This academic article reveals how criminalizing the opium poppy turned medicine into crisis—and how legal cultivation could end the opioid epidemic once and for all. Lessons from Portugal, Switzerland, and history show: prohibition kills, cultivation heals.
In the lab, acetylation is about as ordinary as boiling water. It’s the simple process of attaching a tiny chemical tag — an acetyl group — onto a molecule. Chemists do it every day to change how substances behave: aspirin is made that way, cellulose acetate for film and plastics too, even your own cells…
Drug prohibition contradicts American ideals like personal freedom, limited government, and free markets. Prohibition expands government power, fuels black markets, and disproportionately harms marginalized groups while ignoring evidence supporting alternatives like decriminalization. Policy reform is needed to align drug policy with the values of liberty and justice.
Drug prohibition in the United States has long been criticized not only for its ineffectiveness and punitive nature but also for its deeply rooted racial biases. The 1994 Crime Bill, officially known as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, was a pivotal piece of legislation that exemplified how drug laws disproportionately target and…
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. ~ Thomas Jefferson The above quote is one of my…
Narcotics have been prohibited for more than 100 years, yet their strength keeps increasing. Is prohibition to blame?
This title isn’t clickbait. The government organization that has been entrusted with keeping drugs off our streets has detailed instructions online, that anyone can access, detailing how to grow opium, isolate the active alkaloids in it, and then convert those into pure heroin. This would be humorous if they weren’t locking people up as we…
Is using substances immoral, and if so, where should the line be drawn? Are certain substances acceptable? How about certain amounts? What’s the difference between “problematic substance use”, “substance abuse”, and drinking? Join us as we unpack one of the most convoluted and ill-defined issues of our time. Drugs are Bad, mmm’kay? This is the…