esterday, my power was out for 12 hours thanks to the fall of less than an inch of icy rain. This means I could post no essays, read no ebooks and contact no followers. I could not even play computer chess while I waited for the power company to repair the lines, given the meager power of my computer battery, which generally lasts just long enough for me to power down the system safely after an outage. True, I could use my phone for some activities for the first few hours of the service interruption, but it soon lost power too and then I was truly left to my own devices - my own battery-powered devices, that is, of which, as it turns out, I have precious few indeed. I found myself back in the 18th century as far as modern conveniences were concerned. "No boats, no lights, no motor cars," as the '60s theme song laments. "Not a single luxury." Okay, I did have a motor car, but you get the point. The entire technological revolution was suddenly a nullity as far as I was concerned. I was on my own.
It now occurred to me that the great electronic advancements of the last 50 years were like a Crystal Palace erected in a marsh. The structure itself was magnificent, but it was built on shaky ground, to put it mildly. As Annie Jacobsen reports in "Nuclear War: A Scenario1," just one well-placed thermonuclear explosion in the atmosphere over North America would set the United States back 200 years, technologically speaking, by frying our computers and smart phones. If it takes our utility companies an entire day to deal with some mildly inclement weather, imagine the downtime that would be brought about by a fried grid. The social impact of such a catastrophe does not bear thinking of, and I will spare the reader any morbid speculation on the topic. My point here is simply to show how far the politicians of our time have steered the American mind away from things that really matter: above all, the fact that we are all living under a nuclear sword of Damocles that could fall at any moment.
And how do politicians keep our minds off of the things that really matter in life? By beating the drums about immigrants, foreigners and, above all, drugs. They demonize the very substances whose widespread strategic use is clearly the only way to pull the "other-hating" species known as Homo sapiens back from the brink of mutual assured destruction via thermonuclear weapons. And there is proof that this could work. We would see this if we stopped cynically laughing about the Flower Children of the '60s and their Summer of Love and realized that they had the right goal in mind: namely, a world of universal brother and sisterhood. Had the government supported their effort to use drugs strategically on behalf of that goal, rather than drafting drug laws for the express purpose of locking them up and throwing away the key, the doomsday clock might not be "closer than ever" to Armageddon, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists declares today, just "89 seconds to midnight2."
The UK had its own drug-inspired Summer of Love in the 1990s, when ravers were using Ecstasy3. Here are some quotes from DJs active at the time.
"It was the first time that black-and-white people had integrated on a level... and everybody was one." -- DJ Ray Keith.
"It was black and white, Asian, Chinese, all up in one building," -- MC GQ.
"Everyone's loving each other, man, they're not hating." - DJ Mampi Swift.
In a sane world, the headline here would read: "British ravers find unprecedented peace, love and understanding with the help of Ecstasy!!!"
But in the cynical minds of the British MPs, the headline was simply: "British ravers found to be using dirty evil rotten DRUGS!!!"
Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth! Instead of praising the peaceful dance floors as a consummation devoutly to be wished, British MPs sought to shut them down. Who needs universal peace, love and understanding, after all? Who needs all that touchy-feely stuff? So they cracked down on Ecstasy use, after which the UK dance floors erupted into alcohol-fueled violence. Concert organizers suddenly needed to hire special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces. And why? Because UK politicians had come to believe their own campaign rhetoric, that all that matters are immigrants, foreigners and drugs. Nuclear annihilation thanks to a hate-filled humanity? Not so much.
This is why I say to Drug Warriors what Colonel Jessup said to Lieutenant Kaffee in the movie "A Few Good Men": "You can't handle the truth!" You can't handle the fact that we are on the brink of nuclear annihilation thanks to your hatred of peace, love and understanding. Speaking of which, drug pundits like Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan criticize the supposedly irresponsible hippies of the '60s, but what were the Republicans doing during this time? Answer: they were demonizing anyone who did not believe in the zealous pursuit of thermonuclear weapons. The chief complaint against Robert Oppenheimer brought by Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, amounted to the fact that the physicist had moral scruples about such weapons. In the spirit of the times, such namby-pamby sentiment pegged one as a communist and hence as a security risk4. This is the hate-filled backstory that the drug-war apologists ignore when they trash the Flower Children as irresponsible dreamers.
When hysterical Drug Warriors tell us that drug use is a matter of national security, they are right, but for the wrong reasons. It is common psychological sense that we require the widespread but informed use of entheogenic drugs to help screw our species' head back on straight. Unfortunately, common sense is at a premium these days, not just because of drug-war ideology but thanks to modern science itself, which, as David Bohm shows, is based on the idea that the world is made up of parts and that the pursuit of truth requires one to abstract oneself from the big picture, hence the proliferation of academic specialties that develop their own mutually exclusive vocabularies and seldom bother to talk to each other. This is ironic to Bohm, because both quantum theory and the theory of relativity have at least one thing in common. They both show us that the world cannot be understood except in context, that the whole does matter.
