This chapter deals with the arguments concerning the body harm which illegal drugs cause. The arguments for putting drug abusers into jail or mental institutions is that thus their health is saved. Drugs are bad for the health, they kill, jail is better, makes you live longer. Let us take the hardest drug – heroin (to which all ‘soft’ drugs eventually lead according to propaganda). I have never tried heroin, and would feel bad if someone close to me developed a heroin dependency, but I definitely would not ‘forbid’ heroin. They say “once you start heroin, you’re a goner”, and that “people die from heroin”.
These statements are absurd. People do not die from heroin alone – in fact, in places where there is a tradition of manufacturing it, like Afghanistan or Pakistan, there are old people of 80 and over, who have been taking it since they were 10, and are still alive and kicking. Or at least alive and mumbling.
People, who shoot heroin into their veins, and who die young as a direct result of this practice, die generally due to three reasons (apart from being put into jail): a) overdose; b) dirty heroin; c) disease from dirty syringe.
When someone dies from a heroin overdose, this happens because the consumer of heroin is never sure of the concentration of heroin inside the dust he buys from the dealer. Suppose that Jimmy is used to a 15% heroin and 85% added obscure crap mixture. If someone sells him a mixture in which the heroin is 30%, he must take twice less than usual, otherwise, he will have an overdose – a dose of heroin to which his organism is not conditioned. But Jimmy does not know what he buys, because it is illegal, and there is no quality control. In fact, he dies, because heroin is illegal. If heroin was legal, bought at the local drug store, with strict quality control of the product, he would not have died.
When someone dies after injecting heroin mixed with rat poison, it is reported as “junkie dies after injecting heroin”, not “citizen dead in rat poison scandal”, but if someone dies after drinking wine with rat poison in it, he will be treated as a victim of poisoning, people will not blame the wine. When Jimmy dies after taking heroin mixed with rat poison, he dies because heroin is illegal, because the market is not legal, not open, not regulated, and therefore – the consumer has zero protection. He would not have died if heroin was legal. The same goes of course, for the ‘dirty syringe’ cause of illness and death, what is needed is clean syringes, not mindless campaigns ‘against heroin’. As if making an anti-drug concert performed by hypocritical drug abusers and ran by smug cocaine and whiskey fiends can actually lower the death rate better the clean syringes and clean heroin. Only a monkey can believe this. Only an evil hypocrite will pretend to believe it. Take your pick.
Of course not only heroin kills according to the propaganda, all drugs kill and corrupt the body. Lets take marijuana – my favorite drug – it “eats up the lungs”, it “causes impotence”, it makes you into a “schizophrenic”. I could take up the arguments that the “scientific researches” which have been conducted are as biased and inconclusive, as the ones which link madness, suicide and crime with masturbation, rock’n’roll and comic books; that in fact if the state needs the scientists to prove that the Jews are treacherous mutants or that critics of the government have pathological mental disorders, scientists tend to prove exactly that; or even the classical, lame cliché argument that other, legal substances are equally harmful, or even more so, but I consider all these arguments a waste of time, as I think time itself has proven them to be.
These logical exercises do not carry power, because the opponents do not use valid logic anyway. They follow other things, some of which will be examined later on. Bottom line is: there is no substance in the universe, which can not kill you, if you do not use it carefully, and following correct information about it. When you break an arm or bust a vein doing fitness exercise, it is because you were not careful or not properly informed, not because fitness exercise is inherently evil, the same goes for every other practice, including sitting in a chair or taking a shower, and every known substance, including water, oxygen, and tomatoes. Use them incorrectly, and you die.
At the end of the day, my argument is the following: “my health is my health. If I so wish, I will cut off my balls and wear them on a string around my neck. This is my choice and no one can choose instead of me. If the government thinks it must impose by force upon me the currently fashionable “health wisdom”, it’s got another thing coming”. But it can and does think this, of course, and now we proceed to examine the notions behind the force. Or is it the farce?