PROFESSOR: Welcome to Torture 101 here at DEA University. I'm Professor Himmler. Check your schedules, people. "Subverting the US Constitution" is across the hall with Professor Goebbels.
There's no use in taking the roll while so many DEA recruits are wandering around the hallways like so many drug-addled zombies, so I'll just start lecturing and see what happens.
Earth to the students loitering at the door: this is Torture 101. Either shit or get off the pot.
Now then, what comes to mind when I say the word "torture"?
WILLIAM: A Justin Bieber concert.
PROFESSOR: Get out.
WILLIAM: I beg your pardon
PROFESSOR: Get out of my class. You disgust me.
WILLIAM: But—
PROFESSOR: This is a teaching moment, class: There is no room in the DEA for humor.
PROFESSOR: No, wait, I lie. It's okay to let your hair down and laugh at the folks whose rights you have trampled...
But we must reserve that talk for the break room, where we can gloat in peace over the lives that we have ruined.
Ach! More zombies loitering at the door. I can see that we're going to get nothing accomplished today.
Well, at least I can assign tonight's homework: I want you folks to go home and watch "Running with the Devil" starring Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne and Leslie Bibb.
Notice that the DEA agent (played by Natalie) takes her drug suspect to a nondescript storage hangar and suspends him from a meat hook.
MIKEY: Isn't that illegal, sir?
PROFESSOR: Well, if you had taken Dr. Goebbel's excellent course on subverting the U.S. Constitution - which, by the way, is technically a prerequisite for this course on torture, young man - you would know that the DEA scoffs at the outdated precepts of the Constitution and wastes no opportunity to snicker at its impotent allusions to suspect rights.
Let's show Mikey some examples. Suzie, you're interviewing me and I demand to see a lawyer. How do you answer in such a way as to heap scorn upon my appeal to Constitutional protections?
SUZIE: That's easy, Professor. I just say, as incredulously as possible of course: "Lawyer? Here's your lawyer," and with that, I slap your forehead with the back of my gun, whereupon you fall bleeding to the floor and I kick you in your all-too-insolent ribs!
PROFESSOR: She shoots, she scores! Excellent, Suzie. You were really paying attention in Dr. Goebbels' knowledge-fest, aka "Subverting the US Constitution: How the DEA can get away with literally anything." A short round of polite applause for Suzie.
Still, Mikey does have a point, in spite of his seeming cluelessness about DEA values. You see, technically speaking, it remains wrong to torture suspects in any way.
I know, right? It's a real drag. But the good news is, the DEA is such a big and authoritative organization that we can get away with almost any anti-American behavior, provided that we all keep our stories straight and have each other's backs when we... how shall I put this... "bend" the law a little. Wink, wink, wink!
CLASS: Wink, wink, wink!
PROFESSOR: I didn't get a wink wink wink from Cedric over there. Don't tell me that we've got an idealist in our midst?
CEDRIC: Wink wink wink.
PROFESSOR: That's more like it, Cedric. I've got my eyes on you. Why can't you be more like Suzie?
Suzie, you're good at this stuff. What would you say if I'm a reporter and I ask you: "Did you ever violate a drug suspect's rights?"
SUZIE: I'd say, "We read him all his rights, sir," neglecting to point out, of course, that the exposition in question took place while the drug suspect was suspended from the ceiling by a meat hook!
PROFESSOR: Ha! Now that really IS funny. I bet the suspect was even wearing a Speedo, which you had thoughtfully supplied him for the occasion, just like in the movie Running with the Devil.
SUZIE: You know it, sir! Anything to humiliate the beggar who presumes to sell naturally occurring plant substances to a fellow human being.
PROFESSOR: Mind you, it's the kind of thing that we should only laugh about around the water cooler, though... for legal reasons, you understand.
SUZIE: Word.
PROFESSOR: Now, of course, when you're in the field, you may have no access to a meat hook - but the point of the movie still holds: that the good DEA agent will make a suspect talk, Constitution or no Constitution.
NANCY: But doesn't Leslie Bibb end up actually murdering the drug king pin at the end of the movie?
PROFESSOR: Nice move, Ex-lax. You just ruined the movie for everybody in the class.
SUZIE: Oh, no!
PROFESSOR: But you do make a fair point. Torture may indeed work, but there are times when even torture is just not enough.
BOBBY: When is that, Professor?
PROFESSOR: Well, suppose that an American has been selling naturally occurring plants to his fellow Americans for decades and decades, in brazen defiance of the American Sharia against the use of Mother Nature's pharmacy.
JUNE: Oh, that's disgusting!
PROFESSOR: I know, right? And when a citizen thus makes a mockery of our belief in the evilness of naturally occurring substances, there's sometimes nothing left for us to do but to murder them.
BOBBY: Serves them right.
PROFESSOR: Still, we must remember that murder, technically speaking, is not condoned by that pesky Constitution of ours.
That's why it's important that the DEA come together as one single corrupt agency and deny that it's doing anything wrong, while meanwhile trashing the hell out of civil liberties, in ways that conduce to plausible deniability.
Speaking of plausible deniability: I did not say anything in this course that encouraged illegal behavior, did I, class?
DID I, Class?
CLASS: NO, Professor Himmler, you did not!
PROFESSOR: Good for you, class. Now you're catching on! Just be sure to refrain from snickering cynically about our anti-Constitutional predilections until you reach the break room down the hall! In public, the DEA must remain as American as apple pie.
SUZIE: Apple pie suspended by a meat hook, that is!
PROFESSOR: Stop it, Suzie! You're gonna make me laugh before I reach the break room!
Now you too can dangle drug suspects from grappling hooks and shoot them in cold blood while they're sitting across from you, unsuspecting, at their very own kitchen table. Learn from the experts as they teach you how to subvert the US Constitution, consequence free, all in the name of our most righteous and holy Drug War. (First 50 enrollees get free jackboots!)
The drug war is a scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.
For those who want to understand what's going on with the drug war from a philosophical point of view, I recommend chapter six of "Eugenics and Other Evils" by GK Chesterton.
Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.
NOW is the time for entheogens -- not (as Strassman and Pollan seem to think) at some future date when materialists have finally wrapped their minds around the potential usefulness of drugs that experientially teach compassion.
Musk and co. want to make us more robot-like with AI, when they should be trying to make us more human-like with sacred medicine. Only humans can gain creativity from plant medicine. All AI can do is harvest the knowledge that eventually results from that creativity.
DEA Stormtroopers should be held responsible for destroying American Democracy. Abolish the American Gestapo.
Big pharma drugs are designed to be hard to get off. Doctors write glowingly of "beta blockers" for anxiety, for instance, but ignore that fact that such drugs are hard -- and even dangerous -- to get off. We have outlawed all sorts of less dependence-causing alternatives.
Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.
In "Psychedelic Refugee," Rosemary Leary writes:
"Fueled by small doses of LSD, almost everything was amusing or weird." -- Rosemary Leary
In a non-brainwashed world, such testimony would suggest obvious ways to help the depressed.
What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.
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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