Drugs

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We are not drug addicts. We are not criminals. We are free men, and we will react to persecution the way free men have always reacted. ~ Arthur Kleps
The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, “Jewish problem” was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; “drug-abuse problem” is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs. ~ Thomas Szasz
When you smoke herb, herb reveal yourself to you. All the wickedness you do, the herb reveal itself to yourself, your conscience, show up yourself clear, because herb make you meditate. Is only a natural t'ing and it grow like a tree. ~ Bob Marley

Quotes[edit]

  • Drugs are tearing apart our societies, spawning crime, spreading diseases such as AIDS, and killing our youth and our future.
    • Kofi Annan, quoted in Young People and Drugs (April 8, 2003), Awake! magazine, published by Jehovah's Witnesses.
  • Philosophically, I think that if somebody wants to sit around and get stoned that's up to him or her. And if that ruins your life, so be it.... So I am for drug legalization.
  • I've had a lot of fun on drugs ... I've had a lot of marvellous experiences. I've danced a lot. I've had a great time. I'm not ashamed of it. And I don't see what's wrong with it.
    • David Marr (3 December 2011). "The great debate that no one's talking about". Sydney Morning Herald. Farifax. Retrieved 28 November 2006.
  • Professionals and experts seem to prefer the tragic explanation of why some choose drugs to get by more effortlessly in life. Tragic upbringing and sexual abuse, spiced with an alcoholized home, are "popular" explanations. (. . .) What I miss are all those who have in fact used and are using drugs because it feels good – so good that you do not want to stop even though you can see with open eyes that you are playing Russian roulette with everything and everybody that are close. Family, sweetheart, children. Yes, even life. (. . .) The reasons why people start to use drugs are plentifold. You encounter drug users in all social classes and segments of the population. But if there exists a common denominator, that would have to be the desire for a "recess". Recess from what? Well, that varies from one individual to the next. It is really a matter of drug users being as diverse as the rest of the population.

Cannabis[edit]

Main article: Cannabis
  • The Rastas, more than any other group, have elevated ganja to a central place in their religious practice and have developed a well-articulated ideology justifying its use and explaining its significance. ... Rastas regard the proscription of ganja use by Babylon's government as part of its strategy of social control.
  • Please help me squash this deceptive and dangerous misrepresentation of my true feeling on this matter by the ONDCP. It just shows how desperate they are that they must mislead people in this way. And just so there is no question about this, let me be clear: Whole cannabis is not only the best medicine for me, it is the only medicine that has kept me alive during the 32 years that I have continued to live, in relatively good heath, despite a terminal diagnosis of malignant pheochromocytoma.
  • When you smoke herb, herb reveal yourself to you. All the wickedness you do, the herb reveal itself to yourself, your conscience, show up yourself clear, because herb make you meditate. Is only a natural t'ing and it grow like a tree.
    • Bob Marley, as reported in Martin Booth, Cannabis: A History (2005), p. 366
  • I have repeatedly stated [cannabis] is not safe, but that the idea that you can reduce use through raising the classification in the Misuse of Drugs Act from class C to class B—where it had previously been placed, but thus now increasing the maximum penalty for possession for personal use to 5 years in prison—is implausible.
    • David Nutt, (2009). "Government vs science over drug and alcohol policy". The Lancet. 374 (9703): 1731–1733. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61956-5. PMID 19910043.

Cocaine[edit]

Main article: Cocaine
  • A kilo of cocaine costs $50 in the trafficking countries and is sold in the consuming countries for $5,000 to $10,000, and so there always will be someone ready to run the risk of the illegitimate business.
  • I shared a room with a female crack addict who also worked the streets. This was a completely alien thing to me and, at first, I was horrified but soon realised she was not so different to me.

