> different hallucinogenic compounds, mainly nicotine, tryptamines and tropane alkaloids have been chemically documented in Prehispanic artefacts from the Americas, and psychoactive compounds of Cannabis in archaeological wooden braziers from China.
> The alkaloids ephedrine, atropine and scopolamine were detected, and their concentrations estimated [in human hair]
> The results furnish direct evidence of the consumption of plant drugs and, more interestingly, they reveal the use of multiple psychoactive species.
Basically, we have long discovered "drug paraphernalia" and other adjacent materials, suggesting drug use (namely cannabis, tobacco, various psychoactive mushrooms, opium, various stimulants like areca and ephedra, deliriants like Datura, and of course alcohol). But we haven't known for sure that these meant the drugs were consumed recreationally/medicinally. This gives direct evidence the drugs were in fact consumed deliberately.
tl;dr - Homo sapiens got high.
Since hunter gatherers naturally passed along knowledge of the safety of edible plants, at what point did they figure out how to get high and start passing that along too? It's entirely plausible that our species and immediate ancestors have been getting high for millions of years! Since we have to eat anyways, we might have discovered our first high before our first stone tool!
Kinda puts the war on drugs in an even worse light.
People had no aspirin, no painkillers, multiple parasites, diseases, rotting teeth, etc.
While getting high may have been part if it, for some, it may have been relief.
Wait what? Nicotine is hallucinogenic? What sort of ungodly dose do you need for that.
In Wickard v. Filburn, a farmer grew grain on his farm. He did not sell this grain, whether across state lines or otherwise; he merely fed it to his own livestock on the same farm. SCOTUS ruled that this could be regulated via the Commerce Clause because, if he grew his own grain, he could be expected to buy less grain on the open market, which could indirectly affect interstate commerce. By that logic, virtually anything can affect interstate commerce, and be regulated as such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Procedures_Reform_Bil...
Good thing we’ve learned so much since then. You would never have anyone so short sighted as to jump up and down for that in these more civilized times.
I have always thought Wickard v Fillburn was wrong decided, though.
It just says that any mere omission shouldn't be construed to mean anything. The lack of an enumerated right to privacy doesn't forbid the courts from deciding we have one.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_and_Proper_Clause
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause (technically an enumerated power, but the broadest and vaguest one by far)
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The Ninth is a reminder that the Tenth has its limits too.
Probably because most people want regulations and enforcement around pharmaceuticals. If we decide that the government has no power to pass laws surrounding drugs we'd be hurting ourselves.
This isn't how we do things and to some these ideas seem like madness, but it's hard to argue that our existing system doesn't harbor its own brand of lunacy. Putting everything in the hands of an central government is a path we've chosen, but it's not the only path.
UL is partially funded by taxpayer money in the form of grants, is itself regulated by the US government (https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-29/subtitle-B/chapter-XVI...) and for decades it was even tax-exempt! That's not a great example of some random but trustworthy body selflessly protecting the masses without the involvement or oversight of government.
> Finally, we could offer no direct regulation, but states could place strong penalties for any harms caused by dangerous products
And if you get seriously sickened by a product you then must have the resources to prove in court against a massive corporation that it was a specific drug, from one specific company that made you sick and that there's no chance it was any of the other totally unregulated and untested drugs from random sources that you've taken over the course of your lifetime that caused the problem. You'd also have to somehow trace a drug back to a manufacturer who could pop-up and vanish at a moments notice since nobody is keeping track of anything. Not ideal...
> to some these ideas seem like madness, but it's hard to argue that our existing system doesn't harbor its own brand of lunacy. Putting everything in the hands of an central government is a path we've chosen, but it's not the only path.
We've fought tooth and nail for what few protections we have today while pharmaceutical companies have worked tirelessly to exploit and undermine that same system of regulations. With so much at stake, it makes sense that people would hesitate to throw away what progress we have made to try some new unproven thing, but you're right that our current system has its flaws so changes need to happen. What's important is that the end result of those changes makes us all safer and makes it harder for companies to get away with abuses.
As far as leaving everything up to individual states, I know that if I were a drug manufacturer it would be a hell of a lot less of a burden if I only had one set of rules to follow, only had to allow one group of inspectors into my facilities, only had one set of licensees I had to acquire and maintain, only had one place I had to report side effects and submit approvals to etc. Putting everything in the hands of one centralized agency that covers the entire nation is a huge win for drug companies and consumers who don't need to worry that the drug they pick up on one state isn't held to the same standards as a drug they pick up in another. Sometimes centralization is simply the most efficient way to handle something and it'd take a lot to demonstrate that decentralization would be an improvement for pretty much anybody.
The war on drugs would have never gotten off the ground. We would have whole above board industries for recreational drugs which would just be "agriculture" instead of black markets and cartels. Government couldn't touch birth control, PrEP, or whatever bs de jour they want to ban. People wouldn't have to worry about living with chronic pain because they get labeled as a drug seeker.
I wouldn't be so eager to go back to the days of snake oil salesmen who can be fully honest about what something contains, while lying through their teeth about what effects it would have, or the research they've done.
