Since its inception the war on drugs has psycho-actively altered the global perception of drugs and even the definition of what drugs are. The mental fog over American minds was induced via decades of freebasing anti-drug government propaganda, however people seem to be awakening from the haze of misinformation. Still, there remains plenty of misconceptions around fugitive substances like MDMA, marijuana, and psychedelics. Many of these drugs are showing immense psychological benefits in studies (when they are allowed) and throngs of people willing to cite the good these substances can do with almost none of the side effects of many drugs offered by Big Pharma.
Of course the voices of millions won’t be heard on this matter because the government isn’t interested. They are only interested in more shame and punishment for people not obeying their profit motivated rules.
For anyone that’s been paying attention, the US government is not exactly on the side of the people it claims to represent. In fact, it would seem the US is preying on its people when it serves the whims of elites, and dare I suggest our beloved USA is not so much a government by the people, but rather the same classic rule by force empire that has dominated the western world for several millennia, and now the domination has spread to the entire planet via neoliberal doctrine, hence in part why most of the world has adopted our drug policies.
Or are we to still believe in the narrative that our government is a benevolent democratic force who has seen fit through its altruistic nature to protect us from these drugs and autocratically dictate which drugs are acceptable and which are harmful without so much as a conversation.
Did I say autocratic? That sounds negative, like it’s somehow sullying those proud stars and stripes. In honor of the doublespeak installed within our drug legislation let me rephrase that unpatriotic rhetoric with something more euphemistically reverent to this great nation of ours. Let’s say instead, in the name of safety, security, and tough love paternalism uncle Sam showed exceptional leadership to gently curve the behavior of the ignorant misled adult-children of the US and heroically save them from their own foolish inclinations.
Thanks Pa.
Just imagine what this world would look like now if America had not ramped up the drug war and thrown millions in jail to save their hedonist souls and thwart the moral decline caused by the temptations of these pernicious illicit substances. Ponder for a moment if Tricky Dick or the Ole Gipper had backed off the noble drug war front, why we’d probably be living in alternate Biff timeline replete with a proto-simian bigoted orange doofus for a president, a ponzi scheme economy, climate change superstorms, mass incarceration, faux democracy, ecological planetary destruction, and be at war with everything. Bullet dodged. Whew!
And we can only express the highest level of gratitude to those sages of greater truth and wisdom, aka our leaders, who put so much focus and energy, not to mention our tax dollars, into fighting a war on substances that could tragically alter our snow-white trauma free consciousness. Dangerous drugs like cannabis or psychedelics could trick us into thinking we’re calmer, more creative, making stronger connections with others, or even deepening our understanding of the nature of existence. Unfortunately we as infantile adults can never hope to fully understand the externalities of these drugs for ourselves or how all these ostensibly positive elements are truly evil. Our naive civilian impulses are cruelly deceiving us once again.
You know what it is? We probably aren’t working hard enough at our jobs so we started to use the “drugs” as a facile escape from the real productive profit seeking work we’ve been destined to fulfill as god-fearing patriots. Put down the joint and rev up the VCR with a Tony Robbins motivational tape, available for a $1.99 at a flea market near you, that’s all that is standing in the way of your future success. You’re on your way to millions and that’s just for what the thought alone is projecting into your future time wave reality field. Winner.
On a far less sarcastic note, to truthfully begin to address drugs and the government’s intentionally obtuse argumentation tactics then we have to gain an objective understanding of what it is we are talking about when we use the umbrella term “drug.” Everything we put into or do not put into our bodies or actions we take or don’t take will both physiologically and psychologically influence us and could be qualified as a drug if the net effects are to be considered as the definition of a drug, and in the most conventional terms a “drug” is nothing but a thing that has an effect to our mental or physical state.
One could try and separate the argument between the net effect of a chemical substance and other foods or activities that have the similar outcomes, but why? Everything has a reaction in the body and alters mood. Everything. Our skin and eyes are permeable, our thoughts can cause depression or joy, the food we eat has reward systems and addictive elements, it all has implications to our mood and health and acts as a drug does.
The proper default connotation for the word “drugs” should be one of neutrality, with an understanding that drugs can produce a spectrum of effects that are not innately beneficial or harmful. And if we are to ban some drugs because their effects are dangerous for the body or society at large then to be consistent we must consider all things that have the effects noted as deleterious. Going around banning everything in such a manner would make the current authoritarian hellhole all the worse. But to maintain the thread of reasoning, when prohibiting activities the net effects of what they produce must be the cause for banning them because if they had no effect you’d have no reason to restrict access.
So to play naive for a moment and act like the war on drugs isn’t just all about power and money, and we’ll assume for argument’s sake the government cares about our health, under this assumption how can it possibly consolidate this notion when it doesn’t care much when there is lead or plastic microfibers in the water, but it cares we might use benign dosages of innocuous substances and feel good or enlightened.
