Former ONDCP Director John P. Walters is at it again, only this time he has help from Donald Trump’s former US Attorney General, prohibitionist William P. Barr. Barr joins Walters in authoring a Hudson Institute publication claiming that marijuana is dangerous and its legalization was a big mistake. Their announcement was quickly debunked online here and here.
The Hudson Institute was originally founded by a nuclear war strategist named Herman Kahn who later became the inspiration for the character portrayed by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr. Strangelove. John Walters became the Institute’s CEO in 2021, and William Barr joined in 2022 as a “distinguished fellow.” What distinguishes Barr and Walters is an attitude common to the Nazis who viewed marijuana as “polluting the Aryan immune system.”
Blood pollution (or purity) and decadent foreign bodies were top priorities for Nazis. It’s why pot smokers were sent to concentration camps along with Jews, Roma, intellectuals, writers who criticized the Reich, private citizens who grumbled about the Reich, and other social outliers such as opioid and cocaine addicts. Identity cards carried by drug users incarcerated in the camps were colored red while ID cards for Jews were purple. Since the Second World War little has changed for people like former KKK leader David Duke and American Neo-Nazis who accuse Jews of working hard to get America stoned. They say Jews control the marijuana industry. They don’t. The US cannabis industry is democratically authorized by a voter majority and it’s defined and controlled by state governments and local laws.
Fascism seeks to redefine freedom. Under fascism people are free to do as they are told and the government is free to do as it wants. One way of creating a fascist society—other than engaging in drug wars—is to imitate Barr, Walters and the Nazis who dumb down their dialog and message to prevent their listeners or readers from engaging in complex and critical reasoning. Lies become the rule. Relevant science and research gets ignored or suppressed. For tyrants seeking political or social dominance drug hysteria is an easy effective tool that can be used against unproven enemies of the state or society.
Do you think the Nazi’s view on marijuana was shaped by the League of Nation’s Drug Laws of the 1920s, coinciding with the decadence of the Weimar Republic and scapegoating further economic glut coming in after 1928?
Interesting question. All of it played a role. I think religious differences and conflict are the main motivators behind drug prohibitions. Religion influenced the Nazis in this case. They adopted a severe fascist approach to drug enforcement because they found it useful to do so and because Catholicism and other religions have been waging drug wars for centuries.
Drugs are a moral issue for most religions and little else. Petty moral issues get prioritized over the secular concerns of life and death. Somehow feeling good is bad. It certainly doesn’t benefit a religion if a drug out-competes a faith that promises its believers happiness and a better life but fails to deliver.
In Hitler’s case he was an avowed Catholic, a former alter boy who needed the neutral backing of the Church to carry out the Holocaust and his war. To please the Church and get it to ignore him he was required to be a good Catholic in every aspect – that meant Hitler had to be publicly anti-drug – even though he became a heavy user of speed and morphine thanks to his personal physician who continually dosed him so that Hitler could carry out his crazed mission day or night.
The problem for Catholicism is it’s gone nowhere on the drug issue since at least the 19th century. Their dogma is seriously out of date. The justifications the Vatican uses regarding recreational drug use are always circular: people shouldn’t use drugs because then they would be using drugs, etc. Below is how the current Pope Francis feels about cannabis, what may someday turn out to be considered the most medicinally beneficial plant on earth:
A Catholic Church catechism further states:
Secularism and science have played effective roles in countering the drug war only recently. In the last ten years alone there’s been a massive infusion of science into the debates. The literature and discussion on the topic keeps growing. A book is due out in a few weeks that finally reveals details of the bizarre history and relationship between Nazis, drug enforcement, and US drug laws. I will review it here when it becomes available.
German author Norman Ohler’s newest book Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age reveals the remarkable origins and hidden agendas of modern drug enforcement in post World War II America with new information derived from the archives of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals and the Nazi German Reich. Files from both sides of the Atlantic reveal that German psychedelics research sparked the CIA’s MKUltra program. Both the Nazi SS and the Americans were working toward obtaining a reliable truth serum. They believed it could win wars. For a period of time the primary candidate was Albert Hofmann’s LSD-25.
When Allied Forces took control of Berlin after World War II, the United States inherited the Nazi drug war’s methods, as it became necessary to enforce existing German laws in the American Zone. Harry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of the US Federal Bureau of Drugs, was made aware of the Nazis’ legal framework and was greatly inspired by it. Ohlen notes:
Drug enforcement came with wartime bonuses for the Nazis. It made a mass surveillance system for identifying and detaining opponents of fascism much easier to justify and achieve. In the United States, it attained similar goals when it was applied to oppressing different races or cultures.
Anslinger went on to forge a global policy of Nazi-influenced drug enforcement through the United Nations and the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. The policies would evolve badly and have a negative impact on medical science. Ohlen writes that the Nazi and MKUltra fiascoes added much to the peculiar chemophobia regarding psychedelics that until recently made governments and corporations like Sandoz reluctant to do medical research or develop new and effective psychedelics-based drugs.
Swiss researchers investigated what effects if any medicinal marijuana had on mental health in the United States. Their results show marijuana benefits its medical users and does not cause mental problems for recreational users.
Corrected links:
University of Basel: Liberalization of medical marijuana and mental health in the USA
Health Economics Policy and Law: Medical marijuana laws and mental health in the United States
Researchers at Dartmouth College reveal Cannabis receptors are among receptors implicated in the way the brain regulates emotions:
University of Leipzig researchers examine the molecular mechanisms of the opioid receptors and their different functions:
I’ve applied what little mental skills I have to the study of cannabinoid G-coupled protein receptors like CB1 and CB2 over the last ten years. This study you reference is about opioid G-protein coupled receptors. They both are also known as 7-transmembrane receptors due to the way the protein chains pass through the cellular membranes. Kind of like a needle and thread.
