the lopsided concern for ignorant young people in the re-legalization debate
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
December 17, 2022
The Michael Pollan Fallacy: "The advocacy of substance prohibition based on a failure to recognize all the stakeholders in the drug approval process, especially a lopsided concern for the well-being of the ignorant young people of one's own nationality."
I've hitherto refrained from pointing this out, because Michael Pollan seems like a genuinely good guy, not to mention the fact that he is a writer who is many orders of magnitude in advance of my own feeble achievements. But the fact is that I find it irritating for any writer to use psychoactive substances themselves while yet telling us that we must keep these substances illegal for the masses. (See page 405 of the hardback edition of "How to Change Your Mind," in which Pollan writes: "Does that mean I think these drugs should be legalized? Not exactly.") It smacks of hypocrisy and elitism, saying in effect, "I am, of course, intelligent enough to use these substances wisely, but the average Jane and Joe will never be able to do so." And this is, in fact, the pernicious party line of the Drug Warrior, who is constantly telling us by implication that the average human being will always be a gullible baby when it comes to psychoactive medicine -- which, of course, is a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the government is officially pledged to the goal of scaring us about such medicines, not teaching us about them, let alone telling us how to use them as wisely as possible for our psychological benefit should we choose to partake.
And so Michael says, in effect, "not so fast," failing to realize that some of us -- myself included -- have now waited an entire lifetime to have their birthright of mother nature's bounty re-legalized for their free use and yet the progress toward this common-sense goal has been glacial in the best of times.
And why is this so? It's so because writers like Michael fail to realize that in protecting a minority of the ignorant through prohibition, he is thereby reducing millions of folks like myself to a life of unnecessary suffering with depression, to say nothing of the millions who (like Paul Stamets) might have undergone uplifting epiphanies had they been treated with psychedelics rather than with Big Pharma's dependence-causing medicines which turn the user into a demoralized ward of the healthcare state. Which brings me to another point. Writers like Pollan take no account of the fact that the status quo itself is harmful to the health of Americans, and that whatever problems arise from legalization, they would be dwarfed by the fact that 1 in 4 Americans are currently taking some kind of Big Pharma med every day of their life, a treatment that they might have gone without were mother nature not off limits. That's a world of real-life socially sanctioned addicts, and yet all Michael worries about viz. legalization are relatively rare POTENTIAL victims of psychedelic misuse. He seems to think that criminalization will do the least overall harm, but this is only because the victims of criminalization are invisible to him. Why? Because they're living what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation," and such downsides will never show up on the front pages of tabloids or be ballyhooed on the ratings-conscious nightly news as a national tragedy demanding instant legislative attention.
Moreover, if Michael were really worried about young people, he'd be concerned about the thousands of young Mexicans who have lost parents thanks to the war on drugs. But somehow the downsides of the Drug War never factor into our views of drugs as long as their consequences are felt overseas or in American inner cities.
Finally, if any one class of Americans should find it absurd to criminalize mother nature's bounty, surely it should be botanists. Surely, they, at least, should see such criminalization as a clear violation of the natural law upon which Jefferson founded America and a clear and absurd violation of our rights as denizens of Planet Earth. Instead, folks like Michael, admittedly after a lifetime on the receiving end of Drug War propaganda (a life in which they never encountered positive references to psychoactive substances, neither in the press, academia, nor in TV and movies) tell us that we still have to wait until some unspecified date to re-legalize mushrooms of all things -- mushrooms! And no doubt many selfish American parents would praise him for his go-slow approach ("kill 100,000 in Mexico if you have to, just protect little Johnny here at home!") -- but the billions of silent mental sufferers will not praise you, Michael, nor will the victims of Alzheimer's and autism, whose diseases remain incurable due in part to the fact that we have outlawed, and thus discouraged research on, precisely those kinds of drugs that have been shown to grow new neurons and neural pathways in the brain!
Author's Follow-up: January 5, 2023
Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans have been killed by the psychoactive drug known as sugar over the last few years, mostly consumed in the form of Coca-Cola. Not a word from America's substance-demonizing politicians. QED: the DRUG WAR is bald-faced hypocrisy and the political posturing of racist demagogues -- and otherwise intelligent Americans who have been brainwashed by Drug War censorship into believing that poor little uneducated "junior" is the only stakeholder in the drug approval process. Re-legalize now. And use those billions you've been spending on law enforcement to teach -- rather than to ruin people's lives in a divisive campaign to militarize the world and Nazify the English language with hateful, slanderous and unscientific newspeak like "dope," "junk," and "scumbag."
The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.
We need a few brave folk to "act up" by shouting "It's the drug war!" whenever folks are discussing Mexican violence or inner city shootings. The media treat both topics as if the violence is inexplicable! We can't learn from mistakes if we're in denial.
I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.
In 1886, coca enthusiast JJ Tschudi referred to prohibitionists as 'kickers.' He wrote: "If we were to listen to these kickers, most of us would die of hunger, for the reason that nearly everything we eat or drink has fallen under their ban."
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.
They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.
Until prohibition ends, rehab is all about enforcing a Christian Science attitude toward psychoactive medicines (with the occasional hypocritical exception of Big Pharma meds).
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 Michael Pollan Fallacy: the lopsided concern for ignorant young people in the re-legalization debate, published on December 17, 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 Michael Pollan Fallacy: the lopsided concern for ignorant young people in the re-legalization debate, published on December 17, 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)