Whatever we call the drug-war mindset, it exists, and, in my view, is part of a centuries-long pathology of western culture, which clings to the following anti-democratic assumptions:
Right wing "ends" justify any "means" in South America.
It's okay to torture our enemies.
Developing thermonuclear bombs makes sense.
Folks can be hounded out of society for non-crimes, like being communists.
Natural Law and due process can be overruled in "drugs" cases.
We can bomb "them" into submission
Treaties with native populations are meant to be broken.
Thermonuclear bombs were worth pursuing.
Concern for civil and human rights stops at our border.
It's no surprise therefore that those who hold this mindset are opposed to drug re-legalization . Empathogenic drugs like psilocybin and MDMA could bring us all together and make these politicians, and their politics, irrelevant. That's why the powers that be feed us the unscientific lie that godsend medicines have no positive uses whatsoever, for anyone, ever.
Author's Follow-up:
May 29, 2025
This two-year-old post captures a truth about the Drug War that almost no one notices: namely, that there is method to the madness of the Drug Warrior. The Drug War is not just a bunch of bad laws. It is just one of many bad ideas flowing from the pathological mindset of an insecure westerner.
Who is the Drug Warrior, after all?
The Drug Warrior is a bigoted hypochondriac who reacts to ALL perceived problems with simplistic, short-sighted and ultimately counterproductive initiatives. These are the guys who sold guns to seemingly friendly nations during the Cold War, never stopping to think that those countries might someday become enemies and use those weapons on us; these are the guys who "saved" white American "junior" from himself by creating the Mafia and drug cartels that would kill minorities and foreigners; these are the guys who selfishly insist on economic growth at all costs, heedless of the fact that we are leaving our descendants with a toxic Earth, like so many opportunistic butlers making off with the family jewels; these are the guys who "protected" our country in the 20th century by amassing thousands of thermonuclear weapons, completely oblivious to the obvious fact that such weapons would someday be aimed at ourselves.
The Drug War is just one symptom of a pathological western mindset that includes the following traits:
1) selfishness
2) simple-mindedness
3) an inability to wait for deferred gratification
4) an inability to recognize, let alone to act on, principles
5) a visceral hatred of political foes
6) a callous indifference to the rights of their own descendants to live on a clean and thriving planet
Okay, so that's the diagnosis. What is the cure? How do we eradicate this grade-school mindset from American politics?
We need to establish a new social norm, one in which political discussion between supposed adversaries actually takes place -- one in which the only unforgivable sin is our hatred of "the other." We need, in short, to start using drugs for human benefit. Clearly, that is our only hope for saving a species which is on the brink of self-destruction because of its penchant for fearing rather than understanding.
We need to stop censoring reports of positive drug use and to start emulating them instead.
What positive reports of drug use? Consider the following user reports from "Pihkal,"1 reports that reveal the great potential for strategic drug use to help bring the world together in peace and understanding.
"I am experiencing more deeply than ever before the importance of acknowledging and deeply honoring each human being. And I was able to go through and resolve some judgments with particular persons."
"I believe that it would be impossible to harm anything. To commit an overt harmful or painful act on anyone or anything is beyond one's capabilities."
"I felt less of a need to talk, but the intimate closeness with the others was maintained."
" All the next day I felt like 'a citizen of the universe' rather than a citizen of the planet."
Such results were not just achieved in drug trials. Such drug-inspired feelings resulted in unprecedented peace, love and understanding on the British dance floors in the 1990s, as is clear from the following quotes from DJs of that time2:
"It was the first time that black-and-white people had integrated on a level... and everybody was one." -- DJ Ray Keith.
"It was black and white, Asian, Chinese, all up in one building," -- MC GQ.
"Everyone's loving each other, man, they're not hating." - DJ Mampi Swift.
Naturally, the British authorities saw no benefit in peace, love and understanding. In response to these love fests, they cracked down on the use of Ecstasy, and what was the result? The dance floors erupted into such alcohol-fueled violence that concert organizers had to bring in special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces. Another "victory" for the harebrained Drug Warrior.
CONCLUSION
The sensible mindset toward drugs would come about naturally if the western world embraced just two principles.
1) The only people whom we should mistrust and fear are haters.
2) Opponents on political matters must "engage" with their adversaries in a spirit of peace, each recognizing the humanity of the other.
Regarding principle 1: Haters would be scorned and stigmatized in a free world. Why? Because we would all know that there are drugs that the haters could have used wisely in order to stop being haters. The fact that they fail to do so would render them stigmatized in a sane world. Why? Because we would consider hatred like body odor, as something that a person is responsible for insofar as everyone knows that remedies for the condition are ready to hand.
Regarding principle 2: In the utopian world that I am attempting to evoke here, we would insist as a kind of social norm that pundits must regularly demonstrate their ability to chat amicably with their political opponents as a condition of that pundit being taken seriously. This second principle would help bridge the enormous divide in modern politics, where both "sides" talk only to themselves. Note that this problem seems incurable (at least to any self-styled "realist") until we finally start recognizing the increasingly obvious power of drugs to inspire compassion, patience, and understanding.
Note that I am not getting on any high horse here. I myself could clearly benefit from the wise use of empathogens to help me get my views across to my opponents viz. the imperative for drug re-legalization 3 . When passionate "sober" minds meet, a discussion like that can quickly devolve into a shouting match. Not so when we place the humanity of our opponents front and center with the help of empathogens and thereby work with them constructively to achieve understanding, if not actual agreement.
If there were no other problem with antidepressants, they would be wrong for the simple reason that they make a user dependent for life -- not as a bug (as in drugs like opium) but rather as a feature: that's how they "work," by being administered daily for a lifetime.
In the 19th century, author Richard Middleton wrote how poets would get together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses."
We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.
We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.
Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!
Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.
Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.
By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.
Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.
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