I am a 61-year-old American who has been denied godsend medications for depression for the last 40 years, all because Washington legislators care more about punishing "drug users" than they care about helping those suffering from alcoholism, depression and PTSD.
When is Congress going to stop the war on drug research and the war on patients?
It is nothing less than a crime against humanity when the DEA knowingly withholds godsend medications from the American public - and lies while so doing.
Please end this war against patients today. Abolish the DEA and put its leadership on trial for causing immense and unnecessary suffering for America's patients through its anti-scientific lies about substances like MDMA and psilocybin.
And stop financially blackmailing other countries to make them follow suit with America's unscientific Drug War. Is it not bad enough that you've made it impossible for me to get help in America? Do you really have to make sure that I can't get help anywhere on the planet?
Substances are not evil, Senator. That is a drug-war superstition. They are good or bad, depending on how they are used.
Stop demonizing godsend medications just because they may be subject to occasional abuse.
Please stop denying godsend medication to millions merely because a few thousand may abuse them.
Get rid of the fascist DEA - the jackbooted thugs that stomped onto Monticello and stole Thomas Jefferson's poppies -- and let scientists study any substance that they please without government interference - that is, if you really want to live in a free country.
Meanwhile, just remember that "getting tough" means getting tough on patients. We are the ones who suffer so that conservative Republicans can get their demagogue soundbites.
Psychiatric godsend medications include: MDMA, ayahuasca, psilocybin, and ibogaine. Please tell the DEA to back off and let science, not politics, determine these drugs' availability to patients.
Instead, the DEA does everything they can to hinder research and to keep these drugs unavailable to suffering Americans, including tens of thousands of soldiers who have fought for freedom overseas. MDMA was working wonders - but the DEA decided to criminalize it in 1985, AGAINST the advice of its own judge. Why? The DEA has a conflict of interest: their jobs depend on drugs being illegal. It's an outrage that such an agency protects its jobs by keeping godsend medication from the American people.
The DEA is anti-American and anti-soldier. Please tell it to cease ruining the lives of America's patients.
NOTES I sent the above e-mail to Republican Senators, under the assumption that much of the Drug War demagoguery comes from that quarter. It was written in anger and may thus be a trifled disjointed. My principal point, however, is clear: namely, that the Drug War is anti-patient, insofar as it criminalizes substances without regard for the millions of patients who are thereby denied godsend medication. This is because the Republicans like to appear "tough on drugs" by locking up minorities -- and if that means they have to totally ignore the valid interests of millions of alcoholics, depressives, and soldiers with PTSD, then so be it.
Unfortunately, Democrats have to share the blame, since they also pay almost no attention to the millions of patients who are forced to go without godsend medications thanks to our across-the-board drug criminalization. They only differ from Republicans in that they focus on protecting potential abusers instead of prosecuting them. Both sides, however, promote policies that keep godsend medicines unavailable for those who need them most: alcoholics, the depressed, and soldiers suffering from PTSD.
This in turn is because both sides share the superstitious Drug Warrior belief that chemical substances are either good or evil -- when in reality substances are neither good nor evil: only people are. The same substance which seems evil at one dose and in one setting can work miracles at another dose and in another setting. Somehow our Washington representatives are blissfully unaware of this fact. (I'm being kind to the pols here, by the way. A more cynical author would claim that Congress's Drug War-enablers are simply cowing to the demands of lobbyists for Big Pharma, psychiatry, prison guards, and sheriffs, all of whom stand to lose financially if the Drug War is rescinded or pared back in any way.)
The DEA truly believes that substances are evil in and of themselves. Whenever they are forced to allow a little research into MDMA, for instance, they insist on elaborate and expensive procedures to safeguard the MDMA to be used in the study, as if the substance were some kind of highly enriched uranium or the Hope Diamond. This shows absurd priorities: the DEA is ready to stymy investigation into a drug that could help millions - even billions of people - and why do they run this interference? So that they can stop even a handful of Americans from being able to use the substance illicitly.
The DEA is so obsessed with "cracking down" that they would gladly scuttle a godsend cure for countless patients - just to get tough on a few minorities. But this is probably to be expected since the agency's raison d'etre is to punish Americans for using cures of which our politicians do not approve - our politicians, mind, not our scientists.
Author's Follow-up: January 10, 2025
This essay was written five years ago, when I had just started my philosophical campaign against drug prohibition. I can tell because I have given the false impression above that all would be well if we would only give scientists the freedom to figure out American drug policy. But nothing could be further from the truth. Scientists today approach the subject of drugs under the influence of positivism, behaviorism and reductive materialism, which means that they are impervious to psychological common sense. If a depressed person laughs under the influence of laughing gas, that means nothing to them. If they are at peace with themselves through the weekly use of opium, that means nothing to them. As materialists, they are looking for "real" cures to conditions like depression, something that they can see under a microscope -- preferably something that would create lifetime patients for the drug researcher's financial benefactors, namely Big Pharma.
In this way, modern scientists are aiding and abetting the mendacious DEA when they tell us that psychoactive medicines have no known positive uses. It does not matter to either scientists or the DEA that drugs like opium, coca, and psychedelics have inspired entire religions. They ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense. And so neither group will sign off on drug re-legalization. Both will advance the preposterous idea that "drugs" have no known positive uses. True, the scientists are grudgingly acknowledging some potential benefits of psychedelics today, but they are only accomplishing this by laboriously relocating the word "psychedelics" from the "drugs" category to the "meds" category, when what they should be doing is denouncing the fictitious nature of both categories. Substances are substances, and to separate them a priori into morally fraught categories is superstitious and tyrannical.
Yet America has created entire institutions to enforce this neanderthal bias. That's why we have an institute on drug abuse and not an institute on drug use.
As for the perhaps somewhat harsh tenor of my epistle, you must remember that I was only 60 years old when I wrote it. I was little more than a kid at the time. I had yet to acquire the tact and diplomacy that are the hallmark of the mature mind. To paraphrase Verjuice in "School for Scandal," I wanted "that delicacy of tint and mellowness of sneer" that distinguishes the persuasive scrivener. Besides, I knew that the wretch to whom I was writing was fully aware of the injustice that he was perpetrating with his strategic fearmongering and so I felt no need to methodically enlighten him on the subject. My only goal was to remind him that some of us saw through the sham and wanted him to know it, both loudly and clearly.
The drug war tells us that certain drugs have no potential uses and then turns that into a self-fulfilling prophecy by outlawing these drugs. This is insanely anti-scientific and anti-progress. We should never give up on looking for positive uses for ANY substance.
"Now, now, Sherlock, that coca preparation is not helping you a jot. Why can't you get 'high on sunshine,' like good old Watson here?" To which Sherlock replies: "But my good fellow, then I would no longer BE Sherlock Holmes."
Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
Today's war against drug users is like Elizabeth I's war against Catholics. Both are religious crackdowns. For today's oppressors, the true faith (i.e., the moral way to live) is according to the drug-hating religion of Christian Science.
If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"
Jim Hogshire described sleep cures that make physical withdrawal from opium close to pain-free. As for "psychological addiction," there are hundreds of elating drugs that could be used to keep the ex-user's mind from morbidly focusing on a drug whose use has become problematic for them.
Alexander Shulgin is a typical westerner when he speaks about cocaine. He moralizes about the drug, telling us that it does not give him "real" power. But so what? Does coffee give him "real" power? Coke helps some, others not. Stop holding it to this weird metaphysical standard.
People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.
There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.
Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, The Drug War is a War on Patients: my letter to Republican senators of the 116th U.S. Congress, published on December 27, 2019 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
You have been reading an article entitled, The Drug War is a War on Patients: my letter to Republican senators of the 116th U.S. Congress, published on December 27, 2019 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
