The Human Right to Get High on Drugs

Here's drug policy guru Eric Sterling masterfully articulating the madness of drug prohibition.

This honestly sent a tingle down my spine, maybe because I so often find myself steering clear of the personal freedom argument for drug policy reform. It's not what I'd lead with in most cases, and yet it is in so many ways the simplest and most profound truth that defines my opposition to the war on drugs. Any attempt to restrict access to parts of our own minds in despicably evil and intolerable. Prohibition's numerous toxic consequences all owe their origin to the monumental injustice of trying to designate the boundaries of human experience.

For this reason alone, we can be beyond certain that the measures necessary to repair our broken system of so-called drug control are quite grand in scale. Thus, the discussion of "reprioritizing the budget" that you sometimes hear from the President or the Drug Czar is nothing but a pitifully inconsequential distraction from the enormous challenge before us.

Drug prohibition is morally and scientifically corrupt to its core, and although we have no choice but to break it down into smaller parts and repair them incrementally, it's also important to appreciate the staggering depth of the fraud that's been thrust upon us.