The Saturn myth portrayed in Ovid’s poem Fasti is about a ruler so terrified of losing power he destroys his own children to protect it. His brutal act violates the duties and expectations of a regime that tries to preserve itself by annihilating itself and its future from within. No better example exists than the kinds of despotism emerging from a drug war: fear, instability, more fear, further repression, and ultimately the collapse of a ruler’s legitimacy.
It’s no surprise the drug war is driven by its own delusional prophesies of doom. The doomsayers’ common themes proclaim that alcohol will destroy society, that drugs will collapse civilizations, that drug users are inherently dangerous, and that addiction is a moral epidemic rather than a treatable medical problem.
Public policies can do harm to civil liberties, public trust, institutional legitimacy, and the wellbeing of common citizens. In his latest book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution, Jonathan Turley employs what he calls the Saturn gene to explain how revolutions and political movements can mutate into the kind of autocracy that guarantees their failure:
It is a story played out over and over again in history as ambition becomes activism, activism becomes extremism, and extremism becomes authoritarianism. Call it the Saturn gene. We are all Saturn’s children with an inherent impulse that rests within each of us: the capacity of all mortals to become monsters. – Jonathan Turley, p. xvi, Rage and Republic, 2026.
Sources of drug war harm include the criminalizing of millions—especially young people, thereby feeding mass incarceration, destabilizing families, communities, and generating violence through black markets.
The drug war erodes trust in government by incentivizing corruption in police and courts, by creating law enforcement systems that violate civil liberties, and by producing outcomes in opposition to stated goals, such as creating more dangerous drug substances, more violence, false arrests, and SWAT-style home invasions in which innocent people that can include police officers sometimes die.
Prohibition policies sacrifice future generations by criminalizing youths and adults for minor drug possession, thereby creating lifelong barriers to employment, housing, education, and complicating intergenerational family relationships in communities targeted by drug law enforcement. It creates harsh penalties, militarized policing, mandatory minimums, added surveillance programs and asset forfeitures.
Prohibition is pictured as having begun with noble aspirations. In certain cases the stated objective of drug enforcement policies appears to have provided a plausible disguise for motives driven by the types of politics generated when a society combines moral profiteering with the behaviors associated with a Saturn gene which evolved as part of the sociobiology of genetically sourced xenophobia and nationalism.
The perceived legitimacy of the drug war continues to collapse at an accelerating rate. It collapses a bit more each day researchers learn something new about how the brain works, or how certain drugs affect the brain at the molecular level and at the levels of conscious awareness.
Future use of mind tripping drugs will aid in encouraging the development of new technologies, new therapies, and better public policies. It’s already happening. Citizens will want to celebrate their good fortune by recognizing a new era of drug liberty where minds are set free to thrive and evolve. Political leaders who believe in absurdities will continue to commit atrocities, but the drug war will become obsolete – no longer at anyone’s disposal as a convenient political tool. Maybe best of all, never again will people be compelled to feel guilty about feeling good.
The worst addiction for most members of species so called “homo sapiens” is to moralizing. Hypocrisy and moralizing always occur together because their respective Goddesses in the Pantheon are conjoined twins. Hostility to users of mind altering chemicals deemed illegal is not because they do harm but because the subsequent actions by the agents of Laura Norder do harm and it is wrongly attributed to drugs and those who use them.
Complex social problems do not have simple single causes. Behind them instead are complex networks of causal elements which have to be analyzed before one can begin thinking about trying remedies. There are sets of causes in series where one may be a better candidate for attack than others, sets of causes in parallel where any intervention on some only will be ineffective. There are also positive and negative feedback loops and damping the positive and enhancing the negatives are possible targets. This firs requires a sufficiently accurate causal model and if a white board were used to diagram it out its size would need to measure hundreds of square kilometres. Then after identifying potential target elements to attack trial and error interventions would be needed. Some of these would fail.
The majority of humans are not intelligent enough to do this analysis nor to realize the true complexity of the causes and will focus on knee jerk solutions like punishing bad people or spending more on prohibition. Our standard method for changing behavior of people perceived to be bad is punishment but it does not work because “good” and “bad” people do not respond to it in the same way. It may work for those who see their punishment as deserved but it does not work on those society agrees are bad, they perceive it as discrimination and as anger and rage figure prominently in their personal behaviour it makes them worse.
Some people, criminologists, social workers and some more than averagely intelligent former police advise trying to rehabilitate the underclasses on the basis that the money needed would lessen spending on courts, police and prisons but 99% of homo sapiens reject this because it is contradictory to analysis by morally adjusted cost benefit ratios. When comparing expenditure on doing good and harm to bad people the moral ones use morally adjusted numbers. Fudge factors are applied before the comparison, Let’s assume a fudge factor of 10. Then each dollar spent doing good to “bad” people is counted as $10.00 and each dollar making them miserable counted as $0.10. Obviously $0.10 is much cheaper than $10.00 so there is NO WAY such advice will be heeded!!!