Welcome to 'What's My Line: Drug War Edition.' Here is your host, Blaze Thunderstone.
Today's mystery guest is Andy from Staten Island, New York. Andy, how are you doing today?
Great, Blaze, thanks.
Let's ask some questions to see if our contestants can figure out what you do for a living. Fire when ready, Mary.
Does your job have anything to do with breaking down doors and throwing grandmothers to the floor?
You might say that, yes.
Very interesting. Steve?
If I begged for mercy while you were ransacking my house, would you be likely to cut me some slack?
Ha, you wish.
I think we'll take that as a no. Harmony, your question, please.
If you broke down my door and I did not immediately get down on the floor, would you shoot me?
Of course. You would have it coming to you, in that case.
Time is up, I am afraid. Mary, what do you think that Andy here does for a living?
It's hard to say, however, I think he might be a member of the Nazi Gestapo.
Oh, close one, Mary, but that is not quite the correct answer. Steve?
Is Andy one of those mindless thugs who goes around enforcing protection rackets for the Mafia?
Oh! Once again, that's very close, but it is not the precise answer that we are looking for. Harmony, what do you think is Andy's job?
Well, if he is not in the Gestapo and he is not part of the Mob... is he one of those DEA agents who destroys houses on a whim and answers to nobody, thereby constituting an abomination in a supposedly free country?
Exactly, Harmony, well done. Yes, Andy is indeed one of those D E A agents who destroys houses on a whim and answers to nobody, thereby constituting an abomination in a supposedly free country!
You have been listening to What's My Line, Drug War edition, with your host, Blaze Thunderstone.
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
Drug prohibition is the perfect racist crime. It brought gunfire to inner cities, yet those who seek to end the gunfire pretend that drug prohibition has nothing to do with it.
The Drug Warriors say: "Don't tread on me! (That said, please continue to tell me what plants I can use, how much pain relief I can get, and whether my religion is true or not.)"
The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
Two of the biggest promoters of the psychedelic renaissance shuffle their feet when you ask them about substance prohibition. Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman just don't get it: prohibition kills.
Rick Strassman reportedly stopped his DMT trials because some folks had bad experiences at high doses. That is like giving up on aspirin because high doses of NSAIDs can kill.
There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.
That's so "drug war" of Rick: If a psychoactive substance has a bad use at some dose, for somebody, then it must not be used at any dose by anybody. It's hard to imagine a less scientific proposition, or one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering.
There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill.
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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