In yesterday's essay, I reached out to overseas readers, asking them to update me on how drug prohibition is playing out in their home countries.1 I did so in order to demonstrate that the prohibitionist mindset knows no boundaries. Everywhere we look, it has empowered logically challenged bureaucrats, judges, prosecutors and law enforcement personnel to behave inhumanely in the name of "fighting drugs." In doing so, such professionals demonstrate their embarrassing ignorance of world history. They do not realize that drug use has inspired entire religions, as in the case of the Vedic and hence the Hindu religion.2 They have apparently never heard of William James, the Father Of American Psychology, who was convinced of the philosophical significance of so-called altered states.3 They have apparently never heard of ethnobotanist Richard Schultes4 or chemist Alexander Shulgin5 or drug researchers like Stanislav Grof6 and James Fadiman.7 And so they set forth in ignorant bliss on a superstitious campaign to destroy basic freedoms under the supposition that "anything goes" in our efforts to push back against the inanimate scapegoat called "drugs." This is especially true in the legal realm. A modern society's legislative ability to punish a drug user seems to be limited only by the imagination of their prosecutors. The M.O. is always the same, however: come up with any punishment that you please for a drug user, and then retroactively give that punishment the fig leaf of propriety with the choplogic of your choice. The judge will be sure to see things your way provided only that your goal is to "send a message" to those "evil" users of psychoactive substances.
Self-medication is not a dirty word. It has always been a fundamental right to take care of one's own health -- until the medical establishment demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.
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.
The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?
I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.
Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."
Amphetamines are "meds" when they help kids think more clearly but they are "drugs" when they help adults think more clearly. That shows you just how bewildered Americans are when it comes to drugs.
If there was free speech in America, we would see billboards demanding freedom to use psychoactive substances for religious purposes, or to heal, or to follow-up on the research of William James regarding the nature of human consciousness.
The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.
The goal of drug-law reform should be to outlaw prohibition. Anything short of that, and our basic rights will always be subject to veto by fearmongers. Outlawing prohibition would restore the Natural Law of Jefferson, which the DEA scorned in 1987 with its raid on Monticello.
I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.
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