Those who support the Drug War do so based on a kind of materialist version of Christian Science. The Drug Warrior does not discount medical cures entirely, as does the Christian Scientist, but he or she insists that the medical pharmacy of Mother Nature "should not" be used to bring about psychological happiness and that such usage is somehow tawdry and unbecoming of a sane and sober American.
As a dissenter to this doctrine, I believe that there is no reason why Mother Nature's bounty cannot be justly used to improve my mind in the same way that I use Mother Nature's bounty to improve my physical health. In other words, I disagree with both the classic theology of Christian Science and its modern-day interpretation that is presupposed by the Drug Warrior. It is therefore a violation of my religious liberty to deny me access to Mother Nature's bounty on the theory that I should not require that bounty to live a happy and fulfilled life, for that is an unprovable and hence theological assumption and one that I do not share.
We talk about an aborigine's religious right to use time-honored natural substances such as peyote and ayahuasca, but this is beside the point. Indeed, to frame the issues in this way is to tacitly acknowledge the Drug Warrior's right to deny the rest of us our God-given right to access Mother Nature's bounty for the benefit of our own psyches. And how is this justified by the Drug Warrior? As stated above, it's justified based on a theological notion, a religious assumption, an article of faith: namely, that it is morally wrong to expand one's mind through the use of certain psychoactive substances.
To repeat, this is one possible way to look at life (namely the Christian Science way), but it is not MY way, and to insist otherwise is to force me to adopt the religious practices and taboos of Christian Science.
June 7, 2022
12-Step Programs 1 are religions, which require their devotees to confess their powerlessness in the face of problems like addiction. Why is this religion? Because the powerlessness is a necessary result of the substance criminalization upon which the 12-Step church is based. It is powerlessness by design, not by necessity. The generally WASP proponents of the 12-step group first render the "user" powerless in a practical sense by denying them access to all pharmacological godsends. Then they urge the former "user" to consider themselves powerless in a fundamental ontological sense, in a religious sense that is, a sense which is almost made explicit by the 12-step requirement that the user place their fate in the hands of a thinly disguised Christian God called a higher power. "We are all powerless sinners in need of higher help," rings the puritanical refrain. Yes, but would this be true had you not criminalized almost all the godsend psychoactive medicine in the universe?!
This proposition that we are powerless when faced with problems like habituation is by no means a logical truth that is self-evident to a rational mind. It is rather an article of faith of the modern Drug Warrior and a self-fulfilling prophecy thanks to Drug Warrior legerdemain in the civic and legal realms. The fact that this dour prognosis rings true statistically is meaningless in a world that has dogmatically shunned many hundreds of godsend psychoactive medicines that might have changed outcomes for the better. And so the Drug Warrior rigs the therapeutic deck in favor of failure when they deprive a human being of all psychoactive medicine that might actually empower them to thrive in the world, habituation or no habituation. It's as if the Drug Warrior takes away my Tylenol and then tells me, "We all must rely on God for headache relief," to which the sane response would be: "Well, yes, I guess so, but only because you've confiscated all the flippin' medicine that might otherwise have fixed my headache!"
Author's Follow-up:
October 30, 2025
Most people have no clue as to how completely drug prohibition has already screwed up America in blatant defiance of all time-honored democratic principles. Take religious freedom, for instance. In ruling on the rights of Native Americans to use peyote, the Justice Department invented the following outrageous new bizarre standard for religious freedom 2. It said in effect that:
You have no right to religious freedom if you practice a religion that was not practiced by your ancestors.
This is how the Justice Department "justifies" its continued outlawing of peyote for white Americans, while grudgingly permitting the heavily overseen use of the drug by the Native American Church. White people, we're told, have no history of using peyote for religious inspiration, and therefore the government concludes (in the Mother of All Non-Sequiturs) that we have no right to use the cactus in a religious manner.
This is nothing but the outlawing of religion. Worse yet, it is the outlawing of religion based on racial and ethnic considerations!
We see again why I am so baffled and bothered by the many drug pundits (like Rick Strassman 3 and Michael Pollan 4) who see no problem with drug prohibition provided only that it will protect young Americans from the "drug kingpin" called Mother Nature. I cannot believe that such clearly intelligent people are so purblind. I can only draw one of two conclusions: either they are, indeed, logically challenged, or they are knowingly catering to the prejudices of the Great Unwashed, in order to keep their books relevant in the brainwashed marketplace.
We live in a world surrounded by drugs -- and there are plenty more to come for westerners -- thanks both to ethnobotanical studies and laboratory research, legal and otherwise. We could be adults about this and teach safe use -- or we can be children and pretend that Mother Nature herself is wrong and that we have to physically change the world by burning plants to conform to our prejudices against mental and spiritual improvement.
Americans read books like Fahrenheit 451 and think that they concern a fictional world -- but we are living in a philosophically identical dystopia: it's just that we burn plants instead of books. And yet the government's motivation is the same in both cases: to control what the people think. Actually, our government's motivation is far worse than in the Bradbury classic. The book burners just wanted to control what the people think. When our government burns plants, they are thereby controlling what -- and how much -- the people can think and feel. If I had to choose between the dystopias, I would choose the Bradbury world in which thought, at least, was still free. One can ignore the government and thrive apart in such a world. This, incidentally, is why the government outlawed opium in China in the 19th century. The Mandarins had no interest in the health of the Chinese -- which was not adversely affected by opium in any case. They wanted power, a power that was felt. How can you feel powerful when your people can transcend your authority -- and even make you laughably irrelevant -- with a few puffs on an opium pipe? What good is power if the people do not FEEL it as such?
For more on that latter subject, see The Truth about Opium by William H. Brereton 56.
Outlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.
Drug warriors aren't just deciding for us about drugs. They're telling us that we no longer need Coleridge poems, Lovecraft stories, Robin Williams, Sherlock Holmes, or the soma-inspired Hindu religion.
It is evil to give the depressed drugs to help them die while barring them from using drugs that could make them wish to live.
Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.
Amphetamines are "meds" when they help kids think more clearly but they are "drugs" when they help adults think more clearly. That shows you just how bewildered Americans are when it comes to drugs.
The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that signs off on Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself.
The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?
John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!
The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.
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.
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.
Most people have no clue as to how completely drug prohibition has already screwed up America in blatant defiance of all time-honored democratic principles. Take religious freedom, for instance. In ruling on the rights of Native Americans to use peyote, the Justice Department invented the following outrageous new bizarre standard for religious freedom 2. It said in effect that: 
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