Thomas Szasz1 was an American-Hungarian doctor who saw through the unprecedented madness of America's drug-related attitudes like no one else. He revealed the philosophical inanity of those attitudes in clear language. He has a special place in my heart since he is the only drug pundit who not only answered a letter of mine on the subject of drugs, but responded to it in detail, and in a handwritten letter no less. This was in the 1980s, unfortunately, when I had yet to appreciate the full evil of drug prohibition. I wish our years on earth had aligned more felicitously so that I could bounce my ideas off the man today, rather than to continue tossing them in vain at the brick walls erected by the bamboozled pundits of our time.
Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.
The book "Plants of the Gods" is full of plants and fungi that could help addicts and alcoholics, sometimes in the plant's existing form, sometimes in combinations, sometimes via extracting alkaloids, etc. But drug warriors need addiction to sell their prohibition ideology.
Med-dependent patients of the world, unite -- to end drug prohibition, that is. You have nothing to lose but your prescription bottles and your status as a ward of the healthcare state.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"
Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity.
"The Oprah Winfrey Fallacy": the idea that a statistically insignificant number of cases constitutes a crisis, provided ONLY that the villain of the piece is something that racist politicians have demonized as a "drug."
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
Whether we judge people only by the words that they say or only by the substances of which they partake, we are ignoring the most important things: what they really mean and how they really behave.
I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.
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