f an American has a negative response to an anti-depressant, we sigh and say, "Oh, dear, they had a bad reaction." We ascribe no blame to the Big Pharma anti-depressant. The bad reaction is the fault of the user: their system simply fails to respond appropriately to the drug in question.
If an American has a negative response to a psychoactive plant medicine, we snarl and say, "Oh, dear, that is an evil drug!"
It's this kind of muddled thinking about substances that makes the Drug War the great philosophical problem of our time, because the Drug War is propped up and supported on a framework of bogus hypocritical assumptions like this.
Take the old canard of the "crutch," the idea that we should not use mother nature's psychoactive plant medicines because they are crutches.
Was coca a crutch when it helped HG Wells and Jules Verne write great stories? Was opium a crutch when it increased Benjamin Franklin's creativity and friendliness? Were psychedelics a crutch when they provided Plato with metaphysical insights at the Eleusinian mysteries? Was the natural substance called Soma a crutch when it single-handedly (or single-plantedly) inspired the Vedic religion?
If any substances are "crutches," they are the tranquilizing meds of Big Pharma, which, since the introduction of lithium, have been designed, not to help folks achieve self-actualization in life, but to render them more docile and accepting of the status quo. (When Antonio Moniz won the Nobel Prize for lobotomy, it was the nurses who were cheering, not the patients.) In this way, Big Pharma meds are crutches designed to make the patient forget about the need to walk on their own two feet.
Problem 2,643 of the war on drugs:
It puts the government in charge of deciding what counts as a true religion.
Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.
Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.
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.
Materialist scientists are drug war collaborators. They are more than happy to have their fight against idealism rigged by drug law, which outlaws precisely those substances whose use serves to cast their materialism into question.
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 addiction 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.
The Drug War is based on a huge number of misconceptions and prejudices. Obviously it's about power and racism too. It's all of the above. But every time I don't mention one specifically, someone makes out that I'm a moron. Gotta love Twitter.
This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.
Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.
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 Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War published on February 2, 2021 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)