Thanks for the excellent article on drugs. With respect, however, you overlooked a number of the most important victims of the Drug War. The Drug War is a war on the depressed, it is a war on religion, it is a war on scientific freedom, etc. Here are some details:
1) By outlawing "drugs," we commit millions of the depressed and anxious around the globe to unnecessary lives of misery.
2) By outlawing "drugs," we shunt the chronically depressed off onto highly addictive Big Pharma meds, that they must take every day of their life, some of them (like Effexor 1 ) more addictive than heroin 2 (source: NIH) In fact, 1 in 4 American women take Big Pharma 34 meds every day of their life (source: Julie Holland), drugs that I can tell you from personal experience tranquilize rather than inspire -- a fact that makes illegal drug use the SANE choice, not an aberration.
3) By outlawing "drugs," we outlaw religions. The UDV had to fight the DEA all the way to the Supreme Court to use ayahuasca in its rituals -- and the DEA is still going after religions that are trying to use the drug (or rather drug mixture). Even as I write, the DEA is trying to stop a church in Florida from using ayahuasca.
I have placed "drugs" in quotation marks, because in Drug War Newspeak, the term has come to mean: "substances of which pharmacologically clueless politicians disapprove, which we should NEVER take," as distinguished from "meds," which we're told we should REMEMBER to take, preferably every day of our lives.
You quote Milton Friedman as saying that "men of good will" may disagree about drug legalization 5 . This only proves that Milton Friedman did not understand the insidious nature of prohibition. He probably thought that prohibition just keeps some hedonists from enjoying their poison of choice. What it actually does is ban not just entire religions, but the very religious impulse itself! The Vedic religion was inspired by Soma, a psychedelic drug -- so there would be no modern Hinduism if the DEA had been active in the Indus Valley in 1500 BC. Plato got his view of the afterlife from drinking the psychedelic kykeon at Eleusis. And the philosophy of William James was deeply influenced by his use of laughing gas 6 , which taught him that "there are more things in heaven and earth" than were dreamt of in his philosophy.
But the Drug War says no to such researches. It says no to medical research. Why? Because of the Drug War ideology which falsely tells us that criminalized substances can have no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, in any dose. But the fact is there are no substances of that kind -- and to say so is to give up on science. Even cyanide has positive uses.
The Drug Warriors have us all arguing on the back foot, because they have been demonizing drugs for 100 years now, teaching us to fear them rather than to understand them. This propaganda has been accomplished mainly, first by indoctrinating children in Christian Science ideology toward drugs and second, by keeping the media and academia from ever talking about any POSITIVE USES OF DRUGS. They have thereby censored science -- because almost every modern treatise on psychology and mind completely ignores the fact that we have outlawed all the medicines that could give us something to say on those topics.
Friedman is dead wrong. The problems with the Drug War are manifold. As a chronic depressive, I take this personally, because the Drug Warrior has made me go my entire life now without godsend meds for depression. So, no, I do not consider Drug Warriors to be people of good will -- I consider them to be brainwashed at best -- and brainwashers at worst.
You might have also mentioned how the Drug War overthrows natural law, for John Locke told us that we have a right to the use of the land and all that lies therein. Yet Reagan sent the DEA stomping onto Monticello 7 in 1987 to confiscate the founding father's poppy plants. This is not, to me, a topic upon which reasonable people can disagree, this is simple injustice and the overthrow of freedoms that had been painfully prised from despots over centuries.
Finally, you do not sufficiently point out that drugs can be used for GOOD! MDMA 8 brought peace, love and understanding to the British dance floor in the '90s. That's one of the outcomes of drug use that the Drug Warrior never discusses. Instead, they cracked down on Ecstasy -- with the result that concert goers became drunk and violent and organizers had to hire special forces troops to police concert venues (see the documentary "United Nation" by concert promoter Terry Stone).
January 28, 2023
Brian refers to Bandow's work as an 'article,' but it is actually a lengthy and highly annotated paper. So when Bandow fails to mention things like the Drug War's censorship of scientists or its affect on the depressed, it is apparently not an oversight. He has just not thought of these matters, perhaps because he has been convinced by a lifetime of Drug War propaganda that "drugs" really do have no positive uses and so the best we can do is support the individual's right to self-harm. This, of course, is an exaggeration of his nuanced viewpoint, yet it does catch the general tenor of his observations, so far are they from highlighting the many positive uses (both potential and historical) of so-called "drugs." Like most libertarians, he resents government interference in private lives, yet seems to assume that if such interference WERE permissible, then "drugs" would be one of the first things that government would indeed be obliged to "crack down on."
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.
Cop and detective shows are loaded with subtle drug war propaganda, including lines like, "She had a history of drug use, so..." The implication being that anyone who uses substances that politicians hate cannot be trusted.
The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses.
The fact that some drugs can be addictive is no reason to outlaw drugs. It is a reason to teach safe use and to publicize all the ways that smart people have found to avoid unwanted pharmacological dependency -- and a reason to use drugs to fight drugs.
SWAT raids have increased by 15,000 percent from the late 1970s to today, resulting in 50,000 to 80,000 SWAT raids annually in the US alone. --War On Us
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
After a long life, I have come to the conclusion that when all the establishment is united, it is always wrong. (Harold MacMillan)
Before anyone receives shock therapy -- or the right to assisted suicide -- they should have the option to start using opium or cocaine daily -- in fact, any drug that makes them feel that life is worth living again.
Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
The DEA is still saying that psilocybin has no medical uses and is addictive. They should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for using such lies to keep people from using the gifts of Mother Nature.
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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