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Rodney Lewis — | | | | | | | This site is not specific to any drug at all, focusing instead on the crux of the drug issue for me which is people going to jail who I strongly feel don't belong there. Jail, however, is usually only the beginning of the misfortunes dealt those who become ensnared in this "war." Students get expelled from school, workers lose their jobs, parents lose their children. I wanted to create a website for those who think that what people do with their own lives and their own bodies is none of anyone else's business. The ultimate criminal government is one that micromanages and over-regulates its citizens' lives and their private behavior. Any government engaging in illegal activity calls into question its own legitimacy. The tragedy of the American-led global drug war is not only in how it destroys the lives of many innocent people, but that the designation of anything (but especially something as widely-used as marijuana) as contraband denigrates respect for the law in general, which hurts us all. Not only must people involved in the possession or sale of illicit goods often commit worser secondary crimes in concealment or support of their original unlawful acts, but just as merely informing someone of their diagnosis of mental illness will inevitably affect the course of their purported illness, giving otherwise law-abiding citizens who distribute or use contraband the label "criminal" can only serve to further alienate them from what they perceive to be normal society, increasing the likelihood they will later engage in genuinely antisocial behavior. As a student of the public school system, I always found the contradiction quite disturbing of a crusade carried out in the name of children, but which was quite prepared to permanently deprive children of the opportunities that education would afford them for bringing as much as a throat lozenge into the educational environment. It was and is a mystery to me how being excommunicated forever from the largely positive learning and social school community was supposed to help troubled youth who had turned to drugs. I wondered what type of message that sends to the remaining students about their own worth to those in authority. It is easy to imagine an expelled student involved with drugs wallowing in the community, left with no legitimate opportunities for advancement, still interacting with neighbors, former classmates and other peers, exacerbating by magnitudes the very problems their banishment was supposed to have solved or prevented. The so-called "war on drugs" exploits the most disadvantaged in our society. Everyone wants to improve their economic lot. The American dream has come to include working for yourself. Even the smallest of legitimate small businesses takes a bit of time, money and know-how before the first sale can be rung up. You'll need a business license, liability insurance, a financial accounting system for determining which of many possible courses of action to take and what taxes you owe—the list never ends. This has the effect of creating an insurmountable barrier to entry into small business ownership for the poorest of us. As a result of this it turns out that selling drugs has been the most accessible way for those with very little money to parlay a paltry sum into a fortune. Being able to turn as little as US$40 into millions with no paperwork or waiting becomes appealing even to those not so desperately downtrodden. This is why our prisons are full of poor drug dealers and not wealthy ones. The (mostly) responsible use of various mind-altering substances has brought a richness to my own life more valuable to me than all the money in the world. Anti-drug people (a majority whom I would guess had never taken it before) said that LSD "distorts" reality, however, to my initial surprise but lasting amazement it brought a powerfully fresh, beautiful new perspective on the world into focus, the breadth and depth of which is simply not possible to capture with words. Over twelve years after the fact, I don't believe it is an overstatement to say I consider my first 'trip' in the spring of '96 to be the most significant experience of my life, and I think the half-dozen or so trips since then have been integral to a fuller personal development. I will never forget the pure blissful serenity of the klonopin or valium, nor that way a couple shots of whiskey occasionally can provide much-needed respite from life's toil. Others might see me coming down the street and have a fleeting moment of pity that I've never climbed a tree, but I wonder if it compares in any way to how I would genuinely feel for someone who had the misfortune of being born, living, and dying without ever having the privilege of experiencing the things I have experienced. Westerners, to the serious detriment of their mental well-being, forgot how to think in terms of a continuum of gradients rather than in black and white. A product of this prevalent, and in most cases fallacious, mode of thinking is the myth that a person either completely abstains or they have a serious drug problem and they need help, with no allowance for a middle ground. Too little water and you will die, too much water and you will die. The practice of moderation is a component sadly missing from any drug awareness education or public service announcement I've ever seen. With no room for an exploration of the concept of moderation in drug education how can those who are using substances—no matter how much abstinance "education" they see—learn to explore inner space in the most careful way possible? How are we to take the concern for others' well-being that prohibitionists profess at face value when they are not rejoicing in the slightest possiblity that the harms of drug use might be mitigated by teaching about how one could more safely use them? Drug war apologists like to bring out the old saw about the crackheaded mother who chooses the hubs for herself over diapers and formula for her babies. No one in their right mind would argue against government intervention in these extreme kinds of circumstances. But they are hardly emblematic of the case of the typical person who uses chemicals to temporarily alter the way they experience the world. It is not the government's job to protect people from their own stupidity. The government is not your parent. Parents—well, okay, good parents—know when to show love and when to punish. The government, being an entity composed of many, many people that can't all know you (or love you) and be familiar with your needs, cannot do this. I shudder to think of the world five hundred or a thousand years down the road in which society