Mind Medicine - Does fear have an off switch?

“We’ve learned a fair amount of the circuitry that’s involved in generating the initial fear response. We really know relatively little about the circuitry that’s involved in turning it off”   (Richard Davidson, Neuroscientist). 

Is there a reason why this has been neglected? 

Protesters caught on newsprint at Occupy

"Using cannabinoids to overcome fear in the brain"
by Christie Wilcox
Scientific American

" ...in a study published this week in Molecular Psychiatry, researchers from Duke university have found that marijuana-like compounds and the enzyme that degrades them may be the key to understanding fear’s off switch."


http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2012/06/12/overcoming-fear-in-the-brain/



Why it's illegal to take drugs? Psychedelics might open the soul and motivate it against the greed machine? Marijuana might block out fear so that revolution becomes a possibility. We live in fear; of war, of hunger, of our own anxiety. Some drugs could propel us into a society of equality and compassion.


"You may say that I'm a dreamer..." 

Count the Costs Campaign

Highlights: "The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU), together with Transform Drug Policy Foundation, were among the NGOs launching the Count the Costs campaign to urge governments to evaluate the impacts of the 50 years old UN drug control system. This campaign movie highlights one of the most compelling issues, the human rights impacts of the global war on drugs."

Hungarian Civil Liberties Union: http://drogriporter.hu/en

Transform Drug Policy Article: http://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2012/02/new-countthecosts-film-from-hclu.html

Count the Costs: http://www.countthecosts.org/seven-costs/undermining-human-rights

Count the Costs site has great resources and reading materials. Information will set us free.

"Mexico's stark reminder of the cost of prohibition"

The Independent

Highlights:  "Even by the barbaric standards of Mexico's drug criminality, the discovery this week in the north-east of the country of a mass grave with 72 bodies – including 14 women – is shocking. It is also a reminder of the root cause of the violence that has killed an estimated 28,000 people since president Felipe Calderón declared domestic war on the drug cartels almost four years ago. The mayhem reflects above all one simple fact: that the United States, which shares Mexico's 2,000-mile long northern border, is the world's largest consumer of illegal drugs."

"The size of this clandestine market obviously cannot be calculated with precision. But the best guesses put it at $60bn or more per year and suggest that 70 per cent of the flow of illegal drugs into the US is controlled by Mexican cartels, which have long since supplanted their Colombian counterparts as the driving force in the region's drug business. Cocaine, heroin, cannabis or methamphetamine – whatever the US user's substance of preference, the overwhelming likelihood is that it will have transited though Mexico."

"If Americans lost their taste for drugs, the Mexican cartels would be out of business. That, however, will not happen; indeed the forbidden nature of drugs may make them more attractive. So why not legalise them? The argument has been powerfully made before and will be so again, but probably to no avail. Sadly the barbaric drug wars will continue."

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-mexicos-stark-reminder-of-the-cost-of-prohibition-2061932.html

"Violence breeds violence. The only thing drug gangs fear is legalisation"

by Johann Hari, The Independent

Highlights: "Why? When you criminalise a drug for which there is a large market, it doesn't disappear. The trade is simply transferred from off-licences, pharmacists and doctors to armed criminal gangs..."

"Look carefully at that mound of butchered corpses found yesterday. They are the inevitable and ineluctable product of drug prohibition. This will keep happening for as long as we pursue this policy. If you believe the way to deal with the human appetite for intoxication is to criminalise and militarise, then blood is on your hands.

How many people have to die before we finally make a sober assessment of reality, and take the drugs trade back from murderous criminal gangs?"

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-violence-breeds-violence-the-only-thing-drug-gangs-fear-is-legalisation-2062252.html

"...latest uk newspaper to back legislation"

Transform Drug Policy Foundation Blog

Highlights: "Does the media follow public opinion or lead it? Probably a bit of both, but it is clear that the climate around drugs policy is changing in the public political and media spheres, and the momentum for change is building."

http://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2010/08/independent-becomes-latest-national-uk.html