Capitalism's war against itself 
Excerpt from "The Forbidden Fruit" by Luis Carlos Restrepo

The fight against drugs is a war of capitalism against itself. Curious war that aims to eradicate the fullest and neoliberal manifestation of merchandise fetishism. War against one of the most desired and effective forms of capital accumulation, which, despite generously irrigating the financial system, provokes in the Puritan spirits a spirit of crusade that would be envied by those pious inquisitors that in the 15th century drafted, with the grace of details, the Malleus Maleficarum. In a few years, when tempers have subsided and the origin of accumulated capital has been forgotten, the war on drugs will be remembered as one of the most stupid of humanity, just as we remember today the religious wars of past centuries. The comparison goes beyond being a simple metaphor. Talking about drugs is an intricate theological issue, inherited from the combat that Yahweh waged against Baal for giving the Hebrew tribes their own territory. The God of the desert declared war on the Canaanite cults who resorted to drunkenness to communicate with their gods, and Baal-Zebuth became a diabolical force - Beelzebub - who has since identified himself with the orgies of the coven. The fight against the prophets -nebiim- of Baal was assumed by Elías master a holy war. Being reluctant to use euphoria, Elías calls for abstinence and foresight, criticizing the people for walking indecisively between two cults. After challenging the prophets of Baal to invoke their loses through the religious gymnastics of collective ecstasy, Elijah shows them that Yahweh is more powerful. The disgust that the Canaanite ecstasy causes to the prophets of Yahweh is made explicit in the words of Isaiah: "Prophets and priests stumble dazed by the wine ..., because all the tables are full and there is no free space in them" - Is 28.7-. Heirs to this feeling of aversion, the Church Fathers opposed the use of SPA ', identifying cultic drunkenness with lust and sin. Unlike the officiators of E1eusis and other ecstatic cults that existed in the Mediterranean basin until late antiquity, Hebrew rabbis and Christian priests exhibit a professional sobriety that excludes any hallucinated trance. ' Catholic dogma replaces drunken experience with a profession of faith. An objective definition of the word drug is impossible, since it does not contain a concept but a slogan whose social value is given by it: its ability to incarnate and canonize evil. As it is impossible to speak of the prayers without invoking their destructive power, we will use the term psychoactive substance alternatively to refer to the chemical mediators between the brain and the culture, they consume to modify our perception of the world. A similar process was lived in the Persian tradition with the condemnation of the Zoroaster soma (McKENNA, T .. The delicacy of -the gods, Barcelona, Paidós, 131). Escohotado speaks of a "betrayed entheogenic promise" (Escohotado, A., History of drugs, Madrid. Editorial Alliance, 1989, T. I, p 235). However, it will take many centuries for the moral ban to take the form of a world war to change the wishes of citizens and ensure that sobriety is jealously enforced in both the public and private spheres. For despite the religious restrictions that Judeo-Christianity imposes on the use of SPA since its inception, only in the 20th century did the Puritan crusade of the nascent American empire achieve that moral interdiction becomes legal interdiction. driven by a brotherhood of teetotalers who resorts to political power to impose a holy war on society. This ends with a long tradition of tolerance against the consumption of SPA that lasted until the end of the 19th century, a moment of transition to the modern industrial society in which the self-regulated use of opium derivatives began to be displaced by consumer massification. From Galen the Europeans used opium generously, following the Roman tradition that left the consumption of the psychoactive to the free choice of the individual. Used as a remedy for lung and intestinal diseases, to calm anxiety, gout symptoms, toothaches or pains of the piles, its effects were interpreted in the framework of a combat between the substance and the body of the user, who had to be careful with the dose he was taking to avoid annoying rebound symptoms. But leaving medical uses in the background, a group of habitual consumers appeared at the dawn of modernity who claimed the benefits that come with chemical modification, presenting themselves as travelers from an inner world and members of a contemplative race who were looking for the quenching of painful sensations and tamales desires, in order to stimulate metaphysical interests. Disinterested in matter and gravity, given over to the delights of memory and the contemplation of ideas, the opium addicts gave up the disguise of sobriety to merge into a fuller but more inert universal soul, lowering their will to surrender to a paradise ecstatic situated beyond good and evil.