has cultivated a people so acclimated to the paternalistic, nanny state as to be entirely incapacitated without it. Do you want a world for your descendants where weak-mindedness is literally "in the genes"? It is my personal perception that those who advocate most strongly for any maintenance or even the escalation of prohibition tend to have a rather dim outlook on the ability of human beings and life in general to persevere. They go on about how they love America, yet they ignore the most important founding notion, that people need to be free to carve out their own destinies. They rail against social services as too much big government, yet laws dictating such personal behavior as what we do with our own bodies is somehow not. These attitudes have the effect of reducing their ostensible patriotism to mere flag worship. Look at how far we have come in the last three billion years! If you are reading this, you come from a very long line of survivors! It is hard for me to underestimate the ability of any person to triumph over any adversity if their will is strong and intentions are pure. The possibility must be entertained, if only briefly, that we cannot take the stated concerns and goals of the most powerful prohibitionists at face value. Evidence for this comes from the methods of DARE. A natural human reaction to being told over and over again that you may not do something, especially if you never had the notion to do it to begin with, is that you will eventually want to do that very thing. This is especially true with children. The constant barrage of messages that drugs are taboo can only serve to make them more appealing when the natural need sets in to distinguish themselves from their parents and other authority figures through rebellion. Is it any wonder they continue or even step up their experimentation with psychoactive substances once they discover they were lied to when told a single hit of marijuana would invariably debilitate them cognitively for the rest of their lives? It is hard for me to believe this concept is lost on those working for the nation's premier anti-drug education firm, who with their Ph.d's and Master's must have a lot more training and education on human psychology and childhood development than I. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if drugs are harmless or the harbingers of certain death. It doesn't matter that minorities and the poor are especially suceptible to becoming the victims of prohibition. It doesn't matter that LSD can have awesome psychotherapeutic value. It doesn't matter that marijuana is less harmful than we all thought, or that the vast majority of Americans have smoked it at some point in their lives, or that it's more of a stepdown drug than a gateway drug, or that it is good medicine for nearly all. None of that matters. What matters is that people are being incarcerated for doing something that does not harm others, that highly personal behavior is punished in the land of the free, and that needs to stop. The alternative to throwing people in jail merely for what they choose to put in their bodies has its drawbacks too, have no illusions, but I think it is to be preferred as these are highly outweighed by the benefits to humanity, and indeed the only way our battle with drugs will be won. I have faith in the human spirit. I have seen too much greatness in too many unlikely places to not believe that the average person must barely scratch the surface of their awesome potential in their short lifetimes. Some will reach the fork in the road that most hard drug users inevitably do, and to the their own and the world's great misfortune they will give up, they will decide that to go on is too hard or not worth it. Yet others will choose to live, and in so doing will know what it is be alive for the first time in their lives. They will go on to value life as more precious and meaningful than they could have before. This is a treasure that, I believe, people must discover all on their own. It is not a gift that can be bestowed by the criminal justice system or police or judges or (least of all) prosecutors. While I don't by any stretch of the imagination have all the answers, I know in very general terms what a framework for decriminalization of the possession and sales of controlled substances would look like. Firstly, precious resources wasted on incarceration and deceitful, ineffective education would to be used instead to inform honestly and provide proven forms of treatment on demand. Secondly, ethical guidelines would be established for the production and sale of psychoactive substances. Growers and sellers would be licensed after demonstrating their knowledge of these newly-articulated ethical standards. The licensure process would be very low-cost, easy for a person of average intelligence, accessible to all, and speedy. Residential growing facilities would be allowed, but subject to inspection by the fire department. If people are free to do whatever they please, and those things happen to not be condusive to their survival, nature will remove them from the gene pool. A person smoking coke and succombing to the less savory consequences of doing so will be making way for someone who happens to have the genetic makeup to have the physiology such that they are more impervious to the ill effects of these substances. People always have and always will be using psychoactive substances, I guarantee it, but with the passing of each successive generation fewer and fewer will suffer a "drug problem." Through this will be forged a stronger, more robust human species, prepared to face the challenges of the next centuries and millenia. Please do not take it as overstatement when I say that drugs have turned out to be the catalyst for a much larger epic struggle for the soul of humanity. Those who value the freedom of others at least as much as their own will be valiant, to be sure. The only question is, how much will we lose in the meantime and how long it will take? In the interest of complete transparency, I would be remiss in not fully disclosing that DPRM is not technically non-profit in the legal sense, however, any money earned by this site through advertising or by any other means will be used to pay for the continued operation and promotion of this site, which in addition to hosting, domain registration, and other fees, may supplement at times, when needed and possible, my general costs of living. Stated simply, money this website makes may go to feeding me. Thank you so much for visiting this website! Please network with your local drug policy reform activists and join the movement! —Rodney Lewis; Sunday, September 7, 2008

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