Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity because it denies us the right to take care of our own health.
The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses.
Pain patients and the depressed are totally unrecognized victims of drug prohibition.
Drug prohibition outlaws the philosophical research that William James himself told us to undertake.
Drug prohibition has resulted in hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths thanks to totally preventable drug overdoses!
The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.
Drug prohibition has 'saved' Americans from opium and coca by shunting them off onto Big Pharma meds that are FAR HARDER TO KICK THAN HEROIN.
Drug prohibition destroyed the rule of law in Latin America.
American businesses judge people, not by the color of their skin but by the contents of their digestive systems.
Some outlawed drugs grow new neurons in the brain. To refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!
The Partnership for a Drug Free America should be put on trial for having blatantly lied to Americans in the 1980s about drugs, while using our taxpayer money to do so!
White American young people are NOT the only stakeholders in the drugs debate.
Drug prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world.
Doctors decided that cocaine was not good for the depressed. No one asked the depressed what they thought about the drug. (Follow the money!)
We give kids drugs to improve their concentration – but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.
In a compassionate world, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.
If media were free in America, you'd see documentaries about people using drugs wisely for a wide variety of praiseworthy purposes.
Hundreds of millions suffer depression TOTALLY UNNECESSARILY today because racist and xenophobic puritans have outlawed all medicines that can improve people's mood.
It is a category error to place materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine.
If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.
Drug prohibition ended democracy in America by removing hundreds of thousands of minorities from the voting rolls.
The Mexican Drug War led to the 'disappearance' of 60,000 Mexicans in two decades.
The outlawing of coca and opium is a crime against humanity.
In the movie "Four Good Days," the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.
Entire religions have been inspired by drugs that inspire and elate, which are exactly the kinds of drugs that 'Christian' drug warriors outlaw.
Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.
If opium and cocaine were re-legalized, hospital buildings would no longer be the secular cathedrals of our time. Some of that wealth would actually go to healthy people.
The drug war is a scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.
Big Pharma drugs have wrought disaster when used in psychotherapy, but it does not follow that the depressed should become Christian Scientists. The use of outlawed drugs can obviate the need for shock therapy.
Our government treats drugs as if they were uranium and spends hundreds of billions of dollars trying to scare us about them.
All drugs have positive uses. It's absurd to prohibit them because one demographic might misuse them.
You can get a Ph.D. in healthcare, and not learn a thing about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs, as demonstrated by history, anecdote and common sense.
For most drugs, dependency is a bug. For Big Pharma antidepressants, it is a feature.
If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol slaughters. Drug prohibition is the real killer.
The prohibitionist motto: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."
Self-medicating has always been the most basic of human rights, until the medical industry demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.
We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
Most addiction service providers assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.
America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own pain by making opium illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.
The police can confiscate entire estates if they find traces of a drug on the premises, regardless of who placed it there.
America arrests people whose only crime is that they are trying to be all that they can be in life… in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
Drugs like opium and cocaine should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.
America legalizes alcohol and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.
When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia: OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think. POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!
Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing (or to alcohol-related deaths, for that matter).
The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for death-dealing prohibitionists instead?
The UN has adopted the childish and tyrannical goal of eradicating the Divine plant of the Inca from the face of the Earth because Americans blame all their social problems on drugs.
Scientists are practicing pharmacological colonialism when they hold holistic-working drugs to reductionist standards.
Suicide, depression and gun violence are all caused by drug prohibition – but literally no one who fights these scourges will even acknowledge that fact.
The biggest drug pusher in world history is Big Pharma, thanks to whom one in four American women are hooked on drugs for life.
Self-medicating has always been the most basic of human rights, until the medical industry demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.
America outlaws the divine plant of the Inca on behalf of Latin America, then uses its own drug laws as an excuse to invade Latin American countries at will.
The final decision about how much pain relief you receive in hospital is made by bureaucrats in Washington D.C., not by your doctor.
Materialist researchers are gaslighting Americans about drugs, even daring to tell us that laughing gas could not help the seriously depressed!
Journalists should treat drug-related deaths like car-related deaths, as unfortunate accidents which, however, do not constitute a reason for outlawing drugs.
Drug law empowers police officers to confiscate entire estates if they find an illegal plant medicine on site, even if the owner knew nothing about it, and this in a country founded on the inviolability of private property?
Drug prohibition turns addiction into a 'thing' by outlawing all the substances that could help us get off unwanted substances without going through hell.
Scientists are not qualified to judge psychoactive substances because the efficacy of such drugs is determined by the user's actual feelings and experiences.
