Defend Our Right to Explore the Unlimited Potential of the Human Mind

A shout out today to the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics (CCLE), I found the following posted on their website particularly inspiring:

The CCLE’s focus is on protecting the unlimited potential of the human mind, and we maintain that criminal drug prohibition infringes on the inalienable right to freedom of thought. We maintain that the war on drugs is not a war on pills, powders, and plants, anymore than the earlier governmental efforts to ban books or to censor publications was a war on paper and ink. These are wars against thinking certain ways, and for this reason we maintain that criminal drug prohibition is unconstitutional cognitive censorship, and inconsistent with the basic values and freedoms upon with the United States was founded. So long as a person does not endanger others, the CCLE maintains that the government lacks the constitutional authority to punish the person simply for self-determining his or her own cognitive processes.

The CCLE strives to protect the fundamental right to freedom of thought — a right that Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo has called “the matrix, the indispensable condition for nearly every other form of freedom.” Because our enumerated rights date back to a time in which the drafters could not have conceived of modern methods of mental enhancement, or mental surveillance and control, the CCLE is committed to gaining legal recognition of cognitive liberty and to expanding legal protection for our rights of mind.

Sounds about right!

Comment from senseandsensuality - November 28, 2009 at 8:00 am

Wonderful “shout”.. and more than right (just practicing the expansion of mind and noticing that language can be such a barrier to meaning and communicating )!!
I find it depressing that societies have moved and are moving towards the determining and controlling systems that they are in our present day… what causes this?
Defence of capitalist interests (pharmaceuticals)?
Individuals’ drive for material wealth used by societies’ to enhance their own in the globalisation wealth stakes?
Science itself and the manipulation of the expert by politicians and media (see recent climate change data manipulation in the UK)?
Our own material human greed where humanity itself is sacrificed at the altar of mammon….