It’s amazing how many American gun owners fiercely defend their right to firearms while gladly relinquishing their right to the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet. Talk about misplaced priorities! Any government that claims the right to criminalize naturally growing plants will not refrain from outlawing man-made firearms should the winds of political expediency happen to blow in that direction. Yet these gun owners gladly (and even proudly) support the Drug War’s efforts to keep naturally-occurring plant remedies out of the hands of those who need them most: the depressed, the lonely, the anxious, and the victims of chronic pain – all because our government (conveniently assisted by tabloid journalism and a self-interested medical establishment) has launched a propaganda campaign to paint all such users of these substances as irresponsible outlaws and hooligans.
Gun owners like to style themselves as defenders of liberty, insisting proudly with Clint Eastwood that:
“They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.”
But if these gun fanatics were truly interested in individual rights (and not just in the fetishization of this man-made object known as a “gun”), then they would transform their defiant mantra as follows:
“They can have my psilocybin mushroom when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.”
Author's Follow-up:
December 29, 2025
NOTE BENE: I indited this admittedly charming harangue seven years ago, when I was still a kid, scarcely even 60 years old yet! I have since learned that 47,000 people die in America thanks to guns every single year. 47,000! And yet these gun fanatics are worried that their young people might access substances that have been considered medical godsends in the past? Please. 47,000 people! And guess how many Americans died from using MDMA? Zero. Zilch. Nada. There are only a handful of deaths associated with the drug, and those were all caused by drug prohibition, which refuses to teach safe use (in this case about proper hydration) and refuses to regulate product as to quality and quantity.
Americans love guns and violence, but they are terrified by freedom of thought. And so they judge people, not by the content of their character, but by the content of their digestive system.
To say that psilocybin has not been proven to work is like saying that a hammer has not yet been proven to smash glass. Why not? Because the process has not yet been studied under a microscope.
Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.
This is why America is creeping toward authoritarianism -- because of the prohibitionists' ability to get away with everything by blaming "drugs."
Self-medicating has always been the most basic of human rights, until the medical industry demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.
Despite the 50 year-long war on drugs, the global cocaine supply has grown by 400%. --Elma Mrkonjic
What attracts me about "drug dealers" is that they are NOT interested in prying into my private life. What a relief! With psychiatry, you are probed for pathological behavior on every office visit. You are a child. To the "drug dealer," I am an adult at least.
Q: Why are we never told about the potential benefits of drugs?
A: Follow the money.
If media were free in America, you'd see documentaries about people using drugs wisely for a wide variety of praiseworthy purposes.
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
There are endless creative ways to ward off addictions if all psychoactive medicines were at our disposal. The use of the drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin could combat the psychological downsides of withdrawal by providing strategic "as-needed" relief.
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.
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