Kratom tickles the G-protein coupled opiate receptors. It’s an agonist at the Mu opioid receptor and a mixed agonist/antagonist as the delta and kappa opioid receptors. I’m struggling with weigh-bearing issues related to osteoarthritis and sciatica. Taking a modest 3-gram dose of Red Bali Kratom allows me to go grocery shopping and do yard work. Shit saved my ass!
At the 3-gram dose I’m getting more cocaine-like stimulation than analgesia. However, it’s enough of a boost and mild analgesic to allow me to get shit done. It’s constipating and causes sexual dysfunction so I take it sparingly as possible. I had over a decade where I had opiate-dependance from morphine (MS Contin.)
I try to not take it more than 3-days-in-a-row to minimize potential tolerance development. If you were to use it daily and multiple times daily you WILL develop an opioid tolerance that will cause withdrawal symptoms if you quit cold turkey. I save it for when I really need it and it’s my rescue medication. I wish I could say cannabis offered me similar benefit but it’s not really even close to how Kratom helps me. The fact I can purchase this stuff legally without prescription ROCKS.
More on opiate receptors. I had a physician who recommended Salvia Divinorum. He later asked me to keep his recommendation confidential after discussing it with his advisor.
Salvia Divinorum is the most potent naturally occurring hallucinogen, and is unusual in that it interacts with only ONE receptor in the human brain– the kappa opioid receptor (KOR).
I smoked it three times maybe 20-years-ago and it was definitely interesting. I bought it at a head shop. Don’t know if it’s still available today. Hallucinogenic experience through an opiate receptor just seems odd to me.
An almost instant hallucinogenic experience is a TRIP! I likened it to passing through a threshold. A few times a small dose got me to the door but not through it. A larger dose did the trick. I’ve seen YouTube videos of people who would tie themselves to something so they wouldn’t wander around while high. Trippy stuff.
One time I felt like I was being rolled up in a carpet while a pair of glowing eyes stared at me from a distance. Red glow in darkness. It was a bit weird. Another time I became a rose growing on a stone fence. My existence was stationary and all I could see was roses and fence.
There are studies on Salvia, that due to its use of the Kappa opioid receptor it’s considered a substance that can help with addiction. A few times after coming down I would have this feeling of well-being and peace. Really nice. I think that’s what my doc (who was featured on a PBS special titled “Chinese Medicine Master”) was hoping for. He was prescribing morphine and I think he was interested in getting me off the opiate.
I think he’s doing telemedicine now due to narcolepsy. Once while he was doing electro-acupuncture on me (why he went to China for PBS) he left the office for about twenty minutes while I had several needles in me. I got good results for the electro-acupuncture but this occasion I had trouble keeping my position and when I moved the needles were a bit painful. He never said anything and I learned about his narcolepsy later. Pretty sure he had to take a short nap.
More that might be useful, Mount Sinai researchers have identified a brain pathway that is affected by addictive drugs:
totally off topic query to my couchmates… just knowing someone here might have an insight.
I now spend my winters travelling and camping in the SW – exploring (so far) both the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. A place I camp often in the Mojave National Preserve had a fantastic datura season and I arrived in time to catch the last of their summer blooms. Pertinent to the timing of my camping there, the datura were the only flowering plants left with blossoms.
Early to mid autumn the Mojave stays pretty warm and the bees were still active and the one flower left to them was the jimson weed.
My question is: would the honey made from those flowers be psychedelic?
And I ask it here because this is a pretty select group of minds. Asking in a forum like the Shroomery might be too public and lead to some “explorer” trying to track down – and possibly find – a datura honey crop.
Minus a chemical analysis, my guess is there is little or no trace of datura ingredients like scopolamine or atropine in the datura nectar. It might discourage cross pollination by bees and hummingbirds, and datura would likely not have evolved a flower that does that. Blitzed bees buzzing about their beehive is not an evolutionary advantage either. Atropine, BTW, is the go-to-drug for treating nerve gas poisoning in humans, which is why I’m glad my neighbor has a datura growing in their front yard. It’s always best to be prepared in the event of chemical warfare.
I plan on starting a blog and would eventually like to bring in ad revenue, should I start out on a free website or should I buy a domain?.
The University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing is offering a new free education course called Educating Nurses in Psychedelic Assisted Therapy (PAT):
I hear the VA offers ketamine therapy.
There’s more that’s happening in Los Angeles. A psychedelic therapy and ecological medicine symposium will be held at UCLA on May 10, 2024:
Ketamine’s biophysical effects in the brain have been modeled in the Department of Computational Neuroscience and Medical Engineering at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT:
Brain receptor sites are identified for 5-methoxytryptamines for anti-depressant therapy by Mt Sinai Hospital scientists:
Nature: Structural pharmacology and therapeutic potential of 5-methoxytryptamines
The Federal Register (the Daily Journal of the United States Government) is requesting public comments regarding the legalization of MDMA (Midoafetemine Capsules):
Federal Register: Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee; Notice of Meeting; Establishment of a Public Docket; Request for Comments-Midomafetamine Capsules
Comments will be made public. A meeting is scheduled for June 4, 2024.
College students prefer to enroll in colleges in states where recreational marijuana is legal: