I don't mean to scare you, but you are reading an essay by a ghost. Yes, I have been ghosted so often when writing to others about drugs that I believe it is now time for me to embrace the identity that my reluctant interlocutors have tacitly chosen for me. We will all be ghosts soon enough, so I suppose that there is no harm in embracing that condition proactively, as it were. Not that my phantasmal status is going to shut me up, mind. On the contrary, I consider it my first official duty as a ghost to haunt those who have saddled me with this status in the first place, and what better way to do that than by publicizing their neglect of me online? This is not really about payback, however. My real goal in calling these people on the carpet is simply to demonstrate the extent to which drug prohibition has shut down free speech in America on a wide range of important topics.
CNN reporter Lisa Ling has been ghosting me ever since May 13, 2022, when I wrote her to suggest that she should have mentioned the Drug War in her documentary about Chicago gun violence 1 .
See Open Letter to Lisa Ling. BR>
Matthew K. Nock, chair of the Harvard Psychology Department, has been ghosting me since May 11, 2025, when I wrote to suggest that his university's bio about William James should reflect James's interest in altered states.
See How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James.
Mitch Horrowitz, author of "Uncertain Places, has been ghosting me since March 2, 2025, when I wrote to suggest that facts about beneficial drug use are the most "damned" facts in the world today, in the Fortean sense of that word.
See Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation.
Francis Fukuyama has been ghosting me since May 20, 2022, when I wrote him to suggest that the Drug War is the problem with inner-city neighborhoods, not drugs. Liquor and drug prohibition brought gunfire to American streets, not drugs.
See Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama.
San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins has been ghosting me since November 8, 2023, when I wrote her suggesting that drug prohibition is the problem 2 , not the drug dealers whom she makes such a fuss about catching. She should do us a favor and arrest all the Drug Warriors who set up all this violence in the first place, first with liquor prohibition and then with substance prohibition.
See Prohibitionists Never Learn.
Variety Critic Owen Glieberman has been ghosting me since May 23, 2021, when I wrote him suggesting that his review of the movie "Four Good Days" was warped by Drug War presumptions and biases.
See Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman.
Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has been ghosting me since September 1, 2024, when I wrote her complaining about her use of drug law to cover up societal problems, such as a lack of affordable housing and affordable medical care, etc.
See Regulate and Educate.
The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., has been ghosting me since September 9, 2020, when I first wrote to ask them to condemn the Nazification of America via drug law.
See Why the Holocaust Museum must denounce the Drug War.
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
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.
Drug war pundits need to stop using the word "snorts" when it comes to cocaine. We "take" our "meds," and yet we "snort" cocaine, just like a pig. That is NOT neutral language, folks!
Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug:
Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits
The press is having a field day with the Matthew Perry story. They love to have a nice occasion to demonize drugs. I wonder how many decades must pass before they realize that people are killed by ignorance and a corrupted drug supply, not by the drugs themselves.
We know that anticipation and mental focus and relaxation have positive benefits -- but if these traits ae facilitated by "drugs," then we pretend that these same benefits somehow are no longer "real." This is a metaphysical bias, not a logical deduction.
The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.
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.
"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.
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