Drug War prohibition is the perfect storm. It has something in it for everybody. That is why it has lasted for over 100 years now1. It is about power, it is about money, it is about materialism 2, it is about imperialism, it is about religion, it is about racism... and the list goes on. I mention this because every time I focus on one of these by itself, I get shot down by flamers who focus on another aspect, as if there was only one single factor involved in the success of the Drug War over the decades. "You say it's about A?" they scream. "Nonsense! It's about B!" But the fact is, it is about "all of the above."
Nor can we discuss this subject meaningfully without first identifying the demographic about which we are speaking.
Take drug producers like the MindMed company. It has produced a politically correct form of LSD for anxiety from which all visions and euphoria have been removed. Now the company has nothing against euphoria and visions per se3. Its motivation is clearly just financial. But how do we account for the fact that most Americans think that it makes sense in the first place to remove the visions and euphoria from LSD, the very ingredients for which the drug has been valued in the past? Money does not motivate that belief but rather some sort of metaphysical conviction that neither euphoria nor transcendent states are therapeutic. It's urgent that we recognize that unspoken assumption. Why? Because we are never going to get rid of greed, but we can expose and discredit the unacknowledged assumptions by which otherwise sane Americans continue to support the War on Drugs.
Another confusion arises whenever we talk about causes. The fact is there are more than one type of cause. The reason for which something is done is called its final cause. In the case of the Drug War, there are multiple final causes, the chief of which is racism. But there are also efficient causes. These are the beliefs that help justify and promote the Drug War but which are not the reason for the Drug War's existence. One such cause is scientific materialism, a way of conceiving the world which denies that psychoactive drugs have any benefits whatsoever4. The materialist is not a Drug Warrior per se, but the materialist's attitude toward drugs makes the Drug War plausible to society in general. Another efficient cause of the Drug War is puritanism, the west's preference for living by the Golden mean of Aristotle, to avoid excess in everything, including emotion. This helps explain our aversion to the ecstatic states produced by drugs. Nietzsche described this attitude as Apollonian, as distinguished from the tribal approach toward life, which he called Dionysian. But the point here is that literally all philosophers (save for diehard solipsists) agree that the general unspoken presuppositions of a society affect the way in which that society is governed.
This is why philosophy is important when it comes to the Drug War. If we merely blame the Drug War on greed and racism, we will get nowhere, since we will never get rid of such evils. But if we unmask and critique the unspoken assumptions behind the Drug War, we have a chance of deprogramming the millions of Americans who have never thought about such questions deeply and who are therefore being led by the nose by the racist pied pipers of prohibition.
Author's Follow-up: March 10, 2024
This is really the whole point of my website here at abolishthedea.com: I want to show that the Drug War "has to do" with almost every conceivable element of life. That's why I've published hundreds of essays in the last five years and am still nowhere near addressing all the problems that the Drug War causes in society. The Drug War is not a subject that we can or should ghettoize. It is not a niche subject. If you think that it lacks relevance to your life, I have two words for you: Donald Trump, the man who was elected only because the Drug War had thrown millions of minorities in jail and removed them from the voting rolls.
"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
I'm grateful to the folks who are coming out of the woodwork at the last minute to deface their own properties with "Trump 2024" signs. Now I'll know who to thank should Trump get elected and sell us out to Putin.
The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for withholding godsend medicine from the depressed. Here is just one typical drug-user report that appeared in "Pihkal": "A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."
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!"
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.
I'll never understand Americans. Most of them HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control how and how much they can think and feel in this life. Talk about warped priorities.
We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.
"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. The very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.
"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
