The Drug War is FAR WORSE than a failure. It is the politically inspired demonization of godsend plant medicines that have been used responsibly by other cultures for millennia. Benjamin Franklin loved opium, as did Marcus Aurelius and Marco Polo. Sigmund Freud thought cocaine was a godsend for his depression. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Plutarch were all influenced by the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries. Tribes in MesoAmerica have used psychoactive plants in religious ceremonies for millennia, until they were decimated by the west. The entire Vedic religion was founded to worship a plant medicine called soma.
With this politically incorrect backstory in mind, we can see that the Drug War is actually the enforcement of a religion: the religion of Christian Science, according to which a human being "should" have no need for drugs and should rely instead on the Christian religion for solace and peace of mind. That is, in fact, a religion, however, not a legitimate social policy for a supposedly democratic government.
It is also a violation of Natural Law for a government to tell its citizens that it can't reach down and use the plants that grow at their very feet. Jefferson founded America on Natural Law, after all, following in the footsteps of John Locke who wrote that human beings have a natural right to the use of the Earth "and all that lies therein." That's why Jefferson was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the Founding Father's poppy plants. Unfortunately, Americans were so bamboozled by Drug Warrior censorship and lies at the time (especially the highly mendacious "frying pan" ad) that no one noticed that the invasion in question constituted a coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America.
Nor was the Drug War begun to combat a health crisis, but rather to disfranchise the political enemies of the Drug Warriors. The Drug War, in fact, merely took the place of the discredited poll tax in attempting to marginalize unpopular minorities. Harry Anslinger hounded black singer Billie Holiday to her death, not to prevent her from using heroin but to keep her from singing songs like "Strange Fruit," which was making white America uncomfortable in the 1930s. Richard Nixon created drug laws for the sole purpose of removing his enemies from the voting rolls. That's why his own "Drug War" treated "drug" possession as a felony, since a felony conviction would result in the disfranchisement of the guilty party.
If we must have a Drug War, let's crack down on alcohol and tobacco and punish and threaten anyone who has so much as a TRACE of these substances in their digestive systems. Bar them from work and hunt them down.
Then we'd lock up all the HYPOCRITICAL Drug Warriors and start to educate people to benefit from plant medicine and use it in the safest way possible, rather than to superstitiously demonize it and make it the scapegoat for all social problems. For if the Drug Warrior really wanted Americans to make good decisions, they would ensure that every American had a first-class education, rather than spending all their rhetoric and money on locking up the millions whom those same politicians have failed to properly educate in the first place.
The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.
Morphine can provide a vivid appreciation of mother nature in properly disposed minds. That should be seen as a benefit. Instead, dogma tells us that we must hate morphine for any use.
Using the billions now spent on caging users, we could end the whole phenomena of both physical and psychological addiction by using "drugs to fight drugs." But drug warriors do not want to end addiction, they want to keep using it as an excuse to ban drugs.
Imagine if we held sports to the same safety standard as drugs. There would be no sports at all. And yet even free climbing is legal. Why? Because with sports, we recognize the benefits and not just the downsides.
Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.
The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."
Peyote advocates should be drug legalization advocates. Otherwise, they're involved in special pleading which is bound to result in absurd laws, such as "Plant A can be used in a religion but not plant B," or "Person A can belong to such a religion but person B cannot."
Drug warriors abuse the English language.
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
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 far worse than a failure published on March 5, 2021 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, Why the Drug War is far worse than a failure published on March 5, 2021 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)