Okay, take your seats, class. I will be picking up where we left off yesterday. It will be remembered that I was making drug-related comments on the letters written by William James to his friends and family and published in a posthumous two-volume collection by his son, Henry James1. This Henry James is, of course, the namesake of William's famous brother, the cosmopolitan author of "The Turn of the Screw" and "The Portrait of a Lady." (Come on in, there are plenty of seats -- about 5,000 in fact, after which my web server might crash.) Speaking of William's siblings, it's interesting. He had three successful brothers: Henry, Robertson and Garth Wilkinson (the latter of whom he refers to as "Wilky" in his letters) and an ill-starred sister named Alice, who died in her mid-40s after a life full of mostly vague medical complaints that were apparently dismissed as female hysteria by the doctors of her day.2 I say it's interesting because it reminds me of the biography of the Bronte family in the same century. It consisted of three highly successful young ladies and one ill-starred brother, Branwell, an unsuccessful painter who died in his early 30s after turning himself into a sort of poster child for how NOT to employ substances like laudanum and alcohol3. The fate of these two sets of siblings mirrors each other, with the luckless sibling being the female of the James family and the male of the Brontes'. I should add that all of the Bronte siblings were luckless in terms of longevity. Not one of them lived to the age of 404.
Cocaine is not evil. Opium is not evil. Drug prohibition is evil.
Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!
To oppose the Drug War philosophically, one has to highlight its connections to both materialism and the psychiatric pill mill. And that's a problem, because almost everyone is either a Drug Warrior or a materialist these days and has a vested interest in the continuation of the psychiatric pill mill.
You can get a master's degree in healthcare today and not learn a thing about the power of hundreds of outlawed drugs to inspire and elate.
In his treatise on laws, Cicero reported that the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries gave the participants "not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope."
In response to a tweet that "some drugs cannot be used wisely for recreational purposes": The problem is, most people draw such conclusions based on general impressions inspired by a media that demonizes drugs. In reality, it's hard to imagine a drug that cannot theoretically be used wisely for recreation at some dose, in some context.
As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.
Drug warriors have taught us that honesty about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.
There is something wrong with a country that thinks it can decide what human beings around the world are allowed to ingest.
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.
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