Heroin[edit]

Main article: Heroin
  • Ros was dead. He had loved heroin more than it loved him.
    • Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
  • The CIA looked the other way while Afghanistan’s opium production grew from about 100 tonnes annually in the 1970s to 2,000 tonnes by 1991. In 1979 and 1980, just as the CIA effort was beginning to ramp up, a network of heroin laboratories opened along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. That region soon became the world’s largest heroin producer. By 1984, it supplied a staggering 60% of the US market and 80% of the European. Inside Pakistan, the number of heroin addicts surged from near zero (yes, zero) in 1979 to 5,000 in 1980, and 1.3 million by 1985 – a rate of addiction so high the UN termed it “particularly shocking”.
  • By 2007, the UN’s Afghanistan Opium Survey found that the country’s then-record opium harvest of approxinamtely 8,200 tonnes provided 93% of the world’s illicit heroin supply.

LSD[edit]

Main article: LSD
  • At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated[-]like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.
  • The evolution of LSD from remedy to inebriating drug was, however, primarily promoted by the activities of Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert of Harvard University
    • Ibid, p.29
  • It gave me an inner joy, an open mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation.... I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD. It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.
    • Albert Hofmann, Speech on 100th birthday; as quoted in "LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug?". Wired.com. 16 January 2006. Retrieved 29 April 2008.
  • The effects of mescalin or LSD can be, in some respects, far more satisfying than those of alcohol. To begin with, they last longer; they also leave behind no hangover, and leave the mental faculties clear and unimpaired. They stimulate the faculties and produce the ideal ground for a peak experience.
    • Colin Wilson in Introduction to the New Existentialism. p. 88 (1966)

Mescaline[edit]

  • I first explored mescaline in the late '50s.... Three-hundred-fifty to 400 milligrams. I learned there was a great deal inside me.

Methamphetamine[edit]

  • After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of the these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.

Tobacco[edit]

Main article: Tobacco
  • A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.
  • I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

Prescription drugs[edit]

Main article: Medicine
  • "When a drug is ingested, it’s metabolized and what eventually is excreted is the portion of the original parent drug that doesn’t get metabolized, along with metabolites, which may have biological activity of their own,” says Christian Daughton, an environmental chemist from the Environmental Protection Agency.
    The amount that our bodies break down drugs varies widely, from drug to drug and even from person to person. For many drugs, Daughton says, about 90% of the drug is metabolized. Others aren’t metabolized as much, and a lot of the parent compound is excreted. The undigested drugs and metabolites, the digested drugs, are either removed from the body as waste or sweat. These are either flushed down toilets are go down the drain in our showers.
  • Although previously the monoamine systems were considered to be responsible for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD), the available evidence to date does not support a direct causal relationship with MDD. There is no simple direct correlation of serotonin or norepinephrine levels in the brain and mood. In other words, after a half-century of research, the chemical-imbalance hypothesis as promulgated by the drug companies that manufacture SSRIs and other antidepressants is not only without clear and consistent support, but has been disproved by experimental evidence.
  • Irving Kirsch (2010). The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. p. 92.
  • For decades, scientists have embarked on the long journey toward a medical breakthrough by first experimenting on laboratory animals. Mice or rats, pigs or dogs, they were usually male: Researchers avoided using female animals for fear that their reproductive cycles and hormone fluctuations would confound the results of delicately calibrated experiments.
    That laboratory tradition has had enormous consequences for women. Name a new drug or treatment, and odds are researchers know far more about its effect on men than on women. From sleeping pills to statins, women have been blindsided by side effects and dosage miscalculations that were not discovered until after the product hit the market.
  • “We have an aging demographic, and we have an increased reliance, in North America and Europe in particular, with the treatment of health concerns with pharmaceuticals.” This translates to more medicines making their way into the water system, and we need to determine how to deal with it, she says. “Long-term exposures [to pharmaceuticals] are quite a bit different than short term exposures, and we need to really start testing and figuring out if chronic exposures of low doses are relevant for the health of an individual or population of animals.”

