*FLASH* “Hey kids! Jesus here! You may have heard about me or seen me in the Bible or your local Congressman's wife's dusty vagina, respectively. Whoops! Let one of those ‘vagina' words slip! But what were we talking about? Religion? Sex? Drugs!? Oh yes, there it is! By the way the latter is completely unconnected to the other two.

Mel Gibson fucking Jews

I love you. The Bible tells you so! And I don't mean I love you like that hot guy with great lats and a tan bod, I mean like I like, Velvet Goldmine love you. Wait… no, I mean like, I leader of your Scout Troop love you… well, I guess that could be interpreted as… (how many times am I going to have to fucking ask Peter for a befitting translation?) just take the me-damned compliment. I want you to know the last thing I'd want is for any harm to come to you. Unless you're one of those gay Jews. Not gay as in liking other guy Jews, but gay like sci-fi films, prancing around with their basketball teams, and not thinking I fulfill the requirements set by messianic prophecies.

Jesus problem dogDrugs are bad: cocaine makes you a Hispanic, heroin gives you AIDs, and marijuana makes you a glutton—and we all know what my Dad thinks of people who are frivolous with his food. So keep bad stuff out of your mouth. Actually, keep anything I don't specifically address out of your mouth. Just bread, fish, and the Word. No, not those words. Stick with the stuff between ‘homosexuality is an abomination' and murdering guys who use the floor as their jizz rags, then skip past the 700 wives and 300 concubines to ‘the two shall be joined in the flesh'—flip a few pages to ‘God Bless America' and stop before you get to Harold Camping.

NYPD kids cop carBut here for more information is your seriously undertrained University of Phoenix grad local police officer who's never actually taken a class on psychopharmacology, let alone seen an Illinois drug abuse rehab center, but according to the incongruencies in his facial features his mother probably drank a lot of Mad Dog and moonlit as a cook for Frank Lucas. Plus, he watches a sufficient amount of DEA reruns on late-night Spike TV and used to be a neighborhood watchman in a predominately white neighborhood with a peculiar ratio of bullet holes to black teens….”

In an ignorant haze only self-righteousness can bring, your parents will most likely take the easy way out and tell you to abstain from all drugs. Listen kids. I'm getting older, and in that progression there's an implacable, unseen hormonal force that widens the gap between myself and the next generation and leaves me with the realization that the preacher from Footloose had some good points about dancing. Nonetheless, there's one thing we can still agree on: Your parents are fucking assholes. They're fucking assholes because the only reason you were born is because they live in Mississippi so they never learned about contraceptive until your father's tragic slow-pitch softball incident that left him sterile. They're assholes because after you were born out of wedlock to your Baptist teenage mother, she posted numerous pictures of your naked penis all over Facebook, solidifying the assumption that the only prerequisite for being a good mom anymore is having a vagina, a digital camera, and a vindictive attitude towards all other unprepared mothers as if she patented getting knocked up in the back of a Mustang.

Rick Santorum on FootlooseYour parents are assholes because they show up at Planned Parenthood wielding “pro-life” signs because they pledge allegiance to a political party with complete disregard for your well-being after you emerge from your wombed prison to get slapped by an overpaid bureaucrat to validate your vitality, but also ironically simulating what life is going to do to you indefinitely, especially if you plan on going to those mandatory impoverished child after-school programs with handsy counselors your asshole parents signed you up for because they work the late shift at McDonald's, since learning to read from “Pop-Up Video” doesn't lead to fluent literacy. My parents were assholes and never taught me about run-on sentences.

Emo crybaby wearing makeup
My name's Trevor, and I have Cryabetes.

The biggest reason they're assholes is because that ostentatious plutocrat they let accost you after your birth will advise you on the danger of drugs after he pops a Prozac and writes you a Ritalin and Effexor prescription with his Celebrex pen because those assholes who raised you couldn't intervene in the process having never figured out consequences for themselves, let alone teach you while they were on a trial separation. Eventually he will undoubtedly jam his greased up phalanges up your two-hole when you turn 40 just to remind you even your own reproductive organs are turning against you as they signal your induction into the inevitable hall of fame of asshole parents because your kid just turned 16 and hates you, too.

I digress.

Oxycontin adYour parents have lied to you from, “It's completely normal for your dad to be a chaperone at the dance” to “I promise it's not your kids' fault,” so why take their highly unqualified opinion on the use of drugs? In an ignorant haze only self-righteousness can bring, your parents will most likely take the easy way out and tell you to abstain from all drugs. This saves them from compromising on the agreement they made with their young adult selves to basically stop evolving as a human being after high school. I'm not going to condone the use of illicit drugs because that makes me liable for your actions, but I'm also not going to sit here under the illusion that all drugs are bad when the average American's bathroom cupboard looks like the average Rush Limbaugh's bathroom cupboard. Just as much as drugs are used for profiteering, pacification, and exploitation, particularly in the realm of pharmaceuticals, demonizing drugs baselessly can be used for the same purpose.

