DRUG WAR BIBLIOGRAPHY

from The Drug War Philosopher

Andrew, Christopher. The Secret World: A History of Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
All warfare is based on deception, said Sun Tzu. Yes, but what is all deception based on? A mistrust of one's fellows. And how do you combat that, Chris? With empathogens like MDMA and psilocybin.
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Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. London: East India Publishing Company, 2021.
Pious drug warriors have usually thought of Marcus Aurelius as the perfect replacement for bad evil drugs -- but Marcus had his cake and ate it too. He philosophized under the influence of opium (but don't tell the kids!)
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Bache, Christopher. LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven. New York: Park Street Press, 2019.
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Bandow, Doug. From Fighting The Drug War To Protecting The Right To Use Drugs. : , 2018.
Over the last two decades more people have gone to jail for drug offenses than for violent crimes.
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Barrett, Damon. Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Polices on Young People. : IDEBATE Press, 2011.
In which we learn how over 150 countries withhold godsend pain medicine from dying kids in the name of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
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Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. New York: Public Domain, 1928.
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Bilton, Anton. DMT Entity Encounters: Dialogues on the Spirit Molecule. Vermonth: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, 2021.
America spends millions on SETI and billions on NASA looking for alien beings -- and yet we ignore the world of world of inner visions with which naturally occurring substances seem determined to put us in touch
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Blum, Richard. Society and Drugs. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1970.
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Boullosa , Carmen. A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the 'Mexican Drug War'. New York: OR Books, 2016.
How the US Drug War and Its Mexican Collaborators caused the so-called Mexican Drug that has killed over a hundred thousand
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Brereton, William. The Truth about Opium / Being a Refutation of the Fallacies of the Anti-Opium Society and a Defence of the Indo-China Opium Trade. India: Anna Ruggieri, 2017.
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Burns, Eric. 1920: The year that made the decade roar. New York: Pegasus Books, 2015.
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Carpenter, Ted Galen. The Fire Next Door: Mexico's Drug Violence and the Danger to America. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2012.
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Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland: The Original 1865 Edition With Complete Illustrations By Sir John Tenniel. New York: Amazon, 2021.
Alice's shroom-powered adventures are a standing reproach to glum-faced drug warriors, who closely resemble the Queen of Hearts, shouting: "Off with their heads, for using godsend medicines of which I disapprove!"
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Chesterton, GK. Saint Thomas Acquinas. : BookBaby, 2014.
That 'God looks on all things and saw that they were good' contains a subtlety which the popular pessimist cannot follow... it is the thesis that there are no bad things but only bad uses of things.
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Cohen, Jay S.. For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2011.
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De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater. New York: Dover, 1995.
During De Quincey's informed opium use, he "partook" only weekly in order to better enjoy the opera, making his weekday life happier as well, however, thanks to anticipation of use, a benefit of which materialist science takes no account.
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Ellsberg, Daniel. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner . New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.
A stark reminder that the world is living under a nuclear sword of Damocles. And why? Because it demonizes all the godsend medicines (like MDMA and shrooms) that could bring humanity together in universal harmony.
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Fadiman, James. The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys . New York: Park Street Press, 2011.
First-hand accounts of psychological breakthroughs achieved with the guided use of entheogens, suggesting that one-time givens like "character" and "human nature" are far more susceptible to improvement than we thought.
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Filan, Kenaz. The Power of the Poppy: Harnessing Nature's Most Dangerous Plant Ally. Rochester, Vermoont: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, 2011.
Psst! Don't tell anyone. This book actually talks about beneficial uses of the plant medicine that used to be in almost every medicine cabinet in England. That situation couldn't last long under unfettered capitalism.
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Fleming, Thomas. A Disease in the Public Mind: Why We Fought the Civil War. New York: Da Capo Press, 2014.
The late historian Fleming cites the popular mob-led public "diseases" of Witch-Hunting, Liquor Prohibition, and Communism -- yet says nothing about the Drug War, which was the great disease in the public mind of his own time!!!
