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
Open Letters
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
To put it another way: in a sane world, we would learn to strategically fight drugs with drugs.
We need to push back against the very idea that the FDA is qualified to tell us what works when it comes to psychoactive medicines. Users know these things work. That's what counts. The rest is academic foot dragging.
If NIDA covered all drugs (not just politically ostracized drugs), they'd produce articles like this: "Aspirin continues to kill hundreds." "Penicillin misuse approaching crisis levels." "More bad news about Tylenol and liver damage." "Study revives cancer fears from caffeine."
The idea that "drugs" have no medical benefits is not science, it is philosophy, and bad philosophy at that. It is based on the idea that benefits must be molecularly demonstratable and not created from mere knock-on psychological effects of drug use, time-honored tho' they be.
The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.
Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?
Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs. It's even illegal to suggest that psilocybin has health benefits: that's "unproven" according to the Dr. Spocks of science.
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.
Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
Someday, the First Lady or Man will tell kids to "just say no to prohibition." Kids who refuse will be required to watch hours' worth of films depicting gun violence, banned religions, civil wars, and adults committing suicide for want of medicine that grows at their very feet.
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 Menace of the Drug War: open letter to Arab Naz, author of The Menace of Opiate, published on April 18, 2022 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 Menace of the Drug War: open letter to Arab Naz, author of The Menace of Opiate, published on April 18, 2022 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)