Obviously there are some bad drugs out there. Let me tell you a couple of stories:

One day a group of people at the reputable pharmaceutical Merck and Co. woke up and wanted to ascertain information about the safety and efficacy of their new product, Vioxx. They hired the prestigious Dr. Scott Reuben to validate the work of the upstanding folks at Merck on the painkilling non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. Dr. Reuben ostensibly used the many skills he acquired at medical school and his residency to fake studies for the drug in which nobody was actually enrolled, but were often cited by himself and colleagues to justify the continued use of Vioxx to both other medical professionals and the FDA based on “make believe” evidence as if they were on Fox News pimping The War on Christmas.

Fortunately, the FDA suspended their campaign on geriatrics taking CoQ10 and caught wind about the Casper studies on Vioxx—as well as Pfizer's Celebrex, Lyrica, and Bextra—leaving Dr. Reuben as surprised as when Nickelback discovered that what they thought were lighters moving back and forth at their concerts were actually just pitchfork- and torch-wielding concerned townspeople. Don't worry though, before this was all discovered, Vioxx had already killed 10 times as many people as 9/11, and the drug was voluntarily withdrawn, though you can still purchase all of the other drugs Reuben was involved with to this day. You can sleep sound at night though: Reuben was forced to pay $360,000 of the millions he accrued back to those same pharmaceutical companies that released the drugs and was put in prison for the majority of Kim Kardashian's marriage.

Jesus soldier in AmericaAt birth was wrapped in a swaddling flag and laid in a Ranger.

Here's another story. A tale of two drugs, both of whose ancestral lines are likely to have emerged shortly after the appearance of behaviorally modern humans and have been traditionally used for religious ceremonies, ascertaining enlightenment, celebration, treatment of various ailments, and fraternity hazing. Both came under scrutiny for their conscious-altering effects and have been criminalized and regulated thereafter. When prohibition of one was attempted in the country, organized crime grew, and it failed to effectively stifle use of the drug that today is linked to as many as 40,000 deaths in the country annually. As a result, the drug was again legalized. The other, however, once mandatory to produce in the early colonies, was handled with particular hostility because of the interesting threat it posed to the timber and nylon industries due to its vast versatility of use. Thus the political ideology of “Hey That Shit Didn't Work Last Time, Let's Try It Again” was instituted. Although that drug can be used to treat conditions such as impulse control, pain that doesn't respond to opiate treatment (which ironically is more dangerous than this drug anyway), peripheral nervous issues from metabolic disorders, anorexia, cachexia, some forms of cancer such as lung and prostate, religiosity, and a host of other maladies, its lack of any direct link to deaths of Americans make our legislators highly suspicious of its safety. Of course it has been proven to greatly impair the driving ability, but so does being Asian or a woman and that's generally tolerated if you don't live in Kentucky. Still, our policy on marijuana remains intact, leaving prisons overcrowded with nonviolent criminals, and Mexican vacations accompanied by complementary mass burials.

The point I'm trying to get across is that the entire “it's bad because it's illegal” argument is futile at best, but more likely irresponsibly dangerous. Marijuana only being the most salient example because of its widespread use, ease of procuring, medicinal benefits, and relative harmlessness compared to the much more dangerous, legal alcohol, there are many drugs we demonize that can lead to self-improvement. The key with anything—cheeseburgers, water, Axe Body Spray, and bringing out your guitar at parties to get laid—is moderation. The same profiteering that led to the criminalization of marijuana is that which drives the pharmaceutical industry today: void of transparency, wild with costs, and highly experimental. Consequently, we wage war on the methamphetamine endemic while prescribing its chemical cousin to young children for attention, and Dr. Jack Kevorkian could've avoided public backlash if he had changed his name to Abilify. So next time you're playing truth or D.A.R.E., choose truth, not the lazy, easy way out.

So why do people use drugs? Why does a sexually deviant bear shit on someone's chest in the woods? We have an inherent yearning to alter our consciousness: we eat food, we do drugs, we play sports, we have relationships, we order Fleshlights, we masturbate with nooses around our necks to produce a different state of consciousness, relieving us from the mundane bore of baseline conditions. Think of your mind, global workspace, will, consciousness, spirit, or whatever as a bunch of competing drives and entities. What drugs—and all other forms of altering conscious—do are give one of those entities the advantage, taking your empirical reality into uncharted waters in creativity and insight that you could never reach organically. Ultimately, we seek out novelty, and that, in turn, is why drug use increases with intelligence. All of our drives culminate in the hopeful, hedonistic acquisition of pleasure while minimizing pain. On the subject of drugs, I'm going to teach you how to do just that.

Disclaimer: 

The statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease because that's really gross.

Neither I, nor the rest of the gang at PIC advocate the use of illegal drugs, but we're also not naive, fear-mongering twats who believe we really have any effect on whether you want to try drugs or not. If you're reading this, you're probably past help, anyway. Some people with certain neural circuitry should never try drugs at all because of their propensity to addiction…but you won't really figure that out unless you try. Whether it's sex, drugs, or thinking about pink elephants, you can't regulate what you prohibit. Abstinence training doesn't lead to abstinent behavior, abortion restriction doesn't decrease the rate of abortions (it only increases the rate of unsafe abortion practices), and telling kids not to do drugs just will breed a generation of THAT guy.

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