The Drug War is wrong root and branch. It was begun to disfranchise minorities while allowing the US to invade other countries at will, under the pretext of fighting the politically created boogieman called "drugs." We're legalizing pot today only because it's becoming overwhelmingly popular with Anglo-Americans. We keep cocaine criminalized because it is associated with Hispanics and Blacks (even tho' Freud himself considered cocaine 12 to be a godsend for his depression and it has been used for millennia by MesoAmericans, all without a lot of belly-aching about the supposed immorality of it all). What's the result? We're causing a Civil War in Mexico, empowering a self-described "Drug War Hitler" in the Philippines, and sending militarized police forces into hitherto sacrosanct American homes, all in an effort to keep the world from accessing the plant medicine that grows at their very feet (which is a violation of Natural Law, by the way, should America's legal system ever choose to wake up from their self-satisfied slumber and face this outrage head-on).
If we have to have a Drug War, let's jail everyone who has so much as a trace of alcohol or tobacco in their system. Let's remove them from the work force and force them to urinate for us upon demand. Let's remove them from the voting rolls and throw them into overcrowded prisons. That's a Drug War that would give the Drug Warriors a taste of their own medicine. (Of course, let's break down the doors of all these tobacco and alcohol "fiends," kick their family members in the groin while shouting, "Get down! Get Down!"
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
AI is inherently plagiaristic technology. It tells us: "Hey, guys, look what I can do!" -- when it should really be saying, "Hey, guys, look how I stole all your data and repackaged it in such a way as to make it appear that I am the genius, not you!"
This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
Drug war pundits need to stop using the word "snorts" when it comes to cocaine. We "take" our "meds," and yet we "snort" cocaine, just like a pig. That is NOT neutral language, folks!
Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?
AI is like almost every subject under the sun: it takes on a very different and ominous meaning when we view it in light of the modern world's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine.
The press once again hauls out the easy answer. Reiner's son was using drugs! Aha! Of course, that explains EVERYTHING! [sigh]
The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.
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.
It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.
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