Altered state of consciousness[edit]

  • Fly Chick
    Light It
    Going pay all day
    But won't ever get away
    From skinny white pimp
  • Atmosphere, in "The Skinny".
  • Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
    We know Major Tom's a junkie
    Strung out in heaven's high
    Hitting an all-time low
  • Life is a waste of time,
    and some say time is a waste of life,
    but if you get wasted all the time,
    then you might just have the time of your life
    • Drapht, "Boom Boom Boom", 'Brothers Grimm' (2008).
  • Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good,
    They'll stone ya just a-like they said they would.
    They'll stone ya when you're tryin' to go home.
    Then they'll stone ya when you're there all alone.
    But I would not feel so all alone,
    Everybody must get stoned.
  • Lets go home and get stoned
    We could end up makin love instead of misery
    Go home and get stoned
    Cause the sex is so much better when you're mad at me
    • Hinder, "Get Stoned", 'Extreme Behavior' (2005).
  • I've come to decide, that the things that I tried, were in my life just to get high on.
  • It's such a waste to be wasted in the first place
  • Ride, ride my see-saw.
    Take my place
    On this trip
    Just for me
    Ride, take a free ride
    Take my place
    Have my seat
    It's for free
  • And you can fly
    High as a kite if you want to
    Faster than light if you want to
    Speeding through the universe
    Thinking is the best way to travel

Drugs and the law[edit]

  • We need to take effective measures to rob the dealers of their markets and the only way that we can do that is by supplying addicts through the medical profession, through prescription. We cannot afford to be shy about being prepared to do that.
  • Prohibition has failed to protect us. Leaving the drugs market in the hands of criminals causes huge and unnecessary harm to individuals, communities and entire countries, with the poor the hardest hit.
  • Now it's one thing to say (I say it) that people shouldn't consume psychoactive drugs. It is entirely something else to condone marijuana laws the application of which resulted, in 1995, in the arrest of 588,963 Americans. Why are we so afraid to inform ourselves on the question?
  • We’re sending the kids to the department of human services, we’re sending the parents to jail over marijuana. Well, I knew some of these people and I knew they weren’t gangsters. I knew they were nonviolent people.
  • Today, our nation is fighting two wars: one abroad and one at home. While the war in Iraq is in the headlines, the other war is still being fought on our own streets. Its casualties are the wasted lives of our own citizens. I am speaking of the war on drugs. And I cannot help but wonder how many more lives, and how much more money, will be wasted before another Robert McNamara admits what is plain for all to see: the war on drugs is a failure.
    • Walter Cronkite, "Why I Support DPA, and So Should You". Drug Policy Alliance. Archived from the original on March 4, 2006. Retrieved July 17,2009.
  • Since you [US "drug czar" McCaffrey] control a federal budget that has just been increased from $17.8 billion last year to $19.2 billion this year, is asking people like you if we should continue with our nation's current drug policy like a person asking a barber if one needs a haircut?
    • Judge James P. Gray, Orange County California, LA Times, March 29, 2000.
  • Half of what government spends on police, courts and prisons is to deal with drug offenders.
    • Gary Johnson, Jones, Steve (February 1, 2011). "Myrtle Beach Tea Party hears from presidential hopeful". Myrtle Beach Sun. Archived from the original on August 13, 2012.
  • We are not drug addicts. We are not criminals. We are free men, and we will react to persecution the way free men have always reacted.
    • Arthur Kleps, testifying before the Special Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Narcotics, May 25, 1966, as cited in Walter Houston Clark, Chemical Ecstasy (1969), p. 140.
  • Congress should definitely consider decriminalizing possession of marijuana... We should concentrate on prosecuting the rapists and burglars who are a menace to society.
    • Dan Quayle, U.S. Representative and Vice President under President Bush, 1977
    • Source: Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (1996).
  • I remember when the U.S. had a drug problem and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore.
  • Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrong — and demonstrably more destructive — for government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed, and it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost.
  • Importantly, there is nothing in the Constitution — by which, under Article 6, Section 2, officials at every level of government are obligated to abide — that authorizes the banning of any substance or enforcing that ban with the threat of injury, incarceration, or death. The lawful powers of the federal government are enumerated in Article 1, Section 8, and they do not include forbidding drugs or any other substance. Politicians early in the 20th century understood this, and passed a Constitutional amendment allowing them to outlaw alcohol. No such amendment has ever been passed, or even proposed, with regard to drugs.
  • The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, “Jewish problem” was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; “drug-abuse problem” is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.
  • Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.
  • Called "Rauschgiftbekaempfung," The Combatting of Drugs, the term also acquired a more popular meaning closer to 'War on Dope.' This extremely cruel and often arbitrary prohibitionist campaign of National Socialist racial hygiene can be viewed as a precursor to the U.S. War on Drugs, which is itself busily mobilizing the entire police state to root out the demonized forces of foreign 'narco-terrorism' threatening the performance principle of Late Capital's global sweat shop.
    • Scott J. Thompson, "From 'Rausch' to Rebellion: Walter Benjamin's On Hashish and the Aesthetic Dimensions of Prohibitionist Realism"
  • The drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary, prohibition is directly responsible for the power of crack dealers to terrorize whole neighborhoods. And every cent spent on the cops, investigators, bureaucrats, courts, jails, weapons, and tests required to feed the drug-war machine is a cent not spent on reversing the social policies that have destroyed the cities, nourished racism, and laid the groundwork for crack culture.
  • The centerpiece of the cultural counterrevolution is the snowballing campaign for a "drug-free workplace" — a euphemism for "drug-free workforce," since urine testing also picks up for off-duty indulgence. The purpose of this '80s version of the loyalty oath is less to deter drug use than to make people undergo a humiliating ritual of subordination: "When I say pee, you pee." The idea is to reinforce the principle that one must forfeit one's dignity and privacy to earn a living, and bring back the good old days when employers had the unquestioned right to demand that their workers' appearance and behavior, on or off the job, meet management's standards.
    • Ellen Willis, "Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs," The Village Voice (September 19, 1989).