Where if you do take something that makes you sick, or a batch of bad drugs floods the US market you can't possibly track down the people responsible because there are countless people on the street and the internet selling medications, with new unlicensed and untracked sellers popping up and disappearing all the time and no way to trace a particular pill or formulation back to the maker. Where the people who are sickened or the families of those who have died will be required to have enough money and time to take massive corporations to court and prove that a specific company and their drug was responsible for the harm, and that it couldn't possibly have been any of the other totally unregulated drugs the victim had taken at any point in their lifetime.
Where quality control is not mandated and there is no inspection or oversight of manufacturers. Where testing and clinical trials aren't required. Where there is no post-marketing monitoring for adverse effects. No rules against selling addictive substances to adults and children.
Where it's perfectly legal for pharmaceutical companies to bribe doctors to prescribe their drugs to the sick and desperate and to sell them at any price. Where there are no limits whatsoever on advertising them. No rules on how drugs should be labeled or regulations requiring sellers or manufacturers to make people aware of a drug's side effects or contraindications ("Our drug is perfectly safe! It isn't our fault the dumb consumer took it with that other drug and it killed them! They should have done their research! Caveat emptor!"). No rules about drugs requiring a prescription leading to people buying and taking them inappropriately and nothing to stop people from stockpiling essential medications making them scarce.
Over and over again we see how even our current regulations have been weakened and the regulators captured by industry and how and it's resulted in our regulations failing to protect people. We've already seen how totally ineffective those commercial speech and negligence laws you want to exclusively depend on have been at protecting Americans from cosmetics (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/harmful-chemicals...) and supplements https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/10/14/diet-pills-and-...) that are almost entirely unregulated.
I'm all for the legalization of recreational drugs, but I want those drugs heavily regulated like any other pharmaceutical. Be careful what you wish for, and spend some time studying what things were like before the US had drug regulations before you go suggesting we throw away over a hundred years of progress. I promise that while things aren't great, they are much better now than they were before we regulated drugs.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibit...
https://time.com/5501680/prohibition-history-feminism-suffra...
If you have money, opioids are easily available via dealers throughout the world and there is no epidemic of addicts. Yes there are individual cases, but most of these would be destroying their lives in some other available way if opiods weren't available, like heavy use of alcohol.
Teaching what addiction is like is much better at curbing it.
The easiest way to do that is to have someone hold their breath as long as possible until their body is screaming for air each time, for about half an hour.
Because that is what drug addiction is like, and taking the drug is like taking that breath of air, instant relief, until you run out of air again and you're in hell waiting for the next fix. Over and over. Never ending.
I'd say films like Trainspotting did a much better job at stopping heroin than any outright ban ever did.
People have some funny notions about the health consequences of opioid addiction.
In 1942, Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, he developed a heroin addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, initially beginning with morphine.[1]
Firing a gun into the air is ill-advised and illegal because such bullets have a tendency to randomly impact and maim or murder bystanders within the radius of a couple of miles.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/02/15/firi...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/03/can-falling-bull...
>The analysis showed the presence of atropine, scopolamine and ephedrine in the three replicated hair samples (Fig. 5) at the following concentrations: 6.7, 9.2, and 10.7 (mean = 8.9) pg atropine/mg hair, 384, 423 and 504 (mean = 437) pg scopolamine/mg hair, and 295, 328 and 367 (mean = 330) pg ephedrine/mg hair.
Drug use in the broadest sense.
Atropine and scopolamine are no fun drugs as deliriants they require extraordinary skill. In this case the ratio of atropine:scopolamine could be indicative of Datura stramonium [0] growing in the region.
Most recreational drug users who try to experiment with Datura et al. quickly realize after "waking up" ~ 24 hours or so totally disoriented in questionable disposition with little to no memory with what had happened that it is nearly impossible to put them into "good use" and leave it be at some point. Regular use is mostly documented by highly experienced shamans (i.e. experienced in different forms of altered state of consciousness).
[As a note aside: In 1934 Bill Wilson a struggling alcoholic and later founder of AA had a transformative experience under the heavy influence of atropine and scopolamine ("Belladonna Cure") after which he became sober:
>At Towns Hospital under Silkworth's care, Wilson was administered a drug cure concocted by Charles B. Towns. Known as the Belladonna Cure, it contained belladonna (Atropa belladonna) and henbane (Hyoscyamus niger). These plants contain deliriants, such as atropine and scopolamine, that cause hallucinations.
It was while undergoing this treatment that Wilson experienced his "Hot Flash" spiritual conversion. While lying in bed depressed and despairing, Wilson cried out: "I'll do anything! Anything at all! If there be a God, let Him show Himself!" He then had the sensation of a bright light, a feeling of ecstasy, and a new serenity.
] [1]Ephedrine on the other hand is a stimulant (methamphetamine analogue with a hydroxyl group at the β position), now mostly used by bodybuilders in much higher doses (an order of magnitude higher than measured in the hairs above) to effectively burn fat.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datura_stramonium
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Alcoholics_Anonym...
I loved his books when I was a kid - but with serious grains of salt, obviously.