The DEA Scheduling System is Based on Lies

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The DEA Scheduling System is Based on Lies

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 27, 2022

The entire drug scheduling system is based on lies. And for at least two reasons:

1) The system tells us that the substances it "rates" have no medical uses whatsoever. But there are no substances of that kind on planet Earth. Virtually every substance in the world has positive uses at some dose, in some circumstance, for some person, at some time. Even cyanide and botox have recognized uses in the medical world. To say otherwise is not simply false, but it's also anti-scientific and anti-patient, since it prevents us from finding positive uses for the drugs in question. That's why America continues to struggle with Alzheimer's, because we outlaw medicines that grow new neurons in the brain, deeming them, a priori, of no medical value. In the age of the Drug War, our medical system is thus based on superstition, not science.

BUMPER STICKER: The DEA: Blocking therapeutic drug research since 1973
Millions have needlessly suffered over the last 50 years because the DEA has lied about psychedelics, claiming that they are addictive and have no therapeutic value. Stop the lies, start the research.

2) What's more, some of the positive uses are extant. They are right before our eyes. Coca puts a spring in one's step and sharpens the mind, as everyone knows, including HG Wells and Jules Verne, who were big fans of Coca Wine. When the DEA tells us there are no good uses for coca, it is therefore making a moral judgment, not a scientific one. It is declaring, along with folks like Mary Baker Eddy, that the best life is one led without "drugs." The scheduling system is thus just a harsh moral code based not on science, but on Christian Science, the religion that tells us that we should say "no" to drugs.

Author's Follow-up: January 4, 2023

follow-up on essay by the Drug War Philosopher

And so what if substances have no medical uses? Psychoactive substances have religious uses. Did Soma have a medical use? Probably not if you were to ask a materialist. But it inspired the creation of the Vedic religion. Should government have outlawed it? A more pertinent question might be: what new religions is the DEA outlawing in advance by criminalizing the substances that might have otherwise inspired new religions today?

This is why writers like Michael Pollan -- and even Andrew Weil -- are missing the point about "drugs." Both are concerned about the juvenile's potential misuse of substances, as if that's the only concern whatsoever in determining whether drugs should be re-legalized. Drugs should be legalized in order for religious liberty and free science to flourish. If a free world puts white American kids in danger, that's no reason to give up on freedom -- especially since the war that we propose to save them will kill thousands of Mexican children and militarize police forces around the globe, while denying freedom of thought, and hence religious liberty, to billions.

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The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.

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.

Morphine can provide a vivid appreciation of mother nature in properly disposed minds. That should be seen as a benefit. Instead, dogma tells us that we must hate morphine for any use.

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.

First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.

Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.

That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx

The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.

The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.

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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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