DoubleBlind, an online magazine promoting the responsible use of psychedelics and selling kits for growing medicinal mushrooms, published a though-provoking article a little while back titled How the War on Drugs Fuels Environmental Destruction. Even if tryptamine tripping isn’t your thing, the article is a must-read for the spotlight it shines on the ecological havoc wreaked by the US and other nations’ relentless and misguided battle against mind-altering substances.
Reporter Ben Adlin, who has also written for Leafly, Marijuana Moment, and even more mainstream outlets like The Boston Globe, pens a succinct summary of a 63-page report by Health Poverty Action explaining how the two seemingly unrelated topics — drug policy and environmental concerns — are in fact intimately intertwined.
“[I]t’s because the dynamics of drug law enforcement pushed [growers] there,” the report says. “In fact, in the few cases where opium, cannabis, and coca are being legally grown—to supply the pharmaceutical and beverage industries—their cultivation occurs in conventional agricultural contexts.”
Farmers of illicit crops currently have little choice other than to intrude upon delicate tropical ecosystems — our globe’s rapidly-shrinking “carbon sinks” which help protect against devastating climate change. Legalizing, or at least decriminalizing, plant-based drugs would enable growers to utilize farmlands outside sensitive rainforests that are available to Big Pharma and soft-drink bottlers.
While the issues of addiction and overdose deaths remain valid concerns (the full Health Poverty Action report includes some salient quotes on these topics — see for example Section 3, pages 41-47), it’s important to keep a few points in mind.
First of all: Bad actors, such as organized-crime druglords, will continue to push their wares regardless of whether they are allowed to utilize conventional farmland or even if they have to burn down the entire Amazon. This being the case, would we rather see cocaine flooding our streets — or cocaine flooding our streets plus a climate and ecological emergency that threatens the entire globe? I would prefer neither. But it isn’t a simple binary choice, which brings me to my next point.
Secondly: Other, more effective, paradigms exist other than criminalization for minimizing drug-related addictions and deaths. Robust regulation is one, as are educational programs and therapeutic modalities that treat drug abuse as a disease to be treated rather than a crime to be prosecuted. The full 63-page report touches on these topics.
Finally: There is all the difference in the world between medicinal plants as they exist in nature and the potent, highly-refined substances that are manufactured from them by profiteers. Should any naturally-growing plant be made illegal?
Coca leaves in their natural state have been consumed for millenia by indigenous cultures in South America for its stimulant and analgesic properties, with minimal recorded adverse effects. Marijuana has long been recognized by the medical community for various benefits and possesses no significant risk of physical addiction or overdose death. Many cannabis users have sworn by their effectiveness in alleviating nausea, chronic pain, and anxiety when all manner of commercial pharmaceutical products have failed them in this regard.
And I would be remiss if I failed to mention psilocybin mushrooms. While not directly related to the topic at hand (shroom growers aren’t affecting the Amazon), their lack of addiction/overdose risk, their clinically-verified effectiveness in treating psychological disorders, and countless anecdotal accounts of heightened creativity and life-changing mystical experiences reported by users from all walks of life attest to the law enforcement establishment’s folly in continuing to regard them in the same light as substances that are in fact lethal and addictive such as heroin and fentanyl.
Psilocybin and LSD have in fact been effective at treating addiction to other substances (such as alcohol or prescription opioids) — both of which are far more harmful than any psychedelic. Yet the same enforcement establishment that criminalizes these addiction-alleviating compounds gives the green light to Big Pharma and Big Alcohol who produce the substances that cause the addiction in the first place.
Add irony, along with the environment, to the War on Drugs’s list of casualties.
