Carl Sagan - Letter To The Drug Policy Foundation lyrics

Dear Arnold: Thanks for your recent letter on "America's Drug Forum." I quite agree that a balanced look at a broad array of drug issues on American television could do some good. However, there will be a powerful temptation to gear program content to match conventional values — and worse, conventional questions. If I were a viewer of such a series, I'd be interested in the following sorts of questions being addressed: Why are all "d**" lumped together in American rhetoric and public policy questions? How many people are k**ed or impaired in America each year from tobacco and alcohol compared with other d**? What is a narcotic, and which of the popular d** are narcotics and which aren't? What's the difference between physical and "psychological" addiction, and how is my attachment to music or my wife different from "psychological addiction"? Why are d**, including hallucinogenic d**, so widely distributed among the cultures of the Earth and so prevalent as sacraments in the world's religions? Do research findings that indicate a given drug to be safe get as much public attention as those that indicate it to be dangerous? What are some prominent misstatements about the safety or danger of d**, including misstatements or research errors in the scientific literature? Why do people take d**? What is the opinion of recreational or sacramental drug users who are unapologetic about their use? What is the experience of other nations on the effectiveness of drug legislation? What is the experience of other nations about the long-term (in some cases, many thousand years long) experience of drug use (e.g., hashish in North Africa and South Asia)? Might it be possible to engineer d** with all of the alleged benefits and none of the deficiencies and dangers of current d**? Why is the foregoing suggestion occasionally rejected on moral grounds, and is there something intrinsically immoral about feeling good by taking a molecule? Do we ordinarily feel good because our bodies have generated molecules? Does our government establish such severe restrictions that the use of some d** for bona fide therapeutic reasons, under the supervision of a physician, is made impossible? Likewise, what about research into future medical uses? Are such hard d** as morphine, h**n and c**aine made unavailable to, for example, dying cancer patients in great pain, what is the justification for this? What is the experience of other countries in this regard? What can we learn from the use of amphetamines for weight loss among well-to-do women in the '60's and '70's, and c**aine in Coca Cola and medical nostrums earlier in the century? How do social and economic inequities drive the underprivileged to drug use? How much money is spent every year on the planet on illegal d**, (0.3 to 0.5 trillion dollars according to some estimates)? Does the existence of such enormous amounts of money inevitably lead to corruption in police and military enforcement agencies, legislators, intelligence agencies and the Executive Branch? If the financial rewards from drug dealing are so enormous, will not the suppression of the drug industry in one nation (Colombia, say) case it to proliferate in another nation (Laos, say)? Finally, what does it take to apply the scientific method to such questions rather than the repetition of conventional wisdom? I want to stress that I do not pretend to have the answers to these questions, but they are the sorts of questions I would urge be addressed. I hope this helps a little. With best wishes, Cordially, Carl Sagan