Scientists are responsible for endless incarceration 1 s in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.
I then got some apparent pushback, stating that scientists have been trying for years to get the DEA to acknowledge drug benefits and that conservatives are the real problem.
This is true in a way, but not without major important qualifications, and so I responded to this thoughtful individual with a small barrage of qualifying tweets, which I hope elucidated rather than miffed.
I reproduce my responses here in the hopes of illuminating the subtleties involved in this important topic viz. scientists and their guilt (or lack thereof) in promoting the War on Drugs -- and its hateful incarceration 2 s of people who are, after all, merely trying to improve their own damn minds!
1) Yeah, there are definitely good guys out there. Unfortunately, they are either limited by their materialist orthodoxy into adducing only specific and limited microscopic evidence or they abandon materialism 3 for the nonce and talk the common psychological sense that we all understand implicitly and for which we need neither degrees nor lab coats.
2) In other words, scientists qua scientists (i.e., as materialists) are very limited in what they can demonstrate positively about drugs. This is because it is a category error to consider them specialists about human emotions and psychology in the first place.
3) Folks like Ben Franklin enjoyed opium 4 and used it wisely and to good effect, as did Marcus Aurelius. But to PROVE that this helped them is asking a lot. Indeed, it's asking too much. Materialist science is not qualified to do that: the user's own successful life itself IS the evidence of efficacy! (When we look elsewhere for proof of efficacy, we are like OJ Simpson launching a search for a killer -- anyone at all, other than himself.)
4) And so when scientists and/or the d e a claim a lack of established benefits, they are making a philosophical statement peculiar to westerners, that efficacy must be judged under a microscope.
5) Conservatives set the pernicious trend in the Drug War and are happy to have materialist scientists in charge of determining drug efficacy. they know that such progress will be glacial. the fda STILL can't wrap its materialist head around the obvious, that mdma 'works,' in every meaningful sense of that word.
And so while it's fine to say that scientists have tried to be helpful, that statement can only be properly understood in the light of a number of important qualifications that could never be compressed into a single tweet (except perhaps by the linguistically thrifty William Shakespeare himself) hence the foregoing mini essay.
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.
The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.
Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.
All of our problems with opioids and opiates could have been avoided had the busybody Chicken Littles in America left well enough alone and let folks continue to smoke regulated opium peaceably in their own homes.
If opium were legal, then most of the nostrums peddled by drug stores today would be irrelevant. (No wonder the drug war has staying power!)
We don't need people to get "clean." We need people to start living a fulfilling life. The two things are different.
That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.
Drug testing labs should give high marks for those who manage to use drugs responsibly, notwithstanding the efforts of law enforcement to ruin their lives. The lab guy would be like: "Wow, you are using opium wisely, my friend! Congratulations! Your boss is lucky to have you!"
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.
If I have no right to mother nature's bounty, then I surely have no right to manmade guns. If hysterical fearmongering justifies the eradication of the Fourth Amendment, then the Second Amendment should go as well.
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