Philosophical views of drug use[edit]

  • These debates gave rise to the notion of pharmacological Calvinism. As framed by Gerald Klerman, this notion referred to the fact that treatments which made the taker feel good, without hard work being required, are commonly perceived to be morally bad and are likely to be accompanied by some form of secular retribution.
    • David Healy, The Creation of Psychopharmacology (2002), p. 354
  • La Mettrie anticipated the outlines of the world into which we are now moving. In particular, he envisioned philosophical speculation withering once it became possible to intervene effectively at the biological level to change human behavior. At this point, physicians would replace philosophers as the arbiters of human ethics.
    • David Healy, The Creation of Psychopharmacology (2002), p. 358
  • Is there any doubt that drug addiction is an escape from an unbearable inner state - from a reality that one cannot deal with - from an atrophying mind one can never fully destroy? If Apollonian reason were unnatural to man, and Dionysian intuition brought him closer to nature and truth, the apostles of irrationality would not have to resort to drugs. Happy, self-confident men do not seek to get stoned. Drug addiction is the attempt to obliterate one's consciousness, the quest for a deliberately-induced insanity. As such, it is so obscene and evil that any doubt about the moral character of its practitioners is itself an obscenity.
  • There are those who are so tightly meshed within physical reality that the soul is squeezed dry. They are tight, sore, and chafing beneath too-severe habits and ideas. For them momentary release, such as the drugs can give is highly beneficial.
    • Jane Roberts in The Early Sessions: Book 8, Session 362, Page 116.

The disease model for drug use[edit]

There is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. … Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can really dispense with illness—even for the sake of our virtue—and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particular does not require the sick soul as much as the healthy, and whether, in brief, the will to health alone, is not a prejudice, cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
  • If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution; textbooks of physiology, a chapter on perversion; textbooks of genetics, a chapter on the racial inferiority of Jews and Negroes.
  • The popular medical formulation of morality that goes back to Ariston of Chios, "virtue is the health of the soul," would have to be changed to become useful, at least to read: "your virtue is the health of your soul." For there is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the "equality of men," the more must the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal course of an illness, be abandoned by medical men. Only then would the time have come to reflect on the health and illness of the soul, and to find the peculiar virtue of each man in the health of his soul.
  • Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can really dispense with illness—even for the sake of our virtue—and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particular does not require the sick soul as much as the healthy, and whether, in brief, the will to health alone, is not a prejudice, cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness.

