An actual speech from an actually imagined meeting of the National Science Foundation
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid there was a bit of a typo in the bulletin for today's science lecture. My speech today is not going to be on, and I quote, "Genetic Variability in Hydrastis Canadensis." (I'm not sure what your secretary was smoking when she came up with that title, since it bears so little resemblance to the actual topic of my proposed animadversions for this morning's session. Humph.)
The actual title of my address today is: "Scientists are Cowards: Yes, I'm talking to you."
[boo]
And I begin. Ahem.
There is a specter haunting Europe - and the entire free-world for that matter -- the specter of the anti-scientific Drug War.
[gasp]
You doubt it? Just hear me out.
Suppose that the Catholic Church had come forth in the last half-century and told you that there were thousands of plants that you scientists were no longer allowed to study, on pain of being ostracized, removed from your job, or perhaps even arrested?
You guys would be up in arms. Especially the rabid atheists among us. Not to mention any names, of course (such as Daniel Dennett or Sam Harris or Michael Ruse or Richard Dawkins). You'd be like: How dare the Church tell science what it can and cannot study?
[applause]
Enough with the hypocritical applause, folks, because guess what: you scientists DID let an outside force trump the cause of science over the last 50 years - it's just that the force in question was the government, not religion.
[gasp]
The Drug Warriors declared that you must stop studying a wide variety of psychoactive plants (on pain of the aforesaid penalties), and you guys essentially said, in the immortal words of Sergeant Schultz from "Hogan's Heroes": "Jawohl, Herr Kommandant. I know no-think about such plants, I say no-think about such plants!"
QED: You scientists are cowards. End of discussion.
You failed to push back and declare science off-limits to political manipulation. Not only did you thereby do a disservice to science, setting a fascist precedent for ages to come, but you thereby also consigned millions of depressed mortals to decades of unnecessary psychological suffering, suffering that could have been so profoundly alleviated by the advised introduction of psychedelic therapy, using all those psychoactive plants that the government had ordered you to ignore.
[murmur]
Hey, what can I say, folks: tell the truth and shame the devil, right?
Oh, nice. Now you're sending up your security guards to force me off stage? For shame. "Get your hands off me, you damn dirty security guard!"
Leave go! I'm almost finished!
The good news is, you scientists can make up for this pusillanimous oversight by belatedly standing up to government today, through the many scientific organizations here in the States and abroad, and declaring the obvious: that science must be free and that government must revoke all the disincentives that they have put in place in order to keep Americans from acquiring a dispassionate understanding of psychoactive plants.
Do it for science - and for the psychologically suffering around the globe.
It's time for a new Magna Carta, one that puts government in its place with respect to science!
All right, all right, I'm leaving, Tarzan!
What kills me is, the atheists among you write whole books about the dangers of the Church interfering with scientific investigation, a merely hypothetical -- if not absolutely paranoid -- concern, but they never say anything -- not one word -- about the subjugation that is taking place right in front of them even as we speak: the subjugation of scientific investigation to the political demands of the Drug War.
Author's Follow-up:
May 25, 2025
It is five years later and the idea for a Magna Carta for academic freedom1 is as unimaginable as ever in our brainwashed world. But at least I have gone on record so that future generations can laud me as prescient -- in the unlikely event that these words will long survive my dissolution. For as I write, these words are being passed along to you via a hosting service that will shut down shortly after I do.
But I should not pick on scientists alone. The outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of religious liberty, insofar as it is the outlawing of just the sorts of substances that have inspired entire religions. So it is not just the job of scientists to push back against the hateful ideology of substance demonization. It is our duty as freedom-loving citizens of the world as well.
Oh, what a sick thing is drug prohibition! It brought about enormous violence -- and instead of acknowledging that fact, Americans created movies like "Scarface" and "The Godfather," movies 23 that luxuriate in the violent world that we ourselves have created by our unprecedented outlawing of all psychoactive medicines that inspire and elate. It is as if we look at the violence that we have created by drug prohibition as a business opportunity and a way of life rather than as a problem.
We have created a whole new genre of cop shows -- for absent drug law, most cops would be busy helping little old ladies across the street. Drug law brought gunfire to the streets, and undercover operations, and stakeouts, and SWAT raids, and flashy press conferences revealing confiscated "junk."
Conservatives love this violent new world that they have created, for it keeps the public's mind off of social change, whether on behalf of providing healthcare access, reducing income inequality, or anything else. It is a game of divide and conquer. As long as we can keep the country violent enough and blame that violence on drugs and minorities, then potential foes of the status quo will never come together.
If we encourage folks to use antidepressants daily, there is nothing wrong with them using heroin daily. A founder of Johns Hopkins used morphine daily and he not only survived, but he thrived.
"Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?
In a free future, newspapers will have philosophers on their staffs to ensure that said papers are not inciting consequence-riddled hysteria through a biased coverage of drug-related mishaps.
How else will they scare us enough to convince us to give up all our freedoms for the purpose of fighting horrible awful evil DRUGS? DRUGS is the sledgehammer with which they are destroying American democracy.
It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.
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.
Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.
There are hundreds of things that we should outlaw before drugs (like horseback riding) if, as claimed, we are targeting dangerous activities. Besides, drugs are only dangerous BECAUSE of prohibition, which compromises product purity and refuses to teach safe use.
Self-medicating has always been the most basic of human rights, until the medical industry demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.
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.
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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