ne of my several shortcomings as a writer -- of which there are no doubt several -- shortcomings I mean, not writers -- is that I assume that my readers know what the hell I'm talking about when they actually do not. Sound familiar, eh? I thus have a tendency to write tersely in cases where a little prolixity would go a long way. Go on, admit it, you were probably thinking the exact same thing, weren't you? Go on, admit it, I won't bite.
With this in mind, I would like to devote this entire post to the task of fleshing out what I mean when I say that America's Drug War represents a kind of Christian Science Sharia—a claim that I have made in passing in at least ten of my essays over the last year, assuming that I was merely stating a commonplace. Then a friend of mine politely pointed out that some of my readers—bless their hearts—might not be familiar with the theology of Christian Science, nay, with the politically charged connotations of the word «sharia» itself as disapprovingly used in the 21st century by a xenophobic Westerner, and that it was therefore incumbent upon me to dilate on the topic at hand.
This task of clarification is crucial because once one understands the statement that «the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia»—the evil of that quixotic project becomes apparent and we develop an immunity to the Drug War propaganda that pervades Western society, not least in the form of cop shows and Drug War movies, both of which promote the once uniquely Western view that Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines can bring about nothing but madness and despair. Briefly then, though hopefully not tersely.
Christian Science is a religion founded in late 19-century America by Mary Baker (aka Mary Baker Eddy), after she discovered what she took to be the overlooked healing power of spirituality as demonstrated by Jesus in the New Testament. She came to believe that physical suffering was an illusion, that it had no objective reality, and that it could be overcome by faith alone. Given this theological understanding, many modern-day Christian Scientists, like Baker herself before them, feel no need for modern medical intervention and seek to do without its various ministrations (including prescriptions and surgery), sometimes with tragic results. In the 1980s, there were sensational media coverage of Christian Scientists being charged with child abuse for allowing their children to die of treatable diseases due to the parents' religious conviction that healing could come about through spiritual intervention alone.
Having thus briefly explained the Christian Science outlook on suffering, I trust that it is apparent why the Drug War represents the enforcement of Christian Science precepts. The Drug War says, in effect, that human beings should not -- and indeed must not - use mother nature's medicines in an attempt to improve their psychological well-being. And this is simply the doctrine of Mary Baker herself with respect to illness. It is a religious belief, especially as many Drug Warriors suggest that the proper alternative to so-called drug use is to believe in the Christian God. Yet there is no scientific reason why we should not use the plants and fungi of our choice to improve and expand our cognition - there is only the conviction of the Drug Warrior that it is somehow wrong to do so. Of course Drug Warriors who hold this faith have to work constantly to censor history in order to delete counterfactual examples from the past. Thus we read of Benjamin Franklin's creativity, without being told how he used opium to stimulate that creativity. Thus we read of Sigmund Freud's highly prolific work output, without being told how cocaine helped drive him to produce that output. Thus we learn of Francis Crick's great insight in discovering the DNA helix, without being told how he used psychedelics to help achieve that insight.
Having thus established that the Drug War represents the enforcement of Christian Science precepts, I will end my efforts at clarification by defining the word "sharia," both in its original sense and in its generally pejorative modern connotation in the west. We read in Webster's, that "sharia" is:
"the body of formally established sacred law... governing in theory not only religious matters but regulating as well political, economic, civil, criminal, ethical, social, and domestic affairs in Muslim countries."
More to our purpose here is the modern connotation of the word "sharia" in the west, where it conjures images of a police state run by a theocratic government that will brook no dissent and whose laws are emphatically harsh. By thus describing the Drug War as "sharia" in this pejorative sense, I hope to highlight the highly ironic fact that Americans (and westerners in general) are living under the very form of government that they purport to detest, a kind of western "sharia," that subjects them to a set of ultra harsh drug laws (which may soon include the death penalty in America) should they choose to violate the Christian Science doctrine of renouncing Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines when it comes to treating "what ails them," psychologically speaking.
QED, the Drug War is really the enforcement of Christian Science Sharia.
If enough freedom-loving westerners can "get their head around this fact," then we can stop impotently shouting "End the Drug War!" to deaf politicians around the globe and start shouting "End Christian Science Sharia!" instead, thereby revealing to the Drug Warriors that we're "onto" their game and that we know all about their stealth efforts to make us conform with the anti-scientific moral philosophy of the religious reformer popularly known as Mary Baker Eddy.
Author's Follow-up: March 26, 2025
This is not some abstract concern. America will refuse to allow you to earn a living in the States if you are a Christian Science heretic. They do this through the extrajudicial punishment of drug testing, which forbids you to work in America unless you foreswear the benefits of nature's bounty. Of course, these laws are only for the poor. The company owners can do what they will. But then one of the many anti-democratic effects of the Drug War is to emasculate the labor force. What better way to show labor who's in charge than requiring employees to urinate upon demand? Nor is this about uncovering impairment. Impairment need never be found. If drug labs merely find the least trace of a substance of which politicians disapprove, you are no longer allowed to work in the States -- until such time as you renounce your right to mother nature's medicines and of medicines based thereon.
