just read a tweet in which a certain MLLanzillotta1 claims that he is not pro-drug, he's simply "pro-pragmatism."
This is the usual line of the bamboozled libertarian. They believe with the conservatives that there are, indeed, these horrible things out there called "drugs" that should not be used, but they acknowledge that people are going to use them so (sigh!) we should do our best to help them as needed.
I couldn't agree less with this approach to opposing the Drug War.
Here is the reply I posted on Twitter:
I am pro-drugs, because right now we fry the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them chew the coca leaf. Sobriety is no goal in itself. Most suicides could pass a drug test. The idea that drugs are "bad" is Christian Science.
Folks like MLLanzillotta1 fail to grasp the fact that "drugs" is a political term, not a scientific one, and that medicines like coca and shrooms have inspired entire religions. Nor do they realize that the meds that we classify as "drugs" can do extraordinary things, like cure stuttering overnight (as in the case of Paul Stamets and shrooms), help us envision the DNA helix (Francis Crick and LSD) and inspire great stories (HG Wells and Coca Wine). "Drugs," as MLLanzillotta1 calls them (or rather slanders them) inspired Plato's view of the afterlife. For "drugs" is just modern slang for "substances of which botanically clueless politicians disapprove."
But MLLanzillotta1 has plenty of company. Whenever I talk about such things, I try not to get too excited from the favorable reactions I receive, because I know that most folks hate prohibition for the wrong reason. They think it was a good idea that does not work, or that prohibition is cruel as currently implemented. But they are usually completely ignorant of the fact that the very term "drugs" as used today is a modern invention which proposes a sort of pharmacological dualism, in which we have the evil "drugs" on one side of the extant pharmacopoeia and the sainted "meds" on the other, what Julian Buchanan refers to as drug apartheid.
ML and company are victims of Drug War propaganda. They've been indoctrinated to "hate drugs." They may well have received a teddy bear from DARE as a child for saying no to Mother Nature's godsend medicines. The media then shielded them from stories about POSITIVE uses of "drugs," by featuring "users" as scumbags. We don't see Jules Verne drinking coca wine on TV and in movies: instead we see a scroungy looking "bad guy" in denim "snorting blow" under a dangling light bulb in a cellar with a prostitute on his lap. Then we check the urine of ML and company, not to see if they're impaired, but merely to see if they are Christian Science heretics, using substances of which religion founder Mary Baker Eddy would disapprove.
No wonder ML says to himself: "Yeah, drugs are really bad, indeed!"
But with uninformed friends like these in the anti-prohibition movement, who needs enemies?
I am DEFINITELY pro-drugs -- because it is Big Pharma's "meds," not "drugs," that have addicted me for life, ML.
Meanwhile it's DRUGS like MDMA and psilocybin that could help bring about world peace and end school shootings.
Who is not in favor of that?
Or would we prefer nuclear annihilation to legalizing MDMA, in the same way that we currently prefer frying the brains of the depressed to legalizing the coca leaf?
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.
Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.
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.
The Partnership for a Death Free America is launching a campaign to celebrate the 50th year of Richard Nixon's War on Drugs. We need to give credit where credit's due for the mass arrest of minorities, the inner city gun violence and the civil wars that it's generated overseas.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
SSRIs are created based on the materialist notion that cures should be found under a microscope. That's why science is so slow in acknowledging the benefit of plant medicines. Anyone who chooses SSRIs over drugs like San Pedro cactus is simply uninformed.
If we encourage folks to use antidepressants daily, there is nothing wrong with them using heroin daily. A founder of Johns Hopkins used morphine daily and he not only survived, but he thrived.
The drug war is a big scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.
Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.
Listen to the Drug War Philosopher as he tells you how you can support his work to end the hateful drug war -- and, ideally, put the DEA on trial for willfully lying about godsend medicines! (How? By advertising on this page right c'here!)
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Why I Am Pro Drugs published on October 28, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
just read a tweet in which a certain MLLanzillotta1 claims that he is not pro-drug, he's simply "pro-pragmatism."
You have been reading an article entitled, Why I Am Pro Drugs published on October 28, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)