Pity the time traveler who arrives from the 1600s, bristling with a new idea for a science-fiction story:
Time-Traveler: "Hey, I've got this cool idea for a story in which some future despotic government goes out and burns plants to keep the populace from using those substances to improve their minds! I'm gonna call it 'Fahrenheit 452!'"
Me: "Sorry, dude, but that's not science-fiction."
Time-Traveler: "What? Maybe you don't hear so good. I said it's a story about government going out and getting rid of therapeutic plants!"
Me: "Right, and that's exactly what our government does today!"
Time-Traveler: "You're kidding me? I thought I traveled forward in this time machine, not backwards."
Me: "Hey, where are you going?"
Time-Traveler: "Back to my ship -- I'm gonna visit the Earth 200 years from now and see if they've finally got it right."
Americans are childish about drugs. We blame our problems on inanimate objects and burn other countries' plants so that we can feel safe at home. We need to grow up and learn to use nature's bounty wisely for human benefit.
Discussion Questions for Students
1) What is the satirical message of this short drama?
2) What does it tell us about the mentality behind drug prohibition and the War on Drugs?
3) Imagine you traveled forward in time to a world in which horses were outlawed because politicians focused only on the downsides of horseback riding -- like the fact that equestrian sports are the number-one cause of traumatic brain injury in the sporting world. How would you go about trying to convince the horse prohibitionists that they were being silly? Could you succeed, given that everybody in that future society had been taught from childhood to say no to horses? Let's assume that their media had kept them from seeing, reading, or hearing any depictions of beneficial "horse use" as well.
For Further Study
The Drug War Philosopher occasionally illustrates the incoherence of Drug War ideology with the help of science-fiction. See, for instance, his philosophical send-up of the 2022 movie Moonfall, in which he takes a young alien to task for his naive faith in the ability of his humanoid species to 'get along' without the help of some serious empathogens (given the hate-filled propensities of that species' nearest biological cousins, that is, videlicet Earthlings).
What do you think makes science-fiction such a purebred stalking horse for drug-law reformers when it comes to snapping the suspenders off of the cocky challengers on the Prohibitionist side of the jousting field? Hint: when science-fiction authors are not evoking a Mad Max dystopia, they are generally promoting the idea (as 'twere by implication) that technology brings happiness, than which nothing could be more silly, of course, with the possible exception of the idea of the modern drug researchers that laughing gas could not help the depressed. In other words, the DWP would fain task the science-fiction author with psychological naivete. "I mean, come on!" he would essentially say, "Let's be REAL, people!"
We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.
That's so "drug war" of Rick: If a psychoactive substance has a bad use at some dose, for somebody, then it must not be used at any dose by anybody. It's hard to imagine a less scientific proposition, or one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering.
Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.
I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.
The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.
First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.
I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.
SWAT raids have increased by 15,000 percent from the late 1970s to today, resulting in 50,000 to 80,000 SWAT raids annually in the US alone. --War On Us
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.
1) What is the satirical message of this short drama?
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