It is premised on an article of faith: namely, that the best life is one lived without the aid of psychoactive medicines. Therefore it is a violation of Church and State when government tells me I must live my life according to the Drug War ethic of prohibition. For I do not find it morally reprehensible for a man or woman to access the medicinal bounty of Mother Nature to improve his or her mind. It is not part of MY religion to be repelled by such behavior. To the contrary, I find it a moral responsibility to be all that I can be in this life, and if that goal can be aided by Mother Nature's plants, herbs, and fungi, then I consider it a moral obligation to pursue that enlightenment.
Author's Follow-up: September 2, 2022
The Drug War is a greater outrage than almost anyone else seems to give it credit for. It's not just a good idea that was bound to fail -- it's a bad idea that is already failing spectacularly as we write (by causing civil wars overseas, denying medical godsends to billions, denying morphine to kids in hospice, killing thousands of inner-city Americans every year, censoring scientists -- or rather bamboozling them with so much tacit drug-war ideology that said scientists do not even recognize that they're being censored). The government has no business trying to get citizens to stop using plants and fungi whose psychoactive powers have inspired entire religions. The use of such proscriptions is inherently a war on religion, essentially requiring the whole world to green-light only those drugs that have been approved of by WASP politicians, namely alcohol, tobacco and coffee. And if one doesn't like the world without godsend medicines, they can always "come home" to the Christian church, by accepting the existence of a higher power while declaring yourself incapable of using so much as aspirin safely.
Thus conscience (or rather false consciousness) doth make cowards of us all.
Thus via prohibition, the Drug War hopes to turn everyone into a practicing Christian -- or else execute them for drug dealing: the more things change... It's a religious war by another name.
Author's Follow-up:
The above essay was written almost six years ago, when I had just begun to unmask the hateful but unspoken premises upon which the Drug War is based. Spoiler alert: the takeaway message from my subsequent six years of study could be wrapped up in one short sentence: "Prohibition is evil." The proof is extant.
Another summary of my conclusions about the Drug War over the past six years could be stated as follows:
"The Drug War is based on two huge lies: 1) that drug use has no upsides, and 2) that prohibition has no downsides."
Better yet, prohibition is a crime against religious liberty insofar as it outlaws the same kinds of medicines that inspired the Hindu religion: namely, drugs that inspire and elate.
But returning to the theme of the above 2019 essay:
If anyone doubts my thesis that the Drug War represents the outlawing of religion, I have just three words for them: the Hindu religion. As much as even Hindus might refuse to admit it, the Hindu religion was inspired by drug use. It was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. Just consider the following handful of citations about Soma in Vedic scripture:
"Soon as his song of praise is born, the Soma, Indra's juice, becomes A thousand-winning thunderbolt."
"Swift to the purifying sieve flows Soma as exalted Law, Slaying the fiends, loving the Gods."
"Effused as cheerer of the men, flowing best gladdener, thou art A Prince to Indra with thy juice."
"Flow on, Sage Soma, with thy stream to give us mental power and strength."
The take-home message from the Rig Veda is the following: A religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. From this it follows that prohibition is a crime against religious liberty. It is worse than the outlawing of a specific existing religion -- prohibition is the outlawing of the religious impulse itself.
Christian Science
On a superficial level, Christian Science may be seen as a drug-hating religion and so its very existence tends to support the effort of Drug Warriors to outlaw godsend psychoactive medicines. On a deeper level, however, the religion's founder Mary Baker-Eddy was fighting not so much against drugs as against the failure of modern science to acknowledge the power of the human mind. In Mary's case, of course, this was the mind as influenced by Jesus Christ, but yet she recognized a principle with which even a non-believer can agree and which, moreover, is clearly true in light of drug user reports from the Vedic days to the present: namely, that the human mind has a great as-yet untapped power to control one's outlook on life and to therefore positively affect overall human health to some as-yet undetermined degree. Mary does seem to have overestimated the mind's ability to cure the body, of course, but it is worth noting in her defense that the government has outlawed the very research that would be required to determine exactly where the line should be drawn between the mind-curable condition and that which is beyond the help of this sort of holistic healing.
We would need to be able to use psychoactive medicines freely in order to generate the sort of user reports that could help us answer such questions adequately. And this would be research of the greatest philosophical importance, because it would essentially be a search into the true nature of mind-body dualism.
Mind-body dualism is like the weather when it comes to the field of philosophy: everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Well, here is a chance for philosophers to launch a first-hand investigation of the interaction between mind and body and to thereby determine the nature of each -- as well as the nature of the interactive whole which they in some sense comprise. Philosophers just have to decide: Do they want to perform the kind of hands-on philosophic research that William James advocated viz. altered states, or do they want to keep pretending that the Drug War does not exist and that it has no downsides for philosophical research. For the opposite is so obviously true: namely, that drug prohibition forbids us from performing the kind of research that could blow the whole "mind-body" problem wide open from the western point of view and so inspire whole new fields of research.
The Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. It is therefore a crime against religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate.
Prohibition is a crime against religious freedom.
William James found religious experience in substance use. See his discussion of what he calls "the anesthetic revelation" in his book entitled "The Varieties of Religious Experience."
The Drug War is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
The Drug War violates religious freedom by putting bureaucrats in charge of deciding if a religion is 'sincere' or not. That is so absurd that one does not know whether to laugh or cry. No one in government is capable of determining whether the inner states that I achieve with psychoactive medicine are religious or not. This is why Milton Friedman was so wrong when he said in 1972 that there are good people on both sides of the Drug War debate. WRONG! There are those who are more than ready to take away my religious liberty and those who are not. If the former wish to be called 'good,' they will first need a refresher course in American democracy and religious freedom. They need to renounce their Christian Science theocracy and let folks like myself worship using the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions in the past. Until they do that, do not expect me to praise the very people who have launched an inquisition against my form of experiencing the divine.
There would be no Hindu religion today had the Drug War been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!
This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.
Drug warriors abuse the English language.
Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.
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.
If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault. The Drug War is the triumph of hypocritical idiocy.
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.
This pretend concern for the safety of young drug users is bizarre in a country that does not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.
This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.
Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!