Christian Science
On a superficial level, Christian Science may be seen as a drug-hating religion and so its very existence tends to support the effort of drug warriors to outlaw godsend psychoactive medicines. On a deeper level, however, the religion's founder Mary Baker-Eddy was fighting not so much against drugs as against the failure of modern science to acknowledge the power of the human mind. In Mary's case, of course, this was the mind as influenced by Jesus Christ, but yet she recognized a principle with which even a non-believer can agree and which, moreover, is clearly true in light of drug user reports from the Vedic days to the present: namely, that the human mind has a great as-yet untapped power to control one's outlook on life and to therefore positively affect overall human health to some as-yet undetermined degree. Mary does seem to have overestimated the mind's ability to cure the body, of course, but it is worth noting in her defense that the government has outlawed the very research that would be required to determine exactly where the line should be drawn between the mind-curable condition and that which is beyond the help of this sort of holistic healing.
We would need to be able to use psychoactive medicines freely in order to generate the sort of user reports that could help us answer such questions adequately. And this would be research of the greatest philosophical importance, because it would essentially be a search into the true nature of mind-body dualism.
Mind-body dualism is like the weather when it comes to the field of philosophy: everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Well, here is a chance for philosophers to launch a first-hand investigation of the interaction between mind and body and to thereby determine the nature of each -- as well as the nature of the interactive whole which they in some sense comprise. Philosophers just have to decide: Do they want to perform the kind of hands-on philosophic research that William James advocated viz. altered states, or do they want to keep pretending that the drug war does not exist and that it has no downsides for philosophical research. For the opposite is so obviously true: namely, that drug prohibition forbids us from performing the kind of research that could blow the whole "mind-body" problem wide open from the western point of view and so inspire whole new fields of research.
Drug Testing is an anti-American attack on freedom. It destroyed the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. Its existence means that enemies of the drug war are not allowed to work in the United States of America. That is cruel and unusual punishment, especially when you consider that it's handed down, not by a court, but by a faceless process that has been outsourced by the government to American business.
Sure, it is acceptable to test for actual impairment in certain well-defined situations, but that is not what drug testing is about these days. Drug testing is all about rooting out good workers who happen to use substances about which colonialist politicians disapprove. It is so manifestly evil from a freedom-loving point of view that one scarcely knows how to begin arguing against it. But it's apparently what the drug warriors want: they want to leverage our fear of drugs to destroy American freedoms. They've destroyed the 4th Amendment with drug testing. Meanwhile our religious rights are being trampled by DC bureaucrats who absurdly claim to know whether our religions are "sincere" or not. And Oregon pols launched a plan in early 2024 to outlaw free speech about drugs.
WAKE UP! Drug testing and the drug war in general is all about destroying American democracy -- and democracy around the world, while we're at it. It is Christian Science Uber Alles -- even if the vast majority of drug warriors have never even heard of the drug-hating religion of Mary Baker Eddy.
The Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. It is therefore a crime against religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate.
Prohibition is a crime against religious freedom.
William James found religious experience in substance use. See his discussion of what he calls "the anesthetic revelation" in his book entitled "The Varieties of Religious Experience."
The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
The Drug War violates religious freedom by putting bureaucrats in charge of deciding if a religion is 'sincere' or not. That is so absurd that one does not know whether to laugh or cry. No one in government is capable of determining whether the inner states that I achieve with psychoactive medicine are religious or not. This is why Milton Friedman was so wrong when he said in 1972 that there are good people on both sides of the drug war debate. WRONG! There are those who are more than ready to take away my religious liberty and those who are not. If the former wish to be called 'good,' they will first need a refresher course in American democracy and religious freedom. They need to renounce their Christian Science theocracy and let folks like myself worship using the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions in the past. Until they do that, do not expect me to praise the very people who have launched an inquisition against my form of experiencing the divine.
There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
If the depressed patient laughs, that means nothing. Materialists have to see results under a microscopic or they will never sign off on a therapy.
That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.
A pharmacologically savvy drug dealer would have no problem getting someone off one drug because they would use the common sense practice of fighting drugs with drugs. But materialist doctors would rather that the patient suffer than to use such psychologically obvious methods.
The so-called "herbs" that witches used were drugs, in the same way that "meds" are drugs. If academics made that connection, the study of witchcraft would shed a lot of light on the fearmongering of modern prohibitionists.
Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.
Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."
The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.
The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful. Wrong. Substance demonization is wrong, root and branch. It always causes more suffering than freedom.
The sad fact is that America regularly arrests people whose only crime is that they are keeping performance anxiety at bay... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
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 the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia published on June 30, 2020 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)
ne of my several shortcomings as a writer -- of which there are no doubt several -- shortcomings I mean, not writers -- is that I assume that my readers know what the hell I'm talking about when they actually do not. Sound familiar, eh? I thus have a tendency to write tersely in cases where a little prolixity would go a long way. Go on, admit it, you were probably thinking the exact same thing, weren't you? Go on, admit it, I won't bite. 
You have been reading an article entitled, Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia published on June 30, 2020 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)
