The UN of today is in an odd position regarding drugs: they want to praise indigenous societies while yet outlawing the drugs that helped create them.
The whole drug war is based on the anti-American idea that the way to avoid problems is to lie and prevaricate and persuade people not to ask questions.
Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.
My approach to withdrawal: incrementally reduce daily doses over 6 months, or even a year, meanwhile using all the legal entheogens and psychedelics that you can find in a way likely to boost your endurance and "sense of purpose" to make withdrawal successful.
His answer to political opposition is: "Lock them up!" That's Nazi speak, not American democracy.
So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.
Prohibition never ended. Busybody Americans just gave alcohol a big Mulligan for killing 178,000 a year in America alone and then began fighting to outlaw everything else.
This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault.
Wade Davis wrote in Rolling Stone that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?! 178,000 people die from alcohol every year in America alone.
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