Just a quick message to let our readership know that we are doing everything we can to fight the Drug War virus. The first and most important step is to recognize the symptoms of an infected person:
1) Pathological obstinacy. Those infected with the Drug War Virus stubbornly fail to recognize that criminalizing medicinal plants is the unconstitutional enforcement of Christian Science with respect to psychological healing.
2) Selective amnesia. Infected persons conveniently "forget" that Mother Nature's plants and fungi are the birth right of every human being under the natural law to which the American Declaration appealed in arguing against British injustice.
3) Logical confusion. The infected person also fails to realize that all the problems of drug abuse are either directly brought about or greatly exacerbated by the Drug War itself.
What can you do?
The key is to practice social distancing. Keep at least 6 feet away from every known or suspected Drug Warrior and their specious arguments. In so doing, you will underscore your contempt for the shoddy reasoning and fascist tendencies apparent in every carrier of the Drug War virus.
June 15, 2022
Not to nitpick, but there's another symptom of the Drug War virus, namely the tendency to forget that HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their best stories while drinking coca wine, that Plato's views of the afterlife were inspired by the psychedelic kykeon at Eleusis, that Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius were big fans of the opium 1 poppy, and that the entire Vedic religion was inspired by psychoactive plant medicine. Then there's the fact that the psychoactive medicine that we demonize today could be used to fight Alzheimer's 2 disease, fight depression, increase worker productivity, increase one's love of music, increase one's appreciation of the natural world, etc.
If folks forget all this, it is a sure sign that they have contracted the Drug War virus.
In other words the Drug War virus is far more insidious than anyone has yet to fully appreciate. So remember to social distance yourself -- and to buy a mask so that you can place it over the infected person's mouth the next time these anti-nature blasphemers start demonizing psychoactive botanicals without regard for the context of use.
Author's Follow-up: August 14, 2022
A new more virulent strain of the virus has been reported in Children of the Drug War, a chilling collection of drug-war essays compiled by Damon Barrett 3 . It appears that once-civilized countries are now denying morphine 4 to children in hospice, in servile and dogmatic fealty to the drug-war ideology which says that such demonized substances can have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, for any reason whatsoever. In other words, the virus is causing severe neurological problems in those it attacks -- otherwise so-called civilized human beings would never be so heartless as to knowingly allow dying children to suffer severe ongoing pain for no good reason whatsoever.
"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud
We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.
Jim Hogshire described sleep cures that make physical withdrawal from opium close to pain-free. As for "psychological addiction," there are hundreds of elating drugs that could be used to keep the ex-user's mind from morbidly focusing on a drug whose use has become problematic for them.
America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of drug dependency. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing drugs of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.
"The Oprah Winfrey Fallacy": the idea that a statistically insignificant number of cases constitutes a crisis, provided ONLY that the villain of the piece is something that racist politicians have demonized as a "drug."
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses.
Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.
Getting off some drugs could actually be fun and instructive, by using a variety of other drugs to keep one's mind off the withdrawal process. But America believes that getting off a drug should be a big moral battle.
Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.
It's funny to hear fans of sacred plants indignantly insisting that their meds are not "drugs." They're right in a way, but actually NO substances are "drugs." Calling substances "drugs" is like referring to striking workers as "scabs." It's biased terminology.
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.