“Since time immemorial, people have used drugs for the simple reason to make themselves feel better – whatever ‘better’ means….”, says Dr Thomas Szasz with a wry smile and a heavy Hungarian accent in his lecture ‘The Right to Take Drugs’.

To put it another way, it’s ok to feel good. It’s even good to feel good. In fact, the right to feel good is about your autonomy, your body, and your mind, and if you’re an American it’s your constitutional right: to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Euphoria is a good thing. Yes, euphoria is a good thing. That something so straightforward and self-evident needs to be spelled out and repeated as the entire political spectrum across the West continues to collectively lose sight of this most basic of truths again and again and again is a testament to how our societies have got horribly and worryingly screwed up.

One of the greatest freedoms, abilities, or gifts we have as humans is our capacity to alter our mood and consciousness at will through the use of drugs – be they synthetic, semisynthetic, or natural.

As people who are into cannabis, that makes our willingness to be swept up in the escalating, relentless pathologizing and medicalizing of everything – and most especially of ‘drugs’ and ‘drugs users’ – not just fucking stupid but profoundly sinister….

This sinister negativity runs deeper than the will to power and control, and the institutionalised sadomasochism of addiction psychiatry, militarized policing, and mass incarceration – all three of which come down to little more than politics and economics, not least psychiatry, ‘the astrology of the sciences’.

The Drug War in all its authoritarian, racist, and progressive forms has criminalized and restricted a powerful force for good – for peaceful coexistence – one that’s never been more urgently needed than amid the ongoing backlash against liberalism and multiculturalism.

The collective euphoria created through the shared experience of drugs is one of the great social levellers, and the unrivalled power of bliss to transcend and break through barriers of culture, to equalise, and to bring humans together as one through the energy of ecstasy – of just plain happiness, if you prefer – now more than ever needs to be reclaimed from the doctors and shrinks and pharmaceutical corporations with their surveillance capitalism, cops the fucking lot of them….

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Rant continued at Thomas Szasz: The Right to Get High…

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Meanwhile, here’s the sound of Numbers (1981) by Düsseldorf’s Kraftwerk on ‘The New Dance Show’ in Detroit (1991).