Reagan and Bush both encouraged American children to turn in their parents for using plant medicines of which politicians disapprove, precisely the kind of divisive tactic for which Josef Stalin was famous.
The medical industry has a vested interest in the continued outlawing of opium and coca. Their business model requires that Americans be disempowered with respect to their own healthcare!
Thanks to drug prohibition, depressed Americans are forced to see a doctor half their age every three damn months of their lives in order to be approved for buying an overpriced, underperforming and ENORMOUSLY DEPENDENCE-CAUSING BIG PHARMA MED!
Drug prohibition outlaws precisely the kinds of medicines that have inspired entire religions and so it is worse than the outlawing of religion: it is the outlawing of the religious impulse itself!
The FDA approves of brain-damaging shock therapy, but they will not approve of time-honored drugs that could cheer us up without damaging our brains.
The FDA approves of Big Pharma drugs whose side effects include death itself, but they do not approve of indigenous plant medicines.
Americans have been brainwashed about drugs since childhood by the media, with help from the White House itself, above all in the form of the TOTAL CENSORSHIP of all positive reports of drug use from movies, magazines and television shows!
Depression would not even be a 'thing' in America if cocaine were legal, but doctors judged it only by its worst possible use, exactly as if they were to judge alcohol by studying only alcoholics.
Drug prohibition has turned Americans into children when it comes to drugs.
Indiscriminate drug testing is the most egregious violation of the Fourth Amendment imaginable; it sends businesses on a fishing expedition into our bodily fluids.
Thanks to drug prohibition, one in four American women are dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life.
Drug warriors tell us that naturally occurring medicines are so dangerous that we have to lose our time-honored freedoms in order to protect ourselves from them; meanwhile they demand stock up on guns that kill over 45,000 a year in America alone!
American drug policy is based on two enormous lies: 1) that there are no upsides to drug use, and 2) that there are no downsides to drug prohibition.
In America, we are judged, not by the color of our skin but by the content of our digestive system.
Walmart will not even hire you if you have the slightest trace of time-honored medicines in your system, and yet their toy aisle is full of so-called 'hydration games' that encourage the irresponsible use of alcohol.
In 1987, the Jefferson Foundation invited the Reagan DEA onto Monticello to confiscate the Founding Father's poppy plants in violation of everything that he stood for as a politician.
Drug prohibition is based on the following anti-scientific algorithm: that a drug that can be misused by a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason, must not be used by anyone, anywhere, at any dose, for any reason.
We are told not to glorify drugs that improve the mind and promote spirituality – yet Jim Beam liquor targets prime-time vodka ads at young people.
The Drug War is a massive branding campaign to demonize all psychoactive drugs except for liquor.
Drug prohibition is the worst form of tyranny on Earth: it does not seek merely to control what you think, but how and how much you can think – and feel.
If we really want to end inner-city gunfire, we must end the drug prohibition that created it in the first place.
If we really want to end depression, we must end the drug prohibition that causes it by outlawing godsends like coca, cocaine, opium and laughing gas.
If we really want to end suicide, we must end the drug prohibition that causes it by outlawing godsends like coca, cocaine, opium and laughing gas.
The Drug War is one big branding operation to demonize all psychoactive substances except for alcohol.
When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw far more than drugs: we outlaw freedom of thought, creativity, mental focus, and the right to heal.
Drug prohibition is a make-work program for law enforcement.
Property ownership is the key principle of American freedom, yet drug law allows the confiscation of entire estates if a drug is present, even if the owner knew nothing about it.
Imagine if we removed Americans from the workforce and evicted them from public housing if we found a trace of alcohol in their system. Then drug warriors would get a taste of their own medicine.
When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions.
Almost all non-fiction authors censor themselves to never say anything positive about drugs, no matter how they have to distort their subject matter and render their findings counterintuitive.
Scientists tell us that depression is difficult to beat, but depression would scarcely be a 'thing' if we ended drug prohibition and used drugs for human benefit.
Following the science is crazy because drug efficacy is determined by how a given user feels, which is the one thing that scientists can't measure and quantify. Users are the experts on drug efficacy, not scientists.
The FDA never does a true cost/benefit analysis. Otherwise they'd consider the harm of NOT legalizing a drug, like the needless suffering of millions, the destruction of inner cities, and the end of the rule of law in Latin America.
Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.
Drug prohibition is the great philosophical problem of our time, censoring academia and outlawing the investigations of William James with regard to reality itself, yet philosophers are silent.
Whenever we outlaw recreational drugs, we outlaw therapeutic drugs as well.
The depressed are never considered stakeholders in the drugs debate, yet they suffer in silence when racist politicians outlaw panaceas.
Academics should be fighting to end drug prohibition on the grounds of academic freedom, but they are silent.