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Friedman, Milton. Wall Street Journal. New York: WSJ, 1989.
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Fukuyama, Francis. Liberalism and Its Discontents. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.
Great bipartisan insights, BUT... Francis reckons without the drug war, so, like a good drug warrior, he blames all the ills caused by prohibition on the politically created boogieman called "drugs."
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Gianluca, Toro. Drugs of the Dreaming: Oneirogens. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007.
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Gootenberg, Paul. Cocaine: Global Histories. New York: Routledge, 1999.
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Gottleib, Anthony. The Dream of Enlightenment: the Rise of Modern Philosophy. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2016.
The author seems unaware of the increasingly clear ability of empathogens like MDMA and shrooms to improve the very human nature which grumps like Hobbes portray as being so irrevocably fixed.
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Griffiths, William. Psilocybin: A Trip into the World of Magic Mushrooms. Annapolis: William Griffiths, 2021.
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Grof, Stanislav. The transpersonal vision: the healing potential of nonordinary states of consciousness. Boulder, Co.: Sounds True, 1998.
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Head, Simon. Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans. New York: Basic Books, 2012.
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Hofmann, Albert. The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications. : Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, 2005.
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Holland, Julie. Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection, from Soul to Psychedelics. New York: HarperWave, 2020.
Julie claims that Nixon criminalized psychedelics for health reasons. What? That's not the Nixon I know. He said himself that Leary was enemy #1. He was removing "users" from the voting rolls, not protecting them.
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Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell. New York: Penguin Books, 1970.
Huxley's speculations about perception jibe with modern science, which finds that human beings see what is presumably useful to them, not necessarily what is "really there" in the sensory-rich physical world.
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Illich, Ivan. Medical nemesis : the expropriation of health. London: Calder & Boyars, 1975.
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Irwin-Rogers, Keir. Illicit Drug Markets, Consumer Capitalism and the Rise of Social Media: A Toxic Trap for Young People. London: , 2019.
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James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Philosophical Library, 1902.
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Jenkins, Philip. Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
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Johnson, Paul. The Birth of the Modern. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.
Johnson says that opium caused Samuel Taylor Coleridge's problems. Nonsense. Lack of education and irresponsibility causes problems. As Johnson himself says, most Brits used opium as needed without trouble.
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Leary, Timothy. The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead . New York: University Books, 1964.
Americans have been primed by the drug-war zeitgeist to consider everything Leary writes as nonsense. But he was the first one to announce loudly and clearly that what's really nonsensical is to outlaw plant medicine.
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Lindstrom, Martin. Brandwashed: tricks companies use to manipulate our minds and persuade us to buy. : Crown Business, 2011.
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Lovecraft, HP. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. New York: Del Rey Books, 1970.
Lovecraft's work is full of opiate imagery that drug warriors want to render impossible for artists to feel: "I would often drift in opiate peace through the valley and the shadowy groves..." (Ex-Oblivione)
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Mariani, Angelo. Coca and its Therapeutic Application, Third Edition. : Gutenberg.org, 1896.
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Mate, Gabriel. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2009.
Gabriel moralizes "addiction." Addiction, however, is a political term. One can use psychoactive Big Pharma meds every day and be a good patient -- use heroin every day, however, and you're just escaping "inner pain." What?
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Maupassant, Guy de. Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques - Guy de Maupassant: Les classiques du fantastique . Paris: , 2019.
In "La Horla," Maupassant anticipates Huxley by speculating that our perceptual habits blind us to a world of wonders. Many of today's demonized drugs, it appears, can at least partially open our eyes to that world.
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McKenna, Terence. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution . New York: Bantam, 1992.
This was the book that reminded me of what I already vaguely knew: that it is tyrannical insanity for a government to outlaw plants. McKenna's philosophical speculations on why we criminalize inspired me to create abolishthedea.com.