Drug education[edit]

  • As our experience with drug education has developed and been charted, it has become apparent that effective efforts need to be comprehensive. A classroom teacher's efforts must be reinforced by school wide drug abuse prevention activities, and these must in turn be supported by interventions in all aspects of community life. Furthermore, it is not enough merely to address the surface issue of drug use behavior; we must also address the environmental circumstances that contribute to such problems. This complex issue presents a great challenge to drug educators, but it also calls for a restructuring, sometimes called a paradigm shift, of many of our social institutions and the way they interact.
    For example, faith-based organizations are generally uninvolved in drug abuse prevention, except to condemn drug abuse. For them to have an organized and planned role in prevention will require a shift in their thinking about their goals and what type of programs they should sponsor. Establishing referral networks, service linkages, and collaborative relationships among community agencies and individuals is a difficult hurdle.
    Whether or not this is done, drug education professionals often do not know the long-term results of their work because the outcome occurs in the future, when educators no longer have contact with the objects of their efforts. Satisfaction may come from reviewing data trends as the years unfold, but this is not as gratifying as the immediate results that may come from participating in drug treatment of other kinds of human service work in which success is more immediately apparent. Of course, the flip side is that failure also is not recognized. Prevention efforts are repeated because they are well received or because of the inherent satisfaction of doing them. The fact that they have no impact may not be realized without careful evaluation.
    There has been a new push by the U.S. government to demand that state and local prevention programs, wen funded by state and federal dollars, be "science based." The expectation is that programs should show some evidence, prior to implementation, that they will actually affect youth drug use. The background to this effort is that enthusiasm and genuine concern for preventing adolescent drug abuse have often been translated into activities that are enjoyable but not carefully examined and tested. Schools have used funds to purchase t-shirts and ribbons, hire expensive motivational speakers, and to acquire videotapes and untested curriculum material without any assurance that such expenditures have led in the past, or will lead in the future, to decreases in youth drug use.

Other[edit]

  • Not only our well-being, but the well-being of our sons and grandsons depends on disseminating patterns of "sobriae ebrietas" (sober inebriation), which reconsider the use of psychedelic drugs as a moral and aesthetic challenge.
    • Antonio Escohotado, "Inebriation as Experience of the Spirit".
  • I like the FedEx driver, because he's drug dealer and he don't even know it. And he's always on time!
    • Mitch Hedberg, Track 10: "Sesame Seeds," Mitch All Together (2003).
  • All you kiddies remember to lay off the needle drugs. The only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon.
  • MDMA got you feeling like a champion, The city never sleeps better slip you a Ambien.
    • Jay-Z, "Empire State of Mind".
  • The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time … Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers -- common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons.
  • Hiya kids. Here's an important message from your Uncle Bill. Don't buy drugs. Become a rock star, and they give you them for free!
  • In vino veritas.
    • In wine, there is the truth.
    • Roman proverb
  • O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!
  • My head hurts, this shit isn't getting me high
    My chest is so tight, am I going to die?
    My stomachs in knots, as the room starts to spin
    As I wait for this Valium to slowly kick in.
    • Staind, "Pressure", 'Break The Cycle' (2001).
  • There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge.
  • This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel ... total lack of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue — severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting because you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can't control it.
  • You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug – especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes.
  • Ketamine was introduced by God to give dead people a means of communicating with us, the living.
  • A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole.

References[edit]

  1. ↑ Burns, Jennifer (2009). Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-532487-7. OCLC 313665028. p. 85

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

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