The following is in response to today's Tweet by DA Brooke Jenkins calling for a crackdown on "rampant" drug dealing in open air markets. Does she not realize that America has already cracked down to the point that our nation is little more than a penal colony in the eyes of the world? Gee, thanks, prohibition. It's sad to see such a young and apparently bright individual believing so thoroughly in such a hateful policy, one that has ruined the lives of millions of poor people around the globe by entrapment: tempting them with fantastic sums and then turning around and arresting them for taking advantage of the opportunity: the opportunity that prohibition itself has foisted upon them. It's sad to see her supporting a policy that has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America and turned America's inner cities into shooting galleries.
Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
When psychiatrists write about heroin, they characterize dependency as enslavement. When they write about antidepressants, they characterize dependency as a medical duty.
Outlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.
Wade Davis writes that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. What about the 49,000 that commit suicide every year because we have outlawed drugs that could cheer them up!!!
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
Governor Kotek is "dealing" with the homelessness problem in Oregon by arresting her way out of it, in fealty to fearmongering drug warriors.
News flash: certain mushrooms can help you improve your life! It's the biggest story in the history of mycology! And yet you wouldn't know it from visiting the websites of most mushroom clubs.
Just saw a prosecutor gloating about the drug dealers she has taken down.How much is she getting paid to play whack-a-mole?
The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.
(up)