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Miller, Richard Lawrence. Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 1966.
A must-read for folks who, like Michael Pollan, fail to see the Nazi nature of the wrongs perpetrated in the name of fighting drugs, a term which itself is a western pejorative for "substances of which politicians disapprove."
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Miller, Richard Louis. Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle . New York: Park Street Press, 2017.
Informative interviews with movers-and-shakers in the field, including Rick Doblin, Stanislav Grof, James Fadiman, David Nichols and Robert Whitaker. Packed with eye-opening one-liners about godsend meds.
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Moreland, J.P.. Science and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology. : Crossway, 2018.
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Mortimer MD, W. Golden. Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas. Berkeley, California: Ronin Publishing, 2017.
Mortimer reveals how Coca leaf chewing was to the long-lived Peruvian Indians what coffee drinking is to modern society. It provided them with endurance and social cohesion, just as coffee provides us with ambition and competitiveness.
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Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. New York: Oxford University press, 2012.
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Newcombe, Russell. Intoxiphobia: discrimination toward people who use drugs. London: academia.edu, 2014.
Documenting how the drug warriors treat "users" like dirt.
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Noe, Alvin. Out of our Heads. New York: HiII&Wang,, 2010.
Noe reveals how patients with "locked-in" syndrome have reported being supremely aware of their surroundings during their supposedly brain-dead coma, a fact that puts in question our materialist assumptions about consciousness.
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Paley, Dawn. Drug War Capitalism. Chico, California: AK Press, 2014.
Substance prohibition causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some. Nowhere is this more true than in Latin America, as Dawn Paley describes in painstaking detail.
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Partridge, Chiristopher. Alistair Crowley on Drugs. unknown: uploaded by Misael Hernandez, 2021.
Because of drug war self-censorship, we have to turn to renegades like Alistair Crowley to learn the positive sides of so-called 'drug' use.
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Pinchbeck, Daniel. When Plants Dream. New York: Watkins Publishing, 2019.
I find philosophical problems with most of the books that I read on the subject of psychoactive medicine, but Daniel Pinchbeck is one of the few authors who could teach me a few things on this topic.
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Poe, Edgar Allan. The Essential Poe. New York: Warbler Classics, 2020.
Because drug warriors never mention the good side of "drugs," we must turn to Poe to learn, for instance, that morphine can bring a surreal appreciation of Mother Nature (see "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains").
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Pollan, Michael. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence . New York: Penguin Books, 2018.
Pollan has yet to realize that the very term "drugs" is just a modern pejorative epithet for "plant medicine of which botanically clueless politicians disapprove. "
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Reynolds, David S.. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville . New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Exhaustively researched account of the 19th-century zeitgeist, and yet the word "drugs" (as defined, or rather derided, by today's drug warrior) is never even used. Last century's boogieman was liquor, it seems, not "drugs."
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Richards, William. Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences Hardcover. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
The psychedelic experience was once characterized as pharmacologically induced madness. Richards shows how the properly guided experience can lead to sanity instead -- and a way of life that is not self-destructive.
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Rosenblum, Bruce. Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness. London: Oxford University Press, 2006.
The most successful theory in all of science--and the basis of one third of our economy--says the strangest things about the world and about us. Can you believe that physical reality is created by our observation of it? Physicists were forced to this conc
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Rosenfeld, Harvey. Diary of a Dirty Little War: The Spanish-American War of 1898 . Connecticut: Praeger, 2000.
The war took place 16 years before anti-Chinese Drug Warriors criminalized the poppy plant, and yet opium is only mentioned with regard to a group of unimaginative volunteers who smoked some and "couldn't see the point."
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Rudgley, Richard. The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances. New York: Macmillan Publishers, 2014.
Hurray to Rudgley for failing to dance to the Drug Warrior's tune and name his book "The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Drugs." Instead, he refers to "drugs" as substances, removing all the value judgments with which prohibitionists seek to demonize the sub
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Russell, Kirk. Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered. New York: Arlington House, 1967.
