“There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it … brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.”
Aldous Huxley, California Medical School, 1961.
The legal drugs industries vast profits have long been dependent upon their billion dollar pay offs to the state, for the right to sell some of the most lethal and highly addictive of all drugs used by Mankind. The blatant hypocrisy of current international drugs laws allows the pharmaceutical, tobacco and alcohol industries to flourish, while generations of ordinary people are criminalised by statutes that are futile and hypocritical.
To paraphrase the immortal words of Oxford University’s most celebrated dope smuggler, Howard Marks, it’s high time the situation was rectified. If Ron Paul is ever elected to the Whitehouse, he has promised he will pardon all federal prisoners convicted of non-violent drugs-related offences. This would cut the prison population in half, along with the profits of the ever-expanding Prison-Industrial Complex.
Thousands of legal proceedings all over the world have resulted in damages being awarded to people who have been harmed by the products of the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, all of which had government clearance for consumption by the public. Nevertheless, to restrict the right to smoke cigarettes in western society, while the tobacco industry continues to make billions from the unregulated exploitation of the Developing World, is an obvious example of lethal hypocrisy.
The early 20th century criminalisation of alcohol in the U.S. and Europe proved that prohibition actually creates the opposite of its alleged purpose. American speak-easys have been immortalised by 1930’s film noirs and Marks Brothers comedies, but the laws were only repealed when the central banks realised that that they had handed millions in tax-free profits to the mob, which then simply moved its business interests into the newly-formed illegal drugs trade.
Rather conveniently for Dupont and Rockefeller interests, the mass production of hemp, from which it is possible to manufacture organic plastics, paper, fuel, medicine, food and clothing, was criminalised across the planet, despite centuries of tradition and a myriad of uses for the incredibly versatile plant. The prohibition of the popular weed has much more to with replacing its bi-products with oil and chemical-based pollutants, than simply preventing people from getting stoned on its flowers.
Every Man and Woman has the inalienable right to choose the way they spend their own recreation time. Provided their recreational habits do not infringe any other individual’s rights, all lifestyle choices should be lawfully respected. Within the confines of our own homes or specialised environments, no individual, organisation or government has the right to dictate how we behave, if no other individual is adversely affected by our choices.
All laws prohibiting the use of recreational drugs should be abolished with immediate effect. They should be replaced with new Rules & Regulations on the Sales and Marketing of all known Recreational Substances, whether organically grown or developed in a lab.
It should be emphatically forbidden for any drugs companies to artificially enhance the addictive qualities of their products, while honest education about the effects and health consequences of all drugs should replace the state’s disingenuous scaremongering tactics.
As we have seen in the Netherlands, where the Dutch are permitted to grow five plants for their own personal use, the sale of cannabis in licenced coffeeshops has caused a dramatic reduction in the size of the illicit drugs market. There is no sustainable reason why this policy should not be adopted in every country with a thriving cannabis culture.
There is also no adequate explanation why dance drugs such as ecstasy are not openly tested in every European club, with qualified paramedics on stand-by at all times. This policy has already been adopted in Switzerland, where there has not been a single drug-related death since the switch to a more tolerant policy towards users.
The U.K. government’s continued crusade against various flora and fungi that have been found growing on these shores since the dawn of time is completely ludicrous. That Magic Mushrooms and Philosophers Stones are currently considered Class A drugs is simply absurd, when there is no existing research that proves that they are harmful to our health.
Addictive drugs such as heroin, cocaine and amphetamines should be supplied by licenced dispensaries to registered addicts, free of charge. It would then no longer be an ultimate necessity for chronically dependent addicts to thieve from others to feed the habits that fill the pockets of some of the most dangerous criminals the world has ever seen.
Moreover, if possession of all drugs were decriminalised and parole was granted to all those previously convicted of non-violent drugs-related offences, the prisons would empty overnight. Previous experiments in Holland and Portugal suggest that crime would be reduced by up to 70%, resulting in huge financial losses for the privatised prison industry.
