It’s amazing what a lack of drugs can do to a person. The initial symptoms include the use of poor grammar and all-capitals. Progressive lack of drugs will then lead to profanity, violence, and murder. In its most advanced form, lack of drugs causes renal failure. Take, for example, the following message which arrived at Negative Space September 27, 1996:

Subject: Drug Task Force
Name: Having-Problems with Assholes
E-Mail: Idonot.have@email.address.war

Do you assholes have a slightest clue about the great state of mind and body, called BEING SOBER or CLEAN OF DRUGS!?! The world would be a much better place for everyone, if there would not be LSD, alcohol, cocaine, tobacco, etc. Drugs cause violence, death, broken homes, unhappiness... Personally I’m ready to STRANGLE anyone who says YES TO DRUGS!

Fuck you very much! I hope you all die soon!

This is a classic example of what the lack of drugs can do to a person. Here is a person who is obviously going through a nervous breakdown caused by a lack of drugs, exacerbated by renal malfunctions (“problems with” his “assholes”).

The world would be a better place without wine? Personally, I suspect the world would be a better place without neurotic stranglers. My recommendation for “Having-Problems” is a glass of wine a day for the next week, followed by a hemp milkshake.

“Having-Problems” should also be aware, however, that the problems enumerated are problems, not of drug use, but of drug laws. How much violence is associated with the alcohol trade? The tobacco trade? And yet there was a time when the alcohol trade was the most violent in America. And there was a time when the tobacco trade was the most violent in the old world. The tobacco trade was violent when the church tried to outlaw it, and the alcohol trade was violent when the United States tried to outlaw it.

The coca plant caused no violence in South America before the United States decided it was an evil, evil plant. Today, every dollar of cocaine enforcement is a dollar of black market subsidies. Every dollar we spend to fight cocaine strengthens the black market and weakens the South American governments. Before the United States became involved, coca was a tea, for goodness’ sake. It was less addictive and less dangerous than coffee.

When coffee was illegal, the same charges were leveled against it, in the same irrational terms. Yes, coffee was once illegal. It was the “infidel’s wine”, something no god-fearing Christian was supposed to touch. Rewards were offered to those who turned coffee drinkers in to the authorities.

We should say it was utterly irrational, given what we know now about coffee and caffeine. But then, we should also say that our own laws are utterly irrational, given what we know now about coca, opium, hemp, and LSD. Instead, we use the violence of the black market as an excuse to strengthen the black market through more laws, and then pretend to be surprised and angry when the violence only increases.

The next time you see a death on the news and attribute it to drugs, look that corpse in the eye and ask yourself, “Did I support the law that resulted in this death?” Do you support laws that turn a simple trade into a violent black market? Do you support laws that require natural drugs such as coca to be refined into concentrated drugs like cocaine? Do you support laws that then encourage that those concentrated drugs be sold without warning labels, without a list of ingredients, and without regard for whether the buyer is a child or an adult?

Do you?

It’s amazing what the lack of drugs will do to an otherwise rational mind, isn’t it?