Storming Heaven – RAnt(hony)-ings

Drugwar: The Insanity Continues

Evidence of this? This sixty-five thousand dollar mass spectrometer is being used to determine the safety of street-level drugs.

Morning Edition – Built For Counterterrorism, This High-Tech Machine Is Now Helping Fight Fentanyl – November 27, 2019

Instead of increasing the spending on the drugwar, adding to the millions upon billions of dollars that we currently spend combating the black market in illegal street drugs, how about we just decriminalize drug use and then regulate drug manufacture.

…and we do all of that knowing that some people will still get high, keeping an eye out for abusers so they can get treatment not prison. How about we do that instead? Rather than deploying space age technology to determine what potentially deadly drug was cut with what other potentially deadly additive in some back alley lab somewhere? End the black markets. Stop playing either the part of the Baptist or the Bootlegger for a change.

Conservatives Love the Insane War on Drugs

Walls, barbed wire, wars, hate, division, intolerance, exclusion, uncertainty, fear, misery in all its myriad forms, THOSE are the very things that drive people to drugs in the first place. THOSE are the reasons why marginalized communities have such high degrees of suicide and alcoholism and drug use. Because they are desperately trying to ESCAPE.
And for a president who preaches hate and division and intolerance and exclusion and war and walls and fear announcing in front of a room full of hate and division and intolerance and exclusion and war and goddamned WALLS that he is going to somehow stop the flow of drugs into this country — stop the very demand for escape that he himself creates and perpetuates every single day — that is the very pinnacle of ironic cluelessness. That, that right there, is everything wrong with modern conservatism in a single sentence.
If you want a world people don’t want to escape from, then you have to build a better world not higher walls.
Jim Wright Stonekettle Station on Facebook

If you want to end reliance on drugs, you first have to understand why people do drugs. Escapism is only part of the equation; or rather, what we are escaping too is more the question. The book Storming Heaven; LSD and the American Dream attempts to answer that question. Carl Hart’s more recent work High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society dissects the farce that is drug interdiction in the US and how we are destroying ourselves with this insane war on drugs.

As usual, Jim has the farce pegged. If you read the entire article at his link, you’ll see how he breaks it all down. It is a self-perpetuating excuse to waste lives and treasure, like most modern warfare. I have written extensively on the subject of the Insane War on Drugs. It is another of those issues that I have not changed my stance on, because I just happened to have been right all along. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Facebook status post backdated to the blog.

Common Sense 115 – Storming Heaven & more Foreign Dragons

Going through the backlog of Common Sense (with Dan Carlin) episodes that I wanted blog on.

115 was titled Waterboarding the Bureaucracy; and other than wanting to second the motion, yeah let’s waterboard ’em, I really don’t have anything else to say. Except that if you want to research the history of drugs in America (including the CIA’s programs, to some extent) I’d recommend the book Storming Heaven. It’s more about exploring why we experiment with drugs in the first place, but it still addresses the problem with powerful people using drugs to alter the perceptions of others. I found it fascinating, myself.

[I’ve been looking for an excuse to plug that book for awhile now]

As for the second half of the program, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto; again, my observations are limited. Military dictators tend to oppress their oppositions with violence. Why would you not think she was killed by the sitting dictator?

Should Pakistan have democracy? That would be up to Pakistan. Getting involved in the politics of other countries, suppressing the free expression of political thought (even in this country) increases the chance of a later violent backlash; worse than any violence we might face by not interfering in their politics now. Dan takes longer to say it, but it’s just as true in the short form.

This has been an issue widely discussed in Libertarian forums from Strike the Root to Antiwar.com to Mises.org to Lewrockwell.com and on to more traditional places like CATO. The list is nearly as long as the history of ill advised American intervention abroad. It’s just too bad that government bureaucrats don’t read libertarian publications (outside of the CIA, that is) or they might be more aware of the mess they make every time they decide to dabble in other countries politics.

But then, what the hell do we know? We’ve only been saying that terrorism was going to visit us here in the US if we kept meddling in other peoples politics since about 1971. Wasn’t 30 years warning enough?