And as their narrative goes, the government believes so many will want to feel good that we’ll addictively use these substances repeatedly to our ruin. Except it’s been shown that a high percentage of people who experiment with illicit drugs in fact don’t become instant addicts. And no one is breaking down our doors to get to our dangerous supply of toxic water we might be storing, feel free to drink that till you die. However if you choose to smoke an innocuous plant which can cause good times to occur, that’s a crime worthy of years of incarceration. Government suppositions on drugs are nothing short of baseless and ludicrous, a web of infuriating hypocrisy laced with self serving cognitive dissonance.
Bad habits around anything can form and drugs are nothing special in that regard, as most already know drugs were not banned for our health, but rather the war on drugs was used as a control system, a tool for the powers that be to achieve political objectives. This fact is perfectly illustrated by a well known quote from John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did”
Yet still the argumentation the establishment hides behind is some form of “Drugs are bad m’kay” rhetoric. But even the ideas around addiction itself have been exposed as lies and misrepresented through anti-drug campaigns with a rather sick desire to cast judgment on people. Propaganda created the visage of the drug user, a sad desperate creature with sunken eyes and lowly character willing to do anything for another hit. However addiction isn’t so much about the chemical hooks of the substances themselves, but the desire to distract one’s self from the pain of a daily life unworthy of living. There isn’t a single plausible good reason to continue drug war insanity, yet it remains steadfastly weighted around the necks of the people.
The entire drug war is framed on the premise of being a net benefit to the people while government officials equivocate over the collateral damage that amounts to millions of lives destroyed from the implications of fighting the dumb fight. The most ironic thing is that many of the drugs which have negative effects on the quality of our consciousness are legal or relatively easily obtained with a prescription e.g. anti-depressants, oxycontin.
If you want to feel numb and go through the motions in a dampened psychological state that will likely make you feel as if your emotions are encased in plastic wrap, then good news! You have lots of legal options to become a zombie, but if you want to feel alive, more connected, and hit the accelerator on understanding the cognitive dissonance rumbling through your mind – well drugs that help you with that happen to be illegal in most states. It’s almost like they wanted to keep you dumb and numb on purpose.
America cannot be considered a free society with a straight face unless the choice of what we put into our own bodies and what we do with our consciousness is considered part of our innate free will as conscious beings on this planet. We are being robbed of the right to choose how to treat and care for our own mental and physical health over the nonsense government and corporate overreach promotes. The system they endorse seeks to use us for profit rather than help us, this is not symbiosis between government, business, and the people, this is top down parasitic behavior.
Drug schedules, like all immoral legislation, creates its own language and redefines words at a whim to find some ridiculous narrative to cower behind so they can continue to enforce policies that are arbitrary, deeply authoritarian, and paternalistic even in their euphemistic Orwellian dialect. Government officials are corporate fellating liars who are too afraid to have an honest open conversation mostly because they know they have no intellectual ground on which to stand. So they hide behind podiums at fabricated press conferences with false time restraints and if they are forced to briefly confront the issue they will lie directly, possibly not allow for rebuttal, and walk away with their socio-economic power like a child who doesn’t want others to play with their toys.
Sorry citizens, they’d totally sit down and have an in depth debate about these major issues we face, but you know, there is a fundraiser to get to, and a narcissists anonymous meeting they have to attend after. I’m quite sure they’ll issue a statement apologizing for their ever so busied schedules, and rest assured they’ll address these important and pressing issues at a later time, you know when they can adequately study things out. Oh, and when they do “study it out”, they’ll have a little contrived court hearing or press conference where they will define the language, the scope of the arguments, what information is acceptable and what is not, what experts have merit and which do not, and provide strict ever so “necessary” time limits in debate.
Argumentation and logical constructs will be dismissed almost entirely in the decision making process, so if you thought reason might apply you thought wrong, at which point men who have scarcely read a book in their lives outside of their neoliberal echo-chamber will decide that the standing policies are truthful, responsible, and important for public health, perhaps even national security. The details won’t be discussed in an open dialogue, but they will wallow in equivocations until everyone shuts up in frustration while the banalities of evil in the status quo framework march right along in an endless cycle of pain.
The logic is unimportant to why elites are enacting these policies, as there is no logic pertaining to public good. Their actions only make sense when viewed with a lens of self promotion, profit seeking, venality, and exploitation. They opportunistically use their held leverage with the tools of capital, military, and the power of public offices to engineer a system of cronyism that works in a stilted hierarchy of power.
Drug enforcement gives local police reason to expand their budgets to fight a crime that isn’t one. They buy military style equipment and show up at your door with a small militia for the grave crime of growing a plant and smoking it.
