


It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.
Americans have learned nothing but half-truths and lies about cocaine and opium thanks to the total censorship of drug benefits.
In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley
Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.
William James knew that there were substances that could elate. However, it never occurred to him that we should use such substances to prevent suicide. It seems James was blinded to this possibility by his puritanical assumptions.
State-assisted suicide for the depressed is murder in a world in which the state outlaws all substances that could make the depressed wish to live.
Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.
Even if the FDA approved MDMA today, it would only be available for folks specifically pronounced to have PTSD by materialist doctors, as if all other emotional issues are different problems and have to be studied separately. That's just ideological foot-dragging.

(up)