
*Then again, it's not so hard to say. If you're a millionaire Senator with a portfolio that's loaded with pharmaceutical stocks, the last thing you want is for non-addictive plants to become available that would render Big Pharma 6 7 's addictive nostrums obsolete.

"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 8 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist." --Heather Ann Thompson, from Inner-City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration9
"The contempt with which the jazzman is regarded can be seen in a story which famed trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie tells about being searched for drugs by police in Philadelphia. He refused to be searched and asked the police if they searched violinist Isaac Stern when he played in Philadelphia. Obviously, the police applied different standards to Stern than to Gillespie, although both men are great musicians.10"
Ug! Fire bad!
There were 4,731 fire-related deaths in America in 2023.
Learn more at the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Drug warriors abuse the English language.
There would be almost no relapses for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.
Ann Lemke's case studies make the usual assumptions: getting free from addiction is a morality tale. No reference to how the drug war promotes addiction and how banned drugs could solve such problems. She does not say why daily SSRI use is acceptable while daily opium use is not. Etc.
The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.
We live in a make-believe world in the US. We created it by outlawing all potentially helpful psychological meds, after which the number-one cause of arrest soon became "drugs." We then made movies to enjoy our crackdown on TV... after a tough day of being drug tested at work.
Using the billions now spent on caging users, we could end the whole phenomena of both physical and psychological addiction by using "drugs to fight drugs." But drug warriors do not want to end addiction, they want to keep using it as an excuse to ban drugs.
I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.
The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.
Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.

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