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This past week we saw The Star report “Feds say they won’t decriminalize any drugs besides marijuana, despite calls from cities.” After reading this I began to ask myself what it would take for them to say yes. It was also reported this past week in Reason “FDA May Soon Allow MDMA Prescriptions for PTSD.”
“The results were striking. Average scores on the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS), which indicates symptom severity, fell by 71 percent in the medium-dose group and 49 percent in the high-dose group, compared to 13 percent in the low-dose group. Sixty-eight percent of the medium- and high-dose subjects no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, compared to 29 percent of the low-dose subjects.”
The numbers seem promising and although the news may be from two neighboring countries there is an explicable link. Why is the FDA finally allowing this? It’s unlikely that they are doing it primarily for the greater good—it wouldn’t be in their nature to—it’s more likely because they know they can control and make money off of it the same way the DEA has done busting people with it since 1985. It’s a PR move liken to saying ‘Look, we’re innovatively helping people with PTSD (even though it took us decades)’. It’s a way to appeal to the next generational waves to get blown into their careless hands after having their reputations tarnished by their deadly greed. They think that maybe we will see a sense of progressive trust in the corporations that deal it out to those who qualify for their trials and tests even though we’ve grown evermore wary of their ways. They help them now, they’ll help us too, right?
No, I’m not convinced. Why is Marinol (synthetic THC) approved by the FDA but still outlawed by the DEA as a Schedule 1 substance? These are the people who want to put the rubber stamp on patenting all of the hundreds of different compounds from cannabis so only they can extract and sell them while everyone else producing and consuming them without their genetic biomarkers can have a stay in solitary confinement for a while.
This is what desperate obsolete systems of power fail to grapple with as they go crashing to the ground in dusty toxic plumes. They expect no response or backlash for their constant barrage of dehumanization and disregard for fundamental human rights. If right now is not the time to decriminalize all drugs and implement full—not partial—harm-reduction policies for the benefit of the citizens of a just society when will it be? What is it going to take? How many people have to die and have their lives in ruins along the way? No, it isn’t about that either. These are the people running the show. The ones who do the things they say we can’t do. They don’t really mind that this is happening. They’re the ones that set us up. They may never willingly agree to giving up their business to their competition.
How has it come down to this? We can trace it back. Way back. Their power corrupts them the same way it has corrupted so many others. How can we decentralize these federal governments to work again in the favor of their evolving people while also maintaining that the justice system functions humanely and thrives? How can we manage our health care and human rights to reach a state of homeostasis with what we know to be true and sacred and what we need to actually realize this? This may have gotten out of hand but not out of our hands yet. I reject the feds answer not to brusquely consider decriminalizing drugs other than cannabis. We already have the right answer judging from both failed and effective policies and the two clearly do not harmonize. The question we must ask ourselves now is how are we going to bring this vision to the light of day?
An underground railroad of clinical labs abiding by a code of ethics comes to mind. If you could take an entheogenic drug one time and be free from your addictions in many cases forever why would you want to show up at a pharmacy at the same time every day to take your suboxone that’s just prolonging what should already be over? Like how cannabis decriminalization evolved from an underground medical movement resisting an unjust law—perhaps a similar model could be applied to the testing, purification, and facilitation of all drugs and the necessary resources needed to get addicts off of them with our current understandings of the science of addiction.
The costs would be high at first due to the inevitable losses. Or you could look at it like giving the government the tools that they need to do their jobs. Although the feat would not be impossible for investors looking to make a disruption they would take a huge risk putting their names and monies on the line as well as anyone involved. A few of these in practice would surely go down in a heart beat and everyone involved locked up in a cell for a while. Taking down a few hundred would start to get harder. Also what kind of person would have the kind of funds to just essentially throw away on beating the federal government, the pharmaceutical industry, all of the drug dealers, corrupt officials and police in a city at their own game? Give it five to ten years and there will be enough Bitcoin billionaires to ask yourself.
What about viable action right now? There is of course doing more of the same but stepping it up a notch or two. More lobbying. More writing to reps. More talking to people. More protesting and establishing digital and on the ground movements. More deaths. More money and greed. We haven’t hit the breaking point yet and we may never will at the pace they have us set spinning inside our little wheels. What about the addicts who need help the most? The poor, the disabled, the uneducated and propagandized, the one’s who don’t even know that a new life—a clean slate is possible? That redemption is not just something muttered telephonically in a church but something potentially inside of them like a shadow of a phoenix waiting to rise from the ashes of who they used to be? If they’re lucky they have half-measures which are a step in the right direction but are often times deficient.
A cautionary lesson can be learned here from the way certain corporate interests salivate maliciously over profits and control in the perverted name of cannabis decriminalization in some parts of the United States. In the wake of California’s backwards attempt to legalize what was practically more legal for two decades prior, Scott’s Miracle Gro subsidiaries bought up a majority of the companies that many small farmers, who have now been priced out of the market, used to rely on to produce their crops. The old community-oriented farmers market style co-ops that started the medical movement in the 1990’s and provided to patients in need at no cost have been taxed out of the game completely and no longer exist due to new laws and regulations that favor the megafarms and their tech oligarch investors. True decriminalization would look something akin to what Ed Rosenthal refereed to as ‘the tomato model’ and not a clinical trial or permission granted to acres of genetically modified buds while everybody else is left in the dust. Although cannabis may be a more intensive crop in terms of production and processing, having superproprietary control over it while shutting out the ones in need the most is regressive and a further assault by those with dollar signs burned into their great white eyes.
We have the knowledge and ability to bypass ‘opiate substitution therapy’ and go straight to botanicals that destroy ‘opioid use disorder’ and more without the need for any government involvement. In fact some groups are already doing this with Tabernanthe Iboga in Canada and Mexico and there are clinics anyone can visit for themselves if they can afford to and their heart is in good shape. It’s certainly not cheap, and it would only be free under personal or charitable circumstances as facilitators usually want to be paid for both their material, time, and services making sure everything goes as smoothly as possible. Although wider adoption and legal blessings in place to adopt en masse would be revolutionary, we need to show them we don’t exactly have any more time to sit around and wait for things to get magically better as they continue to get worse. What is it going to take for practices like this that can effectively stamp out addictions in one session to be adopted on a mass and less exclusive scale? More of the truth getting out there to the people who need it or can do something with it. More people resisting the censorship of possibilities in our lives from a dystopian virtual reality cloned into being through disinformation. We have the power to create something better for ourselves, our communities, and our children and it starts by saying No.
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Vember is a pen name.