Speaking of this modern focus on parts rather than the whole, Bohm writes:
"A similar trend has already begun to dominate in psychology. Thus we arrive at the very odd result that in the study of life and mind, which are just the fields in which formative cause acting in undivided and unbroken flowing movement is most evident to experience and observation, there is now the strongest belief in the fragmentary atomistic approach to reality.5"
That this has actually happened in the field of psychology is abundantly clear. It is shown in the fact that materialist scientists lack all common sense in evaluating the potential benefits of psychoactive drugs. They are blind to all psychological benefits of drug use. They can see, for instance, no use for laughing gas in helping the chronically depressed. Laughing gas! Readers Digest has known for 100 years that "laughter is the best medicine," but modern doctors do not care how much a patient laughs while using laughing gas, nor how much they look forward to use and thereby reap the health benefits of positive anticipation. These materialists place their faith in the inhumane ideology of behaviorism, which tells them to pay attention only to what can be measured and quantified, that the overall picture means nothing, and that even patient testimony will not tell you if they are "really" happy, that only a scientist can make that call6.
It is no wonder that this attitude has staying power in the field of psychology, because once we renounce this dogmatic reductionism, it becomes blazingly clear that any drug that elates is an antidepressant. The Drug Warrior will tell us that we will never be able to use such substances wisely and safely, but this is a defeatist statement that slanders human creativity. The statement only seems to be true because a reform in our drug attitudes requires a whole new way of thinking about the subject, a shamanic view in which drug deaths are considered no different than traffic deaths: regrettable outcomes that oblige us to educate those who engage in said activities, not to arrest them. Meanwhile, we have to realize that the experts when it comes to the use of psychoactive drugs are the users themselves, not materialist scientists. To put scientists in charge of deciding if mind and mood medicine works is like putting Dr. Spock of Star Trek in charge of deciding if hugging works. "This hugging of yours is highly illogical, Captain. But perhaps it is 'working' on some biochemical basis that I have yet to understand. I am afraid that many well-funded studies will be required to determine if hugging actually works."
In short, Dr. Spock 'just doesn't get it,' and neither do modern scientists when it comes to drugs. And it is not because the truth is hard to see: to the contrary, the truth is glaringly obvious. Drugs can help! They can help us survive, both individually and as a species. It is simply that Drug Warriors cannot handle that truth. They cannot handle a world of peace, love and understanding, where people can live with themselves and do not feel the need to go out into the world and cause trouble. They cannot handle a world wherein Mexicans and Chinese and Russians are our brothers and our sisters just as surely as are the men and women who live next-door. They cannot handle a world in which touchy-feely things like love actually matter.
Rodney King famously asked the American people, "Can't we all get along?", after the L.A. riots of the '90s.
The Drug Warriors' answer to that question is: "Not if WE can help it!"
AFTERWORD
Bohm explains how our belief in a world made up of separate, unrelated parts can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, a habit of thought that is difficult to transcend. He asks us to consider the case of a man who believes that the world is out to get him. His mistrustful attitude will inspire contempt and hatred on the part of others, and so the man will consider that his belief about humanity has been shown to be true by the behaviors that he observes in the real world. "See?", says this man, "People are behaving just like I thought that they would!" Whereas, in reality, the man has essentially created a world in which the people he meets will be disposed to dislike him and to treat him accordingly.
Bohm goes on from this analogy to criticize the modern tendency to consider theories (even his own) as being absolutely and unconditionally true. For when we assume the absolute truth and applicability of a theory, we create a world in which our theory seems to be proven by everything that happens to us, just as the man mentioned above finds that his own cynical philosophy of life is "proven" by every problematic engagement that he has with people in the world. As Bohm writes in his 1980 book "Wholeness and the Implicate Order":
"If we supposed that theories gave true knowledge, corresponding to 'reality as it is', then we would have to conclude that Newtonian theory was true until around 1900, after which it suddenly became false, while relativity and quantum theory suddenly became the truth. Such an absurd conclusion does not arise, however, if we say that all theories are insights, which are neither true nor false but, rather, clear in certain domains, and unclear when extended beyond these domains."
There are endless creative ways to ward off addiction if all psychoactive medicines were at our disposal. The use of the drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin could combat the psychological downsides of withdrawal by providing strategic "as-needed" relief.
Doc to Franklin: "I'm sorry, Ben, but I see no benefits of opium use under my microscope. The idea that you are living a fulfilled life is clearly a mistake on your part. If you want to be scientific, stop using opium and be scientifically depressed like the rest of us."
Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.
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."
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.
Scientists cannot tell us if psychoactive drugs are worth the risk any more than they can tell us if free climbing is worth the risk, or horseback riding or target practice or parkour.
The Drug War is the ultimate example of strategic fearmongering by self-interested politicians.
In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.
Trump supports the drug war and Big Pharma: the two forces that have turned me into a patient for life with dependence-causing antidepressants. Big Pharma makes the pills, and the drug war outlaws all viable alternatives.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
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, You Can't Handle the Truth!: why drug warriors ignore the obvious, published on February 7, 2025 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)
esterday, my power was out for 12 hours thanks to the fall of less than an inch of icy rain. This means I could post no essays, read no ebooks and contact no followers. I could not even play computer chess while I waited for the power company to repair the lines, given the meager power of my computer battery, which generally lasts just long enough for me to power down the system safely after an outage. True, I could use my phone for some activities for the first few hours of the service interruption, but it soon lost power too and then I was truly left to my own devices - my own battery-powered devices, that is, of which, as it turns out, I have precious few indeed. I found myself back in the 18th century as far as modern conveniences were concerned. "No boats, no lights, no motor cars," as the '60s theme song laments. "Not a single luxury." Okay, I did have a motor car, but you get the point. The entire technological revolution was suddenly a nullity as far as I was concerned. I was on my own. 
You have been reading an article entitled, You Can't Handle the Truth!: why drug warriors ignore the obvious, published on February 7, 2025 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)
