In the age of the opium -smoking Marco Polo, there were no such things as drugs in the evil sense in which we use the word today. "Drugs" just referred to all body-affecting substances, from sugar to opium . A Reddit on drugs could not have existed at that time, not just because the Internet did not exist, but because the topic of "drugs" would have been far too broad and open-ended to foster a meaningful discussion.
The only reason we have a "drugs" Reddit today is because racist American politicians began redefining the word "drugs" in 1914 to mean "evil psychoactive substances," this despite the fact that the substances in question have been used responsibly for millennia by other cultures and even inspired entire religions. The Vedic religion was inspired by Soma. Plato got his views of the afterlife from the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries1. And Mesoamerican religions developed entire cosmogonies based around their use of the coca plant and so-called "magic mushrooms." But the history-challenged Drug Warriors censored all such factoids, and encouraged us to do the same.
And we have done so. We have fallen for their demonization campaign, accepted their politically strategic redefinition of the word "drugs," and created popular Reddits like this one to discuss the topic of "drugs" from the unscientific and fearmongering point of view of our racist forebears.
And what was the political purpose behind the Drug Warrior's redefinition of the term "drugs" as a pejorative epithet? It was to punish and marginalize those minorities of whom the beer-swilling and tobacco-smoking Drug Warriors disapproved and to create a conservative Christian society ruled by militarized police forces.
And that strategy worked beyond their wildest dreams, as the Drug War soon became America's number-one export, as country after country gladly followed suit in outlawing godsend plant medicine. And that's not surprising, really. If the one country based on natural rights says that the citizen no longer has a right to the bounty of Mother Nature's pharmacy, then we cannot expect less-enlightened countries to stand up for such rights, especially since it's hard for any government to pass up a chance to monitor their own citizens more closely.
If anyone's searching for proof of the Drug War's hideous impact on democracy, they have only to look at the election of Donald Trump.
In 2016, there were more than five million Americans who had lost the right to vote, most of them minorities and most because of so-called drug offenses. Russian interference may have helped push Trump over the top, but the real reason for his election was the sidelining of millions of voters thanks to the Drug War, which was implemented for that very purpose: to sideline minority voters and empower law-and-order conservatives. And now this same Trump is running again, this time on a platform of executing those minorities whom his drug-warrior predecessors were content with merely disenfranchising.
That's why I'm looking forward to a day when the Drugs Reddit disappears, when the world stops demonizing psychoactive substances in lockstep with our racist forebears, and the word "drugs" once again becomes a neutral judgment-free term embracing all substances from sugar to opium , a world in which we stop demonizing substances for political purposes and start learning about them instead, with a view toward developing novel therapies and safe use guidelines for all time-honored plant medicines.
Editor's Note (Nov. 2021): Of course I was banned from the Drugs Reddit shortly after posting these comments. But that only shows you that I'm on the right track. I'd be suspicious if I wasn't banned, considering the fact that most westerners have been taught from grade school to despise plant-based psychoactive medicine, to call it "junk" and "dope," and to "just say no to Mother Nature's godsend medicines!" Why should the moderators at the Drugs Reddit be an exception to the rule? They've been taught since kindergarten to tilt at the politically created windmill of "drugs" and I expect to have no more success in changing their minds than the curate had in getting Don Quixote to stand down in his battle against his own imaginary foes.
Just be thankful that I'm not paranoid, because then I would also suspect the moderators of purposefully promoting the fearmongering status quo viz. drugs in order to curry favor with Big Pharma 23 , from whom they (the moderators) might even be taking kickbacks!
But I suppose that the principle of Occam's Razor obliges me to assume that the Drugs Reddit moderators are merely dupes of the Drug War ideology like almost everybody else these days, thoroughly bamboozled westerners who, having been successfully brainwashed in the Cult of the Drug War with its lies (about plant medicine frying brains, etc.), now hold inanimate substances responsible for all the evils of the world.
Author's Follow-up: October 3, 2022
In a way, though, the Drug War makes Reddit "drug" groups inevitable, because by outlawing all of Mother Nature's godsend psychoactive medicines, the Drug War creates problems to talk about in Reddit groups. Without the Drug War, in a land where Mother Nature was free and pharma-savvy shaman 4 were free to use them strategically on behalf of clients, addiction would not exist, or else would be embraced in cases where it fit a person's lifestyle, as coca fit the lifestyle of HG Wells, opium fit the lifestyle of Benjamin Franklin, and coffee and beer fit the lifestyles of modern drug-war Americans.
When fully armed with Mother Nature's vast array of psychoactive medicine, a creative shaman (who is both pharmacologically and socioculturally savvy) could help a client "get off" any drug whatsoever, without making it the great moral struggle which the modern 'addiction expert' expects it to become. For the shaman's goal would be different than that of the modern 'addiction therapist,' who seeks the Christian Science outcome of making the patient 'sober' as that term is hypocritically defined by Drug Warriors. The shaman's goal would be to give the 'client' what THEY want in life, whether it be self-transcendence or merely the ability to stand up in front of a crowd without 'choking.' He would fight conditions like depression in ways that the Drug War could never even imagine, with a multitude of therapies that become obvious to us once we stop demonizing psychoactive medicine. He might have the depressive drop by for weekly DMT sessions, using cocaine 56 the next week, opium 7 the next week and so on, according to a schedule that will not addict the client but merely give them something positive to look forward to, which is the best way to beat any depression. Meanwhile, the patient's weekday life could be emotionally, spiritually and vocationally enhanced by the daily chewing of the coca leaf, a benign custom that bound the Peruvian Indian culture of happy camaraderie together for millennia, in the same way that coffee unites the westerner in their culture of grim competition.
Author's Follow-up:
June 20, 2025
I try to avoid Reddit these days entirely -- at least when it comes to the subject of drugs. Almost every one of my submissions on the topic is followed up within an hour or so by my receipt of a creepy anonymous automated reply in Gmail, advising me, in effect, that I am being censored by Reddit for having spoken the truth. That platform's reliance on ham-fisted and anonymous bots is just a real turnoff to me. The platform "out-Kafka's Kafka."
I have to laugh at those who once told me how the Internet was going to empower free speech. They wish. It seems to me rather that technology has given mainstream Americans new ways to "weed out" viewpoints that they might find unfamiliar and/or uncomfortable. Today we outlaw new ideas in advance with bots and so create online echo chambers. How? By hiring a brainwashed and philosophically clueless site coder to set the parameters for the debate in advance. Does the positive talk of drug use offend the status quo? No worries: mainstream sites just outlaw all such references.
Many psychonauts (like Terence McKenna) praise psychedelics while demonizing other psychoactive substances. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason for some people in some circumstance.
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
Yeah. That's why it's so pretentious and presumptuous of People magazine to "fight for justice" on behalf of Matthew Perry, as if Perry would have wanted that.
Everyone's biggest concern is the economy? Is nobody concerned that Trump has promised to pardon insurrectionists and get revenge on critics? Is no one concerned that Trump taught Americans to doubt democracy by questioning our election fairness before one single vote was cast?
If they're going to throw doctors in jail for prescribing too much pain medication, they should also throw them in jail for prescribing too LITTLE.
First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.
"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann
Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity. It is the outlawing of our right to take care of our own health.
When people tell us there's nothing to be gained from using mind-improving drugs, they are embarrassing themselves. Users benefit from such drugs precisely to the extent that they are educated and open-minded. Loudmouth abstainers are telling us that they lack these traits.
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.
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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