This article was originally posted on TheDial.co but is no longer there. I’ve posted it here for posterity.
“Prohibition worked best when directed at its primary target: the working-class poor.”
These quotes could just as well be describing the injustice of current drug policy – rather than the failure of alcohol prohibition in North America.
A version of this article was originally published on The Third Wave
WARNING:This article describes violent acts, and links to discussions with hateful violent language.
In April this year, a man drove a van across busy pedestrian streets in Toronto, killing 10 and injuring more. It was the deadliest mass homicide in the city’s history.
The murderer identified himself with the growing “incel” movement – a term with origins in sexual frustration (the word “incel” is a portmanteau of the misnomer “involuntary celibate”) that has now been appropriated by a nebulous group of disgruntled men who believe that society is rigged against them, dooming them to a life without the sex they’re entitled to.
Mostly confined to online forums, the number of people defining themselves as incels is hard to pin down – although a recent surge in searches for “incel” and the media attention following the Toronto attack suggests that its popularity is on the rise.
The online gathering-places for the modern incel are littered with calls for misogynistic violence, rape, and coercion. When incels aren’t praising the violent actions of mass murderers, or urging others to act in a similar fashion – they’re spreading brutal misogynistic propaganda promoting rape, domestic abuse, and pedophilia.
The reasons behind the surge in incel ideologies are many and complex: harmful patriarchal gender conventions; the normalization of aggression in young boys; the struggle some men encounter in connecting with their emotions. There are dozens of models to explain the attractiveness of incel philosophies to the modern man. But no matter what psychological and societal reasons for incelhood, the movement is inarguably associated with violence.
Male-perpetrated violence is, unsurprisingly, soaked throughout culture and history. It’s not just a phenomenon confined to the bloody sands of ancient battlefields or the slave trade of America and Europe’s shameful legacies. It’s reflected in modern domestic violence statistics, showing that male-perpetrated domestic violence accounts for 91% of all domestic abuse prosecutions, and that 87% of all domestic homicides are perpetrated by men.
There is clearly a very current, prevalent, systemic issue with male-perpetrated violence in society. The incel movement is just another way in which this problem is being highlighted. And we need to do something about it.
I know, it’s been a while! I’m sorry! I’ve been busy working for The Third Wave and other ventures… the psychedelic movement is constantly gaining ground these days.
This latest (ghost-written) article of mine is intended to explain why we need to change the way we treat mental health issues, and how psychedelics could be the catalyst for a paradigm shift in mental health therapy.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the enormous stigma that surrounds heroin.
Even people within the drug-using community who detest prohibition will often be heard saying something like “Yeah, legalise everything… but not heroin. Never heroin.“
Why is this the case? Is there evidence to support the view of heroin as the most harmful, addictive drug around?
Next week is Drug and Alcohol Awareness Week at the University of Manchester. As a student there, I’ve written this piece for the Mancunion newspaper, highlighting the need for harm reduction initiatives that protect our students.
Please read and share to promote safer drug use and potentially save lives!
http://mancunion.com/2017/02/16/promote-safe-drug-use/
I wrote this article for The Third Wave, where it originally appeared, as a response to an opinion piece in the New York Times from skeptical clinical psychiatrist Richard Friedman. I think it can help address the typical arguments that come from people of anti-psychedelic bias. Enjoy!
A recent article in the New York Times, penned by clinical psychiatrist Richard Friedman, attempts to scare his audience into thinking that LSD might not be a good treatment for depression, despite a barrage of recent studies suggesting otherwise. Friedman appears to be of the opinion that it would be wrong to offer these drugs to sufferers of disease; even though there is no evidence of harm from LSD or psilocybin when given in a clinical setting, and despite the growing body of evidence of the efficacy of these drugs in treating mental health conditions.
Friedman himself mentions the debilitating nature of depression; between a third and one-half of all patients will never find relief from conventional treatments. Hundreds of millions suffer worldwide, and hundreds of thousands commit suicide every year. Most of those sufferers don’t have access to the expensive treatments most commonly handed out by psychiatrists in the developed world.
This one’s a little off-topic… technically it’s nothing to do with psychedelics.
You might have heard of kratom recently; it’s been in the news quite a bit, since the DEA announced in August that they wanted to make it illegal, before they fairly quickly withdrew their plans in the face of a loud public backlash. After all, thousands of Americans have been using kratom to combat prescription drug addiction or alcoholism – getting rid of kratom could cause huge damage to people’s lives.
Kratom is a plant that grows almost everywhere in SouthEast Asia. Its leaves are traditionally chewed for their sedative and painkilling properties. In the West, it’s often found in dried form, and brewed into a tea or swallowed in capsules. Kratom contains a bunch of alkaloids that have a relaxing and soothing effect. It’s like a plant-based alcohol – except, it hasn’t been directly linked to seven forms of cancer, like alcohol has.
The period in the 1920s and 30s where alcohol was banned nationwide in the US was a volatile time. It led to an explosion of organised crime, hundreds of thousands of moonshine-related injuries and deaths, and only a moderate reduction in the use of alcohol. The US missed out on untold millions of tax dollars in that 13-year period of prohibition – in a particularly tumultuous economic time that included the great depression of 1929.
Few people would argue that prohibition was a good idea. Although it may have reduced liver damage and moderately reduced alcohol consumption, it increased crime, led to thousands of deaths from poisoned alcohol, and unfairly targeted working class Americans. Any benefits from reducing the sale and production of a harmful drug were minor compared to the unintended consequences of criminalisation.
It’s been three months since the Psychoactive Substances Act was passed into law in the UK. It effectively banned every substance that wasn’t food, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine or prescription medication. Despite the immense, sweeping power this act has given police, so far they’ve only targeted head shops; stores selling ‘legal highs’. This was the main aim of the PSAct from the outset – shut down the high street vendors that were successfully bypassing UK drug policy. Since the end of May, 24 head shops have been shut down, and over 300 non-specialist stores have stopped selling legal highs. The Home Office estimates this will cost the economy £32 million annually… and that’s probably a fairly conservative estimate.
In addition, 186 people have been arrested for selling legal highs. One representative example is a man selling canisters of harmless laughing gas at a festival. He could face a lifetime in jail for carrying a gas used to whip cream.
Canisters of laughing gas could land you in jail
So the PSAct has achieved its main goal – but at the cost of our freedom. This is the first time in our history that instead of declaring what is illegal, an Act has listed what is legal. And it’s a very small list. It sets a scary precedent for future policies.
Strobe lights, dense fog, thumping beats, crowded dance floor… and a whole lot of MDMA. It’s a typical clubbing experience.
Clubs devoted to the class-A drug ecstasy aren’t exactly a new concept. They’ve been around for decades. But this was my first encounter. Everyone was clearly there to get high; the dancers knew it, the DJ knew it, the bouncers knew it.
In some ways it was a bizarre experience. And it was a microcosm of our nonsensical drug laws.
Ecstasy has been illegal since 1985, but it is a relatively harmless drug. There are risks associated with taking large amounts, taking it frequently or mixing it with other drugs, but compared to alcohol or tobacco these risks are low. Former head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, Professor David Nutt, was fired for (truthfully) saying that taking ecstasy is less dangerous than horse riding.
The Psychedelic Scientist 