I would encourage you to consider how the Drug War has created the opioid problem by outlawing godsend psychoactive medicine, discouraging honest talk about substances, and incentivizing dealers to sell the most available and addictive substances possible. Please consider that the Vedic-Hindu religion was inspired by the psychoactive effects of plant medicine1, and that drugs are therefore not the problem. Rather the desire for transcendence is universal, and when we make that transcendence illegal through drug laws, we empower criminals to sell the most dangerous substances possible.
Please consider also that the menace is not from opiates, Arab: the menace is from the Drug War, which for the first time in human history has told humanity that it has no right to the medical and religious bounty that grows at their very feet.
The desire for self-transcendence will never disappear. The desire for profit will never disappear. If we want less suffering in the world, what needs to disappear is the anti-scientific and anti-religious war on psychoactive plant medicine, aka the Drug War.
Author's Follow-up: June 21, 2024
This is the whole problem with the Drug War: it demonizes drugs. Well, guess what? All drugs have positive uses at some dose, in some circumstance. Even cyanide has potential positive uses.2
Scientists cannot tell us if psychoactive drugs are worth the risk any more than they can tell us if free climbing is worth the risk, or horseback riding or target practice or parkour.
It's really an insurance concern, however, disguised as a concern for public health. Because of America's distrust of "drugs," a company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.
I knew all along that Measure 110 in Oregon was going to be blamed for the problems that the drug war causes. Drug warriors never take responsibility, despite all the blood that they have on their hands.
"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley
The Partnership for a Death Free America is launching a campaign to celebrate the 50th year of Richard Nixon's War on Drugs. We need to give credit where credit's due for the mass arrest of minorities, the inner city gun violence and the civil wars that it's generated overseas.
The term "hard" is just our modern pejorative term for the kinds of drugs that doctors of yore used to call panaceas
Drug warriors are full of hate for "users." Many of them make it clear that they want users to die (like Gates and Bennett...). The drug war has weaponized inhumanity.
Think you can handle a horse? So did Christopher Reeves. The fact is, NOBODY can handle a horse. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.
Westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight.
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