Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use drugs that speed up and sharpen mental processes.
Using the billions now spent on caging users, we could end the whole phenomena of both physical and psychological addiction by using "drugs to fight drugs." But drug warriors do not want to end addiction, they want to keep using it as an excuse to ban drugs.
The drug war tells us that certain drugs have no potential uses and then turns that into a self-fulfilling prophecy by outlawing these drugs. This is insanely anti-scientific and anti-progress. We should never give up on looking for positive uses for ANY substance.
Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
Q: Why are we never told about the potential benefits of drugs?
A: Follow the money.
The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.
We give kids drugs to improve their concentration -- but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.
American businesses judge people, not by the color of their skin but by the contents of their digestive systems.
The evidence has been in for well over a century now: people want to use psychoactive substances to transcend the rational mind. It's about time we stopped punishing them for that.
Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
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