This type of authoritarianism doesn’t work in a more true form of direct democracy, one that isn’t just democracy in name only, where representatives aren’t simply sold out elites who are put there because they are reliable useful idiots. It only takes a cursory objective glance at our society to understand that we do not live in a democracy at all. Not even close to one, the system is wordsmithed into a democracy, but functionally more like a financial feudal system where the only options the public may choose from are bad and worse.
Becoming consciously aware of a new potential reality
So to briefly summarize the US government’s war on drugs – They, referring to the they that is the evil incarnation of destruction known as the US government, rebranded a definition of a thing called “drugs” which isn’t really a thing at all, but in doing so they could frame the drugs themselves and the users as a low class group of heathens. They then said these “drugs” were physically addictive in ways which was also a lie. They banned research on the “drugs” so as to make scientifically calling out the lies more difficult. They proceeded to carry out drug enforcement policies based on the lies in ways that were bigoted and cruel involving what amounts to kidnapping American people and placing them in cages for decades, known euphemistically as our rehabilitation system.
They let corporations create drugs that are worse for us than some of the banned substances and then sell these worse drugs back to us in a monopolistic system where they can charge whatever they want with no price regulations. They tore apart millions of families in this drug war while in the same insincere breath also tell us of family values and peaceful coexistence.
In search of these drugs police are legally empowered to break into homes and terrorize people, essentially let them do everything the 4th amendment of the constitution was supposed to protect against, and again, they let them do all this based on the lies they initially fabricated. And this ladies and gentlemen is the flotsam that constitutes the drug war.
The fabrication of the drug war is a good example of the dangers of misplaced power given to governments and authoritarian control systems. The men in the Nixon administration were in no way qualified to assess what drugs should be banned on a medical level even if one could justify doing such a thing at all. They cited absurd reasoning for the laws and as far as I can tell with zero compassion or scientific backing, and now it seems it’s going to take something close to revolution to end this nebulous war that has killed so many people and saved so few.
I knew when writing on this subject I’m joining a long line of common dissent against the ludicrous nature of the drug war. Years of articles with frustrated writers like myself hammering away on the fetid dung pile of lies put forth by agencies like the FDA, CIA, and DEA who will lie in ways meant to flippantly outrage more reasonable opinions. It’s a show of power to lie with such hubris and rule without a shred of truth necessary. They have made it rather clear this not a debate, rather just another unjustifiable action taken by authoritarian oligarchs.
In some regard worrying about the drug war as a specific issue is what the installed social hierarchy wants. In an instant of selfish bigoted ignorance a government can pass laws that take decades to fully rescind. They know the public, who has limited resources, will waste them futilely chasing after an issue that is a symptom of the problem. A system that is perhaps best termed as pure evil, as what else can you call a socio-economic system of control that has so little regard for life.
Lies can only persist through a misallocation of power. If one holds power they may force their lie onto others. A billionaire can keep abusing people, tell them its for their own good, and get away with it so long as they can create the social distance needed or the security forces employed to stave off reconciling the implications of those lies.
Why do we continue to accept the status quo system that does not need to provide any reason for its actions, it intentionally conflates language and bends meaning to whatever task it is trying to accomplish. After seizing control of language and subsequently manifesting bad ideas into corrupt law the neoliberal system of control will self congratulate themselves for their reprehensible actions and promote them as benefit to whatever is fashionable at that moment – public safety, jobs, democracy, freedom, health, “the children”; all the usual excuses for doing awful things. Under these ostensible nobilities the system will do whatever it wants even when it flies in the face of all good structured logic, reason, and humane action.
The most dangerous drugs of all are those which create reward systems based on the love of money, power, and status which have absorbed and rotted out the minds of elites. After the hooks have found traction in the ego mind these addictions have the effect of leading to a mindset which forever capitulates to their own impulsive selfishness. The salvageable person who may have been there disappears and becomes lost to competitive vanities who will steal from the poor, murder, exploit, kidnap & imprison those who stand in the way of their self centered inclinations. The reward systems for power seem to cause more hedonist bloodlust than any plant or chemically manufactured substance. Furthermore, authoritarian addictions are a more dangerous threat to the world than any pleasure seeking substance, also more worthy of an addiction program.
We must let go of the old to let a new system begin. One that thinks different. One that is a psychedelically fueled to the ends of greater consciousness, joy, togetherness, and cooperation. A system built democratically and without social hierarchy that would never be systemically capable of letting a self centered egomaniac like Trump take charge because the process would have shot down all his ideas already since they are antithetical to reason and human happiness.
A new way of being where the devil is off our backs, and the weight of carrying around a social hierarchy is dropped. The old sadistic addiction to power and ego has to be accounted for in all arrangements regarding social power structures, as power is the only drug worthy of banning.
