The University of Pennsylvania just blacklisted the words "freshman" and "sophomore." Whatever we may think of this latest politically correct gambit, it strikes me as amusing that we have this faux freedom to tweak the dictionary while we have no freedom to use the plant medicine that grows at our very feet. If the university wants to be truly progressive and take a truly courageous action, they would ban the word "drugs," which is used in the US as a Christian Science pejorative for psychoactive medicine. But that would be a real stand that might cause real pushback, and that's not the kind of "bold action" that university deans are known to favor. "Look at us, we're attacking patriarchy -- but we still grant government the right to control how much we can feel, how we can think, and how much we can think."
August 30, 2022
You see what he did there? Brian's suggesting that progressives these days are hitting easy targets while steadfastly ignoring the biggest infringement of all time, both of personal and civil rights: namely, the Drug War, which punishes us (albeit usually indirectly) for saying or doing anything that conflicts with the Drug Warrior's attitude of substance demonization. For almost 40 years now, the government's official policy about "drugs" has been to lie to us about them. Not so much by saying false things but rather by reporting only negative outcomes of substance use. Office of National Drug Control Policy actually has a charter that forbids its members from even considering any positive uses for the substances that America has criminalized. And yet we're talking about the kind of medicines that have inspired entire religions.
What Have We Learned?
August 30, 2022
Mouse over questions to read answers
What is the main point of this mini essay?
To compliment University of Pennsylvania for their new rules about forbidden speech?
To task that otherwise worthy institution for ignoring the 24,000-pound gorilla in the room, viz the Drug War, which has created endless problems out of whole cloth.
To congratulate the school for ignoring the Drug War like everybody else.
In other words, Brian is wondering, when the heck is anyone going to realize that "drugs" is the loaded term par excellence?! For the way it's used today by Drug Warriors, it means: psychoactive substances for which there is no beneficial use whatsoever: not today, not tomorrow, not at any dose whatsoever for any person whatsoever for any reason whatsoever in any country whatsoever, ever.
Of course there are no substances like that in the entire world. A scientific country (not to say one that studies history and was founded on natural law) knows that any substance can be used for good or ill. There are no evil substances. Evil is not a property of things, but of people. Evil, for instance, is being done when a government purposefully tries to scare its people from psychoactive substances rather than educating them in the ways of safe use.
Author's Follow-up: October 10, 2023
I am not seeking to opine here on any particular progressive cause célèbre. My meaning is merely this: If the far left would get as indignant about their rights to Mother Nature as they currently are about the misuse of pronouns, the world would be making far more progress in overthrowing the anti-scientific, racist and panic-driven ideology of the War on Drugs -- which, of course, is actually a war on the users of the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions.
If we let "science" decide about drugs, i.e. base freedom on health concerns, then tea can be as easily outlawed as beer. The fact that horses are not illegal shows that prohibition is not about health. It's about the power to outlaw certain "ways of being in the world."
The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.
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.
We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.
Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.
All uplifting drugs are potential antidepressants. Science denies that fact by claiming that drug efficacy must be proven quantitatively. And so they ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense.
The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.
There would be almost no relapses for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.
We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
I am not seeking to opine here on any particular progressive cause célèbre. My meaning is merely this: If the far left would get as indignant about their rights to Mother Nature as they currently are about the misuse of pronouns, the world would be making far more progress in overthrowing the anti-scientific, racist and panic-driven ideology of the War on Drugs -- which, of course, is actually a war on the users of the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions.
(up)