author of Red Star Rogue, published on June 19, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
ear Mr. Sewell:
You have been reading an article entitled, Open letter to Kenneth Sewell: author of Red Star Rogue, published on June 19, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)