These are some quotes taken from an interview with Dr. Shulgin(Godfather of Ecstacy) relating to this matter. I think Shulgin should be president. :)
Please take a moment to read this.
Quote:
Q. What's your feeling about the "just say no" approach to drug education?
A. I disagree with it. I firmly believe that people must be kept fully informed, must have complete access to all information about something and then make a choice. This way I think you're going to have a better consequence from the use of drugs in society. Drugs will be used in society. They always have been. They always will be. The risks now are getting more and more away from the body, away from the mind, away from the the public health aspect, and more and more into the legal aspect. I would say the most damaging aspect of many drugs and drug use today is the law, which often does more harm than the drugs themselves.
Q. Is there any chance of that actually changing for MDMA?
A. Might the law change in the area of MDMA? Only with difficulty. Unfortunately, the whole legal system as it addresses the drug and drug-use situation has moved away from what originally was a medical or a public health concern. Now it embraces not only power and control, but money. I'm trying to estimate the size of the industry - that is, the 'war on drugs' industry - that has been built up, that is associated with, connected to, and benefits from this particular war. Now that we've lost communism as an enemy, what do we do with our large military? We find ways for it to be used in socially responsible enforcement of law. You have seizure laws. Property can be seized if that property is somehow associated with drug use. You have industries like the prison industry. I've heard that in California alone, four billion dollars a year is invested in the prison industry, in some 30 or 40 prisons. This is a big industry and it's growing. You have people who make spectrophotometers that are back ordered. Fifty-thousand dollar spectrophotometers are back ordered because the demand for testing urine samples is so great, that they can't supply them fast enough to the analytical laboratories where they're hiring chemists to run these assays. This is a big industry! You have the investment of the State Department which now can enter countries more and more - South American countries, European countries, because they are the sources of drugs. And therefore, it can enter and influence the politics of those countries. And the vehicle for getting into foreign politics is 'the drug' and 'the drug war'.
We had a Posse Comitatus Act passed after the Civil War in this country, that said that the military cannot be used in the enforcement of civil law, except for national emergencies. And so I learned just a while ago that submarines, nuclear submarines that no longer have to patrol the Straits outside Murmansk are now following trader-trawlers from Colombia to the United States and are going underwater and using their periscopes to see where the ships are going. Then they inform the Coast Guard. So, I asked the question of this person, 'How much does it cost to run a nuclear submarine for an hour? And I asked a group of people who were business people, visitors sitting around a camp fire, and I got answers ranging from twenty thousand to twenty million. Because you can't say the cost of a nuclear submarine. If you consider the toilet paper and the potato chips, twenty thousand dollars an hour. If you consider where the uranium came from and how often you have to change the missiles, and at 30 years what you're going to do with the left-over fuel. This is billions of dollars of equipment that, per hour, becomes quite expensive. And this is being used in the war on drugs. It's a part of the industry. The military has a tremendous investment and is getting more of an investment. This is part of that industry of the war on drugs.
You are not going to take away the very tools that are the raison d'etre of that industry without making a lot of people very unhappy. They've lost their income. They've lost their position of power, position of authority, position of doing what it is that gives them their jollies. You think that people use drugs because of the pleasure it gives them. The people who run the drug war in a sense use the drug war for the pleasures it gives them in turn. And unless you can change that ever increasing body, that entity, the gestalt of that industry as a self-perpetrating and self-growing thing, you're not going to find MDMA coming out and being made legal very soon.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
