The surprisingly fruitful poesy of a soul not entirely unsteep'd in the sacred legendary of his Arcadian forebears, the which he tweaks with such irreverent imagery (now with satire, now with humor) that the careful reader often desires nothing more than to take this young man out to dinner at an excellent restaurant -- in a thinly disguised attempt, of course, to figure out exactly what makes him (this unexpectedly good-looking poet of ours...) tick.

The Drug Problem is a Social Creation

Brian: Take a little off the top, Minnie.

Of my head, that is.

Minnie: Gotcha, boss.

Brian: You know, Minnie, I've just been reading "Beneath the American Renaissance" by one David S. Reynolds.

Minnie: My Lord, but your Lordship is thoughty!

Brian: One does like to stay informed, Minnie.

Minnie: Look up.

Brian: Yes, I always try to keep looking up, Minnie, despite all the bad news these days: videlicit Putin's invasion of Ukraine and his apparent designs on Eastern Europe in general.

Minnie: No, I mean look up, toward the ceiling, so that I can clip these wayward bangs of yours.

Brian: Oh, right.

Minnie: Sorry, but you were saying?

Brian: Do you know that no one was wringing their hands about "drugs" in the 20th century, Minnie? No one. They were wringing their hands about alcohol and prostitution, yes, but not about drugs.

Minnie: Ah, so that's what this Reynolds person says?

Brian: See, Minnie, the book is all about the domestic societal influences on America's greatest writers of the 19th century, specifically Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman and Emerson.

Minnie: Yes?

Brian: And Reynolds almost never mentions the influence of something called "drugs."

Are you getting all this, Minnie?

Minnie: Me sabe plenty, kemosabe. Now head back in the full upright position. The captain has turned on the "fasten seat belt" sign.

Brian: And then, out of thin air, lo and behold, come 1914 and the unconstitutional outlawing of the poppy plant, suddenly American moralists discovered that there was a huge problem with drug abuse.

Minnie: How convenient.

Brian: I know, right? Folks who were using opium up until that time without problem or stigma -- in the same way that Benjamin Franklin used that drug -- were suddenly seen as addicts requiring prison and compulsive therapy.

Minnie: Figures. Bald-faced power grab, both by politicians, the corrections industry and the health-care establishment.

Brian: And so the legislature of that time effectively decreed that there would henceforth be a thing called "drug abuse" that would be punished by the federal government -- and eventually the world.

Minnie: Keep looking up, O he who knows.

Brian: Which created a very convenient scapegoat for moral problems in the minds of those who wanted to stop blaming liquor for problems and switch the focus of their red-hot moral indignation to "drugs." (All that pent-up emotion of the temperance movement couldn't just disappear -- it had to go somewhere.)

Minnie: Excuse me for thinking, but it seems like Americans have now fashioned a whole morality out of the notion of drug abuse.

Brian: You shoot, you score, Minnie. That's exactly right. America has created a kind of negative religion in which the good and holy are those who do without "drugs" -- which means, of course, the psychoactive substances of which puritanical beer guzzling and tobacco chewing WASP yahoos disapprove.

Minnie: It's a wonder so many seemingly intelligent people put up with that farce.

Brian: Well, there are many subtle ways in which this unfair attitude toward "drugs" is maintained. Not only by police shows and movies, in which substance users are always the "baddies," but by scientific researchers, who are constantly focusing on the problems of "drug abuse" -- and never, but NEVER, on the ways that demonized psychoactive substances can be used for mental relief, mental focus and the instillation of peace and love in the heart of humanity.

Minnie: Keep looking up -- literally and otherwise.

Brian: I mean, let's face it, Minnie, if all you ever learned about aspirin was the ways that it had been mishandled and the problems that it had caused, you'd deem it a moral duty to endure one's headaches rather than to treat them.

Minnie: Yes?

Brian: Then there are the bald-faced lies, stating that "drugs" somehow fry the brain the moment that they are criminalized by botanically clueless politicians.

Minnie: Word.

Brian: And so this thorough analysis of 19th-century social forces undertaken by author Dean Reynolds shows us clearly that the entire "drug problem" is a social construction. There was a very conscious decision by Americans to create a drug problem in 1914, and they did so by outlawing the poppy plant. I repeat: they created the supposed "drug problem" in 1914.

Minnie: Look down.

Brian: And what's the result today, Minnie?

Minnie: Preach!

Brian: America is the most drug-using country in the world, with 1 in 4 American women dependent on Big Pharma drugs for a lifetime -- a dependency rate that is almost three times higher -- THREE TIMES HIGHER -- than the chemical dependency rate that existed before the drug war.

Minnie: Look up! Look down, your pants are falling down! Ha ha!

Brian: Quite.

Minnie: But pray, continue.

Brian: And so we see that American conservatives have teamed-up with bamboozled liberals to create a sort of negative religion called the Drug War, in which all social evils are referred to "drug use," a problem which was in turn created out of whole cloth by beer-guzzling politicians themselves, in part to take the heat off of alcohol, which was the social problem "par excellence" in the 19th century.

And, of course, this made-to-order drug problem not only can never be fixed by law -- but it SHOULD never be fixed by law -- since humankind has always been interested in self-transcendence, and so it's absurd and tyrannical to outlaw the very substances (many of them growing at our very feet) that can provide that transcendence.

By outlawing the naturally occurring substances that can provide transcendence, we actually CREATED the opioid crisis. How? By forcing those who seek self-transcendence to use drugs based on their availability and not on their relative safety. That's how this bogus "drug war" actually created the opioid crisis that exists today.

Minnie: What do you think?

Brian: I think it's clear that the whole "drug problem" is a social construction, that would not exist if we were to educate folks about ALL psychoactive substances, without carving out huge exceptions to our honesty when it comes to Big Pharma meds, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, sugar, and other "western drugs of choice." Re-legalize the plants that grow at our feet (which it was a violation of Natural Law to outlaw in the first place) and then be 100% honest about the known effects of ALL drugs!

Minnie: No, I mean what do you think of your hair cut?

Brian: Wow. You shot, you scored.

Minnie: I know, right?








Akhenaten -- Another Interview with Greatness -- Bombshell: Webmaster Insists that Everybody Must Get Stoned -- Buoyancy: Review by the Moviegoer of the United States of America -- Dear Lance Morrow -- Denzel as Terrorist in John Q -- Don't Read This -- First Lab-Grown Hamburger Financed by Brian Quass -- How the DEA Determines if Your Relgious Beliefs are Real -- Human Beings Ain't Jack S--- -- Merry Christmas 2021 -- Minnie and Me -- More things that Dr. Fauci will and will not be doing now that he's been vaccinated -- Pipe Dream or the Next Big Thing: You be the judge -- Portrait of the artist as a young witch -- Psst! This post is for artists only! -- The Drug Problem is a Social Creation -- The Man of Mode by George Etherege -- The State v. Homo sapiens -- The Theory of Aesthetic Relativity -- The Turing Test Bias -- The Visit -- Thoughts about Cultural Geography, dawg -- Three Arguments Against Political Correctness in Academia -- Why Zero Tolerance is Bullshit -- Willie Who? --

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