If nurses and doctors were really interested in their patients' health, they would be fighting on their behalf to end drug prohibition which outlaws their right to heal.
We should no more blame drugs for deaths than we blame cars for deaths. Both can be used wisely and for good reasons.
Americans were always free to take care of their own health – until drug warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine.
The more I learn about the positive effects of drugs, the more I am baffled by the American mindset toward them. If we looked at the vast psychoactive pharmacopeia that is potentially available to us without any presuppositions whatsoever, we would surely say something like the following:
"Here is the potential answer to every psychological shortcoming on earth! We need to find a way to harness the benefits of these substances for those who desire to use them (while, of course, respecting the rights of the many stealth Christian Scientists among us who are puritanically biased against the idea of using medicines to improve our minds and mood). We need to create a role in the west for a sort of pharmacologically savvy empath, someone whom one could consult for any psychological concern under the sun, with a view toward determining the best way to use available medicines to achieve desired results in the real world, advice that would be based on the goals of the user and informed by the empath's own drug experiences, their knowledge of historical drug usage and of best practices in a health-conscious drug-using community. In other words, real people would be the experts about drugs and not a disinterested Dr. Spock who assumes that drug efficacy is to be found in the ability of a substance to work in such a way as to flatter a theory of a biochemical determinist."
But the sad fact is that almost no Americans, and seemingly none in positions of power, are aware of the benefits of which I speak. That's because America censors all positive reports of drug use and relegates those accounts that do exist to seedy locations, to niche magazines and accounts written by radical writers. Of course this strategic sequestration of drug-friendly information is easy to do, given its relative scarcity in the age of the Drug War. For who but an iconoclast will dare to write tracts that will cause them to be subjected to the kind of scrutiny and criticism that could spoil their reputation with the mainstream and so render them more or less unemployable? For the most part, Americans who know better keep their mouths shut, knowing that it is just not considered American these days to maintain that there are positive uses for drugs.
It will be argued that psychedelics are being fast-tracked to some extent, even by the Trump administration, but this is surely because Trump envisions lucrative business practices to develop around the medicalization of such substances. Besides, this governmental promotion misses the whole point: that the President of the United States should not be in the business of deciding what psychoactive medicines may be valuable and which not.1 That is like electing the dumbest kid in the class to be leader of the Science Club. And even this analogy does not capture the full idiocy at work here, because we do not even need a Science Club to oversee our use of Mother Nature, especially when the club in question (in the form of the medical establishment) will be using that unholy monopoly to work with Big Pharma to put as many Americans on dependence-causing "meds" as possible. One in four American women now take a Big Pharma med every day of their life, and this in a country that claims to believe that drugs are bad, and never more so than when they cause dependency! This is why psychiatrists keep calling their prescriptions "meds" instead of "drugs," a kind of newspeak designed to keep the gullible public from noticing the hypocrisy of the status quo.
If pushed to respond to criticism, psychiatrists will claim that their "meds" ONLY cause dependency, while hated drugs cause addiction, but this is a distinction without a difference from the point of view of a user. If I quit Effexor cold turkey after long-term use, I may not go out and rob a pharmacy to get more pills, but I may just give up on life altogether, which is not an improvement over heroin from my own perspective. At least the thieving heroin addict is seeking to DO something about his or her situation, whereas I am just giving up. I guess the real benefit of being "only" dependent on antidepressants is that I won't locate the doctor during his weekend golf game and pester him for a refill on the putting green. Moreover, the term "addiction" is thrown about like candy in the anti-drug movement, with addiction being basically considered the regular use of a substance of which politicians disapprove.
A study in the 1980s showed that many regular heroin users managed to live normal lives, this despite the fact that the government was spending billions of dollars a year in an attempt to prevent them from doing so2. Imagine if we just let heroin users alone and let them use a regulated product with clean needles and so forth. There is absolutely no difference then between the daily use of opiates and the daily use of antidepressants, except that the former drug is often easier to kick and far less problematic from a philosophical point of view (about which I have written extensively in other essays). The difference is a political and ideological one. It exists because politicians do not like the kinds of lifestyles that they associate with such drug use, whereas they're comfortable with a "med" that helps keep people more or less satisfied with the status quo, or at least apathetic about changing it.
They are afraid of allowing human beings to have the freedom to control how they think and feel about the world around them, lest they should choose a mindset that renders them disinterested and even psychologically superior to the propaganda of advertisements that could otherwise help control their spending habits in favor of big business.
