"The right to chew or smoke a plant that grows wild in nature, such as hemp (marijuana), is anterior to and more basic than the right to vote." --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p xvi1
When I was a teenager, the major injustice of the hiring process involved having a rent-a-cop test you to see if you were lying - and I lost at least one job that way, not because I was lying but because the whole scientistic process of the "lie detector" test made me extremely nervous (with wires everywhere and a community college freshman taking notes like he's some kind of Einstein carefully crunching numbers to determine my precise level of personal integrity). Plus, I have a habit of overthinking questions. ("Have you ever stolen anything?" Do they mean as an adult? What if I stole from my little sister in grade school? "Have you ever lied?" What exactly constitutes a lie? Am I lying if I don't even realize it at the time?) And it turns out that this habit of overthinking things brings about the same physiological symptoms that the second-rate Einstein associates with lying.
Dear ______:
I am providing this urine sample under protest since I do not believe that this business has the constitutional right to demand it. My rationale for this action is explained in the essay above.
Sincerely Yours:
___________
Science knows nothing of the human spirit and of the hopes and dreams of humankind. Science cannot tell us whether a given drug risk is worthwhile given the human need for creativity and passion in their life. Science has no expertise in making such philosophical judgements.
The war on drugs has destroyed America's faith in the power of education. In fact, it has made us think of education as WRONG in and of itself. It has made us prefer censorship and fear-filled ignorance to education!
Some fat cat should treat the entire Supreme Court to a vacation at San Jose del Pacifico in Mexico, where they can partake of the magic mushroom in a ceremony led by a Zapotec guide.
Prohibition turned habituation into addiction by creating a wide variety of problems for users, including potential arrest, tainted or absent drug supply, and extreme stigmatization.
It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.
Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.
Drug prohibition began as a racist attempt to prevent so-called "miscegenation." The racist's fear was not that a white woman would use opium or marijuana or cocaine, but that she might actually fall in love with a Chinese, Hispanic or Black person respectively.
Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.
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."
Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.
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