The Need for Drugs

Go to any football game and you have 100,000 drunks, boozed up, smoking cigarettes, watching 22 athletes that are supposedly clean. -Louis Simmons

It always makes me laugh when I hear pundits rail against the legalization of marijuana. Take your pick of conservative pundits and they will more than likely be against the ‘drug dealers’ who have moved into states and communities that have chosen to legalize the plant. They will drone on about the dangers of marijuana, all the while remaining eerily silent on the topic of prescription drug abuse, alcohol abuse, tobacco, gambling, cheeseburgers and whatever else you want to add to this list.

These are the same pundits who think nothing of taking their children to a professional sporting event- where the ads for a mass-produced beer are countless and no one in attendance doubts that their favorite athlete is taking a little something extra to win that day.

Steroid and performance enhancing drugs is widely talked about and accepted in athletics, even though those substances are illegal. Look to the bodybuilding world or the recent Olympic Russian scandal as confirmation of this (https://www.t-nation.com/pharma/steroids-what-pro-bodybuilders-are-really-using). Why are the police not arresting Olympians as they get off the track? Why are cops not corralling bodybuilders into cages off stage and handing them a summons? I will tell you why- because that drug use is accepted.

It is just as accepted as the piles of compounds and supplements available in any health food store. Miles and miles of containers containing ‘proprietal blends’ of who-knows-what and how-much. It is just as accepted as hordes of Spring-Breakers or Mardi-Gras-Goers doing kegs stands in the street, and just as accepted as your local pharmacy- killing more people with opiates than any warlord could dream.

Then we have the non-accepted drugs. Marijuana, despite continued evidence for help with seizures, PTSD and other maladies. MDMA or ecstasy, even though there are people studying its’ potential benefits to the human race. (http://www.maps.org/research/mdma) Peyote, illegal unless your religion calls for use of the drug- then an exception can be provided for. DMT, mescaline, LSD. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I find it odd that mind altering drugs are banned, and mind numbing drugs are not. Is there a war on changing consciousness? If people could take a drug that makes them see themselves as part of the species and not separate from the whole, is that bad? Is the crime smoking a joint or locking up that person?

Graham Hancock breaks down the breach Colorado stepped into and the path blazed for other states.

Drugs have allowed us to perform surgery on one another without pain, have brought couples together, torn lives apart, and both saved and killed babies. There is a reason that “one barrel of wine can work more miracles than a church full of saints.” -Italian Proverb.

Our species has been seeking out mind altering alternatives since that first rotten fermented fruit was eaten. Since the first peyote button was chomped on. It is time to be adults about the chemical compounds that surround us. We need education, not fear.
The drug we really need is truth - and the truth is we need drugs.