There is really only one valid concern about drug use, though, and that is unwanted dependency.3 (I do not include drug overdoses here, since they will eventually disappear, at least as a statistically relevant problem, in a world in which we regulate product as to identity and dosage and actually teach safe use.) Notice I did not say dependency by itself is a valid concern, but unwanted dependency. But this is a truth that the mainstream cannot fully embrace, because the healthcare industry is using unwanted dependency as a business strategy these days to ensure customers for decades to come. I certainly wouldn't be visiting a doctor 1/3rd my age every three months of my life if I had not been rendered dependent on Venlafaxine, a drug that the Mayo Clinic still flogs as a great treatment for depression on a page that does not even mention its enormous dependence-causing potential. In my view, all would-be users of the drug should be warned that they are probably signing up to be a lifetime "patient" if they use that drug for more than a few weeks. The lack of such a warning is completely immoral. And this brings us to more newspeak. When a heroin user takes their dose for the day, they are an addict seeking a fix. When a depressed American takes an antidepressant, they are a health-savvy person undergoing "maintenance therapy."
This is all self-interested nonsense and will only end when we completely change our attitude about drugs and see them in a new light, in a way that we would all agree on immediately if we were not misled by cultural biases, self-interest, and drug-war indoctrination, above all in the form of the censorship of almost all reports of beneficial drug use in the media.
AFTERWORD
I tried to perform research for this article, because I wanted to employ quotations that would make it clear that drugs do have benefits. But I was surprised to see that there is almost no website out there that unapologetically lists the glaringly obvious benefits of drug use, obvious at least to those who are willing to use psychological common sense rather than assuming that Dr. Spock in the chemistry department is the authority on mind and mood medicine. So I visited the ASK AI interface and typed in the following question:
There are many websites that talk about the downsides of drug use. Are there any sites that highlight the benefits of drug use?
I received no list of sites at all. Instead I got a somewhat pompous lecture on "The Complex Discourse on Psychoactive Substance Use." It was essentially a sort of apologetics for the willfully ignorant status quo.
So I checked out the footnotes, looking for likely sources of free talk about psychologically obvious benefits of drug use. But the list was unimpressive. It included the kinds of authors and pundits whom the hoi polloi might consider to be cutting edge on the topic, but whom a close examination of their positions shows them to be quite conservative relative to the bias-free attitude that I am recommending above. Andrew Weil was high on the list of footnotes, but he shows no sign of understanding the many psychologically obvious ways that drugs like opium and cocaine could help specific people with certain counterproductive behavioral predispositions to thrive in life. Michael Pollan was also near the top of the list, but Michael still champions drug prohibition, although he hid that fact on page 405 of his supposedly cutting-edge book entitled "How to Change Your Mind." There were a couple of promising-sounding papers from authoritative-sounding journals, but they were hidden behind academic paywalls, and then there were the books about harm reduction – but absolutely no books about benefit PROduction.
Well, if you want something done, you've got to do it yourself. It looks like I myself am going to have to create the page that I was looking for, one that points out good uses for hated substances. The relevant quotations may be few and far between thanks to Drug War censorship and an ongoing effort to gaslight us about obvious godsends, but they are out there, nonetheless, in the works of Aleister Crowley, in the user reports of Alexander Shulgin, in the anesthetic revelations of William James, in the dogmatically ignored writings of Sigmund Freud, in the histories of a variety of Latin American countries, and even in the ancient scriptures collectively referred to as the Vedas, upon which Brahmanism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism were all based. Speaking of which latter source, I will close with a single line from the Vedas in praise of the psychoactive Soma juice, presented here as a sort of "teaser" for the drug-friendly quotation page yet to come.
We have drunk Soma and become immortal; we have attained the light the Gods discovered.
These are the kinds of potential drug benefits that Americans are withholding from the depressed around the world, and it is nothing less than a crime against humanity for us to do so. Sure, the average user will need guidance to achieve maximum benefits from drugs given their specific situation, hence my call above to replace psychiatrists with pharmacologically savvy empaths. But imagine the massive benefits that will accrue to society when we start prioritizing education and best-use practices over fearmongering and incarceration. In such a world, we would say goodbye to drive-by shootings, goodbye to the massive incarceration of minorities, goodbye to the totally unnecessary drug overdoses of young people, and "hello and welcome back" to the rule of law in Latin America… and that's just for starters!
Notes:
1: Indeed, no one should be placed in that position, period, full stop. All psychoactive drugs should be considered as potential godsends, at some dose, and/or in some combination, for some person, in some situation, etc. (up)
2: Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State Miller, Richard Lawrence, 1996 (up)
3: Of course, there will always be pathological and masochistic cases that raise concerns about the willful employment of inherently toxic substances like turpentine, but I am writing here of the great mass of users who may be supposed to have a basic interest in the preservation of their own health. (up)