It prevents Americans from accessing the plants that grow at their very feet, in clear violation of the Natural Law upon which America was founded.
It makes "drugs" a red herring for all social problems, thereby ignoring the real social problems (including substandard education and the Drug War itself) that give rise to counterproductive substance use in the first place.
It ignores the obvious lesson from American history that prohibition leads to violence. There were almost 800 gun-related deaths 1 in Chicago alone in 2021, all attributable to substance prohibition, which gives rise to well-armed gangs just as surely as liquor prohibition gave rise to the Mafia.
It turns Americans into arch-colonialists who hypocritically go overseas to burn plants that have been used responsibly for millennia by other cultures, all in the name of preventing addiction in the States (by which reasoning, the Islamic world should be free to come stateside and burn our grape vines).
It leaves the depressed and anxious with nothing but highly addictive Big Pharma meds to treat their condition, when hundreds of far less addictive remedies (many not addictive at all) could be harnessed from plant medicines that the Drug War has criminalized.
It turns these sufferers into eternal patients (the exact opposite of empowerment) by requiring them to visit an expensive psychiatrist in person every three months of their life in order to receive yet another expensive prescription, since the DEA has such an absurd fixation on "controlling" this thing called "drugs" that they don't even trust a patient of 40-years standing to use them wisely.
The Drug War has led to the Nazification of language, to the point that substance users and those who sell plant medicine are called "scumbags" and "filth" and other terms that used to be used by the Nazis to describe their enemies. (This is why I wrote a letter to the Holocaust Museum in September 2020 urging them to denounce the Drug War: )
It willfully ignores all inconvenient historical truths, like the fact that the Vedic religion was founded to worship a psychoactive plant and that psychedelics featured prominently in the Eleusinian mysteries2, which lasted 2,000 years until it was tellingly banned by Emperor Theodosius I as a threat to Christianity.
It willfully ignores the historical fact that "drugs" have been used responsibly by such western luminaries as HG Wells, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen, Ben Franklin, Aaron Burr, Marcus Aurelius, Francis Crick, Meriwether Lewis, Samuel Johnson, Frederic Chopin, Plato, Plutarch, Cicero, Aristotle... and even Thomas Jefferson, who surely flipped in his grave when the jackbooted DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants.
It seeks to make the world forget these inconvenient truths by cranking out TV shows 3 , books, and movies 45 in which "drugs" are always used by scumbags, and so we see a badly dressed lowlife snorting cocaine 67 in a dimly lit backroom, instead of seeing HG Wells and Jules Verne happily writing their books while taking generous swigs of coca wine.
It unscientifically considers a solitary but well-publicized instance of drug misuse to be a knockdown rationale for sweeping drug criminalization, thereby denying godsend medicine to millions based on the uninformed actions of a few.
Despite its constant demonization of plant medicine as being dangerous -- indeed too dangerous for hapless Americans to be allowed to use them -- the Drug Warrior never engages in true, unbiased talk about drugs: to the contrary, they actually criminalize research about the substances that they demonize, to ensure that Americans fear psychoactive botanicals rather than understand them.
The Drug War creates civil wars overseas out of whole cloth, giving imperialist America a convenient excuse to invade sovereign countries at will, by charging them with the bogus crime of using plant medicine of which beer-swilling WASP American politicians disapprove, especially the coca plant, which has been part of South and Mesoamerican cultures for millennia.
The Drug War has disfranchised millions of minorities, removing them from the voting rolls, thereby stealing elections for conservative Drug Warriors, some of whom now want to execute the minorities that they have previously been content simply to marginalize.
The Drug War censors scientists, just as the Church once censored Galileo -- with the exception that westerners do not notice this modern-day censorship since they have been indoctrinated since birth in the drug-war ideology of substance demonization.
Drug testing is not about finding impairment. It is an extrajudicial fishing expedition searching for godsend botanical medicines of which politicians disapprove. Some of these "drugs" (like coca and psychedelics) have inspired entire religions. Drug testing thus adds insult to the injury of outlawing plant medicines in the first place, which was a violation of natural law. That's why Thomas Jefferson, the founder of our country, was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 8 in 1987 and confiscated the garden-loving president's poppy plants.
Drug warriors blithely tolerate 95,000 deaths a year by alcohol without comment, along with almost half a million a year by tobacco, while saying nothing at all about the psychiatric pill mill 9 that their substance prohibition has created. Thanks to the Drug War, in fact, 1 in 4 American women are dependent on the daily use of expensive and uninspiring Big Pharma meds for their entire lifetimes -- a chemical dependency many times that which Americans ever had on opium 10 prior to the unconstitutional outlawing of the poppy plant in 1914.
The Drug War is not about getting Americans off of drugs -- rather it's about getting Americans on the "right" drugs, as judged by the needs of Big Pharma 1112 and their billionaire stockholders.
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.
The FDA approves of shock therapy and the psychiatric pill mill, but they cannot see the benefits in MDMA, a drug that brought peace, love and understanding to the dance floor in 1990s Britain.
If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol massacres. The problem is drug prohibition, not drugs.
The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.
The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war.
We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).
71% of the depressed have relapses after getting off their meds. Doctors blame this on depression, but increasing evidence suggests that these people are having withdrawal problems.
If media were free in America, you'd see documentaries about people using drugs wisely for a wide variety of praiseworthy purposes.
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 we encourage folks to use antidepressants daily, there is nothing wrong with them using heroin daily. A founder of Johns Hopkins used morphine daily and he not only survived, but he thrived.
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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