Burke was a conservative in a sense, but he would not recognize America's Republican party of today. He would surely have seen that prohibition causes all the problems we ascribe to "drugs," and then some.
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Schlosser, Erich. Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. New York: Penguin, 2014.
In 1980, the Air Force nearly blew up Arkansas and irradiated half the country. When Reagan took office the next year, what was his priority? Outlawing plant medicine that could make our species less warlike.
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Sewell, Kenneth. Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S. . New York: Pocket Star, 2006.
On March 7, 1968, a rogue Soviet submarine nearly blew up Pearl Harbor with a thermonuclear bomb. Instead of launching a war on nukes, then-President Nixon launched a war on medicines that could inspire peace, love and understanding.
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Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler. New York: RosettaBooks, 2011.
Paraphrase from book: "No one who has not lived for years in a DRUG WAR SOCIETY can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."
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Shulgin, Alexander. PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. New York: Transform Press, 1991.
'A tale of self-discovery, accompanied by the faint stirrings of a technology that is yet to be fully born, much less developed.' - David Nichols
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Shulgin, Alexander. The Nature of Drugs Vol. 1: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact. Santa Fe: Transform Press, 2021.
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Slater, Lauren. Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds. Back Bay Books: Boston, 2019.
Despite griping about the weight she's put on from taking her daily 'meds,' Slater gives Big Pharma a big fat mulligan for consigning 1 in 4 American women like herself to a lifetime of chemical dependency on SSRI antidepressants.
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Smith, Wolfgang. Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief. : , 0.
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Smith, Wolfgang. Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology. New York: , 2022.
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St John, Graham. Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT. : , 2021.
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Straussman, Rick. DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences . New York: Park Street Press, 2001.
Rick doubts DMT's therapeutic usefulness, but common sense psychology suggests that any break from full-on introspection would be a treat, notwithstanding materialists who aren't even sure that laughing gas could help the depressed!!!
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Streatfield, Dominic. Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography. New York: Picador USA, 2003.
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Swartzwelder, Scott. Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.
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Szasz, Thomas. Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974.
Filled with inconvenient truths that critics ignore rather than refute, including how politicized science tells us a la God: "Eat of the fruit and you shall die," ignoring the fact that education tells us how to eat of that fruit safely.
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Szasz, Thomas. Interview With Thomas Szasz: by Randall C. Wyatt. : , 0.
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Szasz, Thomas. Our Right to Drugs: The case for a free market. New York: Praeger, 1992.
Chock-a-block with all-too-rare common sense: "Doctors, lawyers and politicians started the War on Drugs and continue to wage it, and they are its real beneficiaries -- the drug war's ostensible beneficiaries... are its victims."
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Tyler, George R.. Billionaire Democracy: The Hijacking of the American Political System. Michigan: Pegasus Books, 2016.
Doesn't mention drugs, but illustrates how drug reform can be stymied by just 3% of the public: namely, those holding stock in Big Pharma, etc., especially when these elites can bribe politicians to retain the status quo.
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Watts, Alan. The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness. New York: Vintage, 1965.
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Wedel, Janine. Unaccountable: How the Establishment Corrupted Our Finances, Freedom and Politics and Created an Outsider Class. : Pegasus Books, 2014.
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Weil, Andrew. From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs. New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2004.
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Whitaker, Robert. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America . New York: Crown, 2010.
Prohibition has facilitated the creation of a psychiatric pill mill upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life. Moreover, these pills cause the chemical imbalances that they purport to fix.
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Whitaker, Robert. Mad in America. : Perseus Publishing, 2002.
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Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States: 1492 - present. New York: , 2009.
The whole aim of popular politics is to keep the public alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. -HL Mencken
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Zuboff , Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2019.
Surveillance capitalists and drug warriors share the same goal: to keep human beings predictable: one by rendering us more robot-like and the other by denying us the mind-improving blessings of psychoactive medicine
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