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Love is beautiful. I define love as the choice to view something or someone as basically good, intrinsically valuable. To want to play and engage with it, and wish for it to persist and flourish (be safe, happy, healthy, etc.)

To me, an anarchist is somebody who doesn’t settle for anything less than love in life.

Love is what we feel when we do things playfully and voluntarily (as opposed to doing things because of obligation, fear, craving for an extrinsic reward, e.g. work).

Love is what we feel when we engage in friendship - choosing to spend time and play with each other because we like each other for who we are.

I believe that friendship is the base out of which all other relationships grow.
Friendships are customized by adding on any activities both people wholeheartedly consent to,
these activities run the full gamut from bowling night, to running a plumbing shop, to romance and sex, limited only by the mutual interests of the people involved.

When either person stops being interested in an activity, that activity can be retired as graciously and playfully as it was adopted, without harming the friendship. Friendships can stay intact forever, resilient to —even made vital by— constant change; when they do, that is lifelong love.

Marriage can either be beautiful or a miserably stifling spook, depending on the spirit in which two people enter into it.

If by “marriage” we’re simply talking about a big party that two (or more) individuals are throwing in order to celebrate and promote their lifelong friendship, that’s pretty dope.

But if we’re talking about marriage as some kind of state-mediated, legally-binding contract that exists to codify and limit individuals’ freedom to do as they please - that actually ruins love by turning it into something involuntary, something backed by fear.

Individuals should be able to say “yes” and “no” to doing any activity with each other whenever we please. There should not be limitations placed on what consensual things we can do with each other; it shouldn’t matter what our sexes are, whether we want one partner at a time or multiple partners at a time, whether we made different choices in the past, etc.

In reality, the only limiting factors are the content of our own desires and our ability to act on them.

Beyond this, we shouldn’t limit ourselves in our minds, and we certainly shouldn’t let other people (states, bullies, busybodies) attempt to place limits on us that we don’t want. If they do, we’ll buck their expectations and defy their wishes.

Drugs are medicine and I believe they should be treated as such. I want them decriminalized so that people can use them in therapeutic ways with the guidance of experienced healers, therapists, doctors, etc.

Addiction is a serious problem. However, addiction isn’t a phenomenon that’s unique to illegal drugs. People get addicted to legal drugs (over the counter and prescription), and people get addicted to sex, food, music, video games, shopping, relationships, gambling, etc. I want to stop addiction but it needs to be tackled in a more radical way than simply getting rid of some drugs.

According to experts on addiction and recovery like Gabor Mate, the reason that people become addicted to things is that they are missing something vital in their lives. There is a hole in a person’s heart where some value ought to be, and they fill it with the similar, but inferior, value provided by the object of addiction.

For example, opiates like heroin or morphine closely resemble our bodies’ natural painkillers, the endorphins (which are released during pleasurable activities like play, exercise, sex, etc). If a person isn’t getting enough endorphins in their life, it’s only natural that they will try to seek out synthetic substitutes. So, if we want to help somebody get off the drugs, we need to help them get back to the kinds of practices that generate endorphins.
A lot of recreational drugs affect the serotonin and dopamine receptors, which are responsible for mediating positive feelings such as abundance and success. These are also the receptors that are targeted by prescription antidepressants. Part of the key to getting somebody off of such (legal or illegal) antidepressants is to make tangible, material changes in their life so they experience more abundance and success. Solve the problems that make them depressed. (In some cases eve this might not be enough, because of brain chemistry, in which case long-term drug use may be recommended - and some of the best medicines for depression, the psychedelics, are currently illegal).

Various traumas may make it so that people feel like they are missing something deep inside them for years. PTSD is everywhere in our society, and it’s incredibly complex - takes a lot of hard work to heal such wounds.

I believe that radically improving society by implementing Libertarian Socialism will help alleviate many of these problems: Worker and consumer ownership to help give people the sense of abundance, success, purpose, etc.
Anarchism - a culture of consent, voluntarism, play - to help raise future generations without severe trauma, to give people a chance to live their dreams and experience deep pleasure without the need for drugs, or other addictions like consumerism which not only destroy the individual body but also destroy the environment.

Still, it’s not enough to idealistically hope that people will be so happy and healthy under libertarian socialism that nobody will ever need medicine.
We need to take the two-pronged approach. And while we fix society, we also need to put all potential medicines back on the table. We need to listen to the doctors who have shown that drugs like MDMA (ecstacy) do wonders as treatments for PTSD, that small doses of magic mushrooms can heal depression and anxiety better than normal antidepressants, etc. End the weird double standard that makes some drugs with deadly side-effects perfectly legal while others with harmless side effects are felonies.

I’ve never been a partier and I think the use of powerful medicine (or even spiritual tool) as a “party aid” is stupid. But you can’t blame people for self-medicating, hoping to tap into a source of meaning in a world that doesn’t give them any. And the fact that people use them for fun means their effectiveness is obvious and accessible. We’re morons for making it impossible for doctors to prescribe them.