Vice writers are like all Drug Warriors: they write as if a natural psychoactive substance can be justifiably condemned provided only that it causes one single solitary problem for one single solitary person (even if the person in question was massively irresponsible when using said substance). What anti-scientific idiocy! A 2017 study shows that aspirin kills 3,000 people a year, and yet Vice is not writing horror stories to illustrate that fact. Why not? Because Vice authors have an agenda. They're not out to demonize drugs in general, but only those substances that threaten Big Business and the scientistic status quo.
Vice is guilty of what we should henceforth call the "ONE STRIKE YOU'RE OUT" fallacy, which says that a criminalized substance can be dismissed as evil merely because of its association with one single solitary instance of misuse. The fact that adult writers can glibly accept such an idiotic assumption shows how far the Drug War has melted the brains of America's so-called intellectual class.
The British Parliament was guilty of the "One Strike You're Out" fallacy when they broke up the peaceful rave scene in 1995 by cracking down on Ecstasy, merely because the drug had resulted in one single solitary death -- a death which was caused by the Drug War itself because it outlawed objective research into the drug in question, thereby denying safe-use information to the ravers who used it.
That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.
The FDA is not qualified to tell us whether holistic medicines work. They hold such drugs to materialist standards and that's pharmacological colonialism.
Any self-respecting mycologist should denounce the criminalization of mushrooms.
Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
There is something wrong with a country that thinks it can decide what human beings around the world are allowed to ingest.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
Countless millions suffer needlessly in silence because of America's fearmongering about drugs.
This pretend concern for the safety of young drug users is bizarre in a country that does not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
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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