Stop counting angels on a pin and speak up against the drug war
The Drug War represents an ideology, not just a set of problematic laws. It implies an idea of "the good life" and writes laws accordingly. It is not enough to complain about implementations of the Drug War ideology. Rather, that ideology must be attacked at its root by unveiling and refuting the assumptions upon which it is based. That is not a job for mere facts and figures but for philosophy.
Stephen Hawking said that philosophy is dead. I beg to differ. It may appear to be dead, but that is only because it has been hiding its head in the sand, ostrich-like, ever since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. That was when Congress first set the illogical and unconstitutional precedent of criminalizing plants, which had hitherto been considered our birth right as mere Earthlings under natural law. Since then, the Drug War and its anti-scientific laws have thrived in the hands of tyrants based on a propaganda campaign of sloppy logic, superstitious metaphysics and linguistic equivocation, all designed to make us look upon Mother Nature as a drug kingpin rather than as our medical benefactor and the source of countless therapeutic godsends. In other words, {^the "Drug War" is the philosophical problem par excellence of our time for it thrives on a series of misunderstandings and presumptions that only a true philosopher can hope to parse with nicety and expose in such a way as to make the need for reform obvious to the man or woman on the street - and thus to the man or woman in Congress.}{
That's one of the reasons that I've created this website, as an attempt to get the friends of liberty to start attacking the Drug War on philosophical grounds, rather than on the feeble grounds that the Drug War just does not work as advertised. Such latter arguments yield enormous ground to the Drug Warrior, implying that militarized tyranny, domestic surveillance, SWAT raids on unarmed citizens, foreign intervention and the suspension of natural law would be fine if only it cut down on the use of naturally occurring substances.
SWAT raids and domestic surveillance, in a supposedly democratic society, to cut down on the use of substances? And why exactly do we assume that it is good to cut back on the use of naturally occurring substances? That is a mere Christian Science prejudice, not a logical conclusion from any set of agreed-upon propositions. A Drug War critic who argues in this way may as well find another button-pushing injustice about which to opine, since the Drug War cannot be ousted by those who hastily grant all the false unspoken premises upon which it is founded.
If philosophers should read this, there's plenty of work to do, so let's not stand upon ceremony. "Grab a musket and get in rank," as my Jeffersonian ancestors used to say. Here are a few promising projects to fire your respective imaginations.
1) Elucidate the theological, political, and ideological links between the following events: The Drug War of modern times, Emperor Theodosius's 392 AD banning of the psychedelic Eleusinian Mysteries, and the Conquistadors' scorn for the plant-based psychedelic rites of MesoAmerican cultures.
2) Explain how modern employee "drug testing" is the extrajudicial enforcement of Christian Science with respect to psychological healing.
3) Trace the modern antipathy to "substance use" to the distrust of witches and their use of psychoactive plant medicines.
Author's Follow-up: October 15, 2022
The mere title of this site, "The Drug War Philosopher," is meant to suggest a fact that very few pundits understand: namely, that the Drug War is based on such a hodgepodge of unrecognized assumptions and presumptions that it truly takes a philosopher to identify and rebut them all in real-time so as to not be snookered by Drug War lies, misdirection and propaganda. Moreover, it is only a philosophical approach to the Drug War that can reveal the true extent of the damage caused by this policy of substance demonization. Most authors on this topic approach it piecemeal, skewering the Drug War for this or that outcome while missing a host of other more subtle but more egregious results of the reigning drug policy. I seem to be the only author who points out, for instance, that
the Drug War censors scientists by keeping them from investigating most psychoactive substances, partly by law and partly by discouraging funding and ostracizing researchers
scientists have become complicit in this censorship and now self-censor themselves as, for instance, when they tell author W. Goldman Mortimer that he should not write about the coca leaf since it would "send the wrong message," or when researchers write papers supposedly giving us the last word on treating depression, or Alzheimer's, or autism, meanwhile failing to mention even in a footnote that they have ruled out a priori the study of demonized psychoactive medicines in performing their research.
the Drug War is the enforcement of drug-hating Christian Science.
less psychoactive drug use should NOT be our goal any more than less non-psychoactive drug use should be our goal. If we find a drug that cures cancer, we should not hold back in using it based on an ideology that tells us "less use is better" somehow in the abstract. Likewise if we find drugs that can help end school shootings (like the empathogens MDMA and psilocybin). The goal should be to leverage all the benefits we can get out of medicine, not to assume a priori that we should limit the gains we thence derive based on our own Christian Science prejudices.
the drug has created the psychiatric pill mill, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma meds for life. This latter record-breaking dystopia is completely off the radar of the Michael Pollans and the Gabriel Mates of the world. Like the self-censored scientists mentioned above -- indeed like almost every non-fiction author and pundit today -- they reckon without the Drug War.
the Drug War FORCES US TO FRY BRAINS WITH SHOCK THERAPY -- because we have ruled out entirely the idea of making patients feel good with medicines like opium and coca showing that we would actually prefer to knowingly damage the human brain than to let a person be made to feel good with plant medicine!!!
the Drug War ideology forces kids in hospice to go without morphine for pain relief showing that we'd rather have children suffer pain than to give them a drug that we have superstitiously decided is evil incarnate, showing in turn that the Drug War is fanatical beyond belief.
So many organizations talk about fighting the Drug War with facts and figures. That sounds great. But the problem is that the Drug War represents an ideology, not just a set of problematic laws. It implies an idea of "the good life" and writes laws accordingly. It is not enough to complain about implementations of the Drug War ideology. Rather, that ideology must be attacked at its root by unveiling and refuting the assumptions upon which it is based. That is not a job for mere facts and figures but for philosophy.
Related tweet: October 15, 2022
It was -- and continues to be -- a bloodbath, but not for nothing. The Drug War gives the health industry a monopoly on mind medicine and gives psychiatrists jobs for life, prescribing dependence-causing pills on which 1 in 4 American women are dependent.
Related tweet: November 2, 2022
Increasing drug use is GOOD if it means less use of alcohol, tobacco, and the Big Pharma meds upon which 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent for life. The Drug Warrior doesn't want less use, they want more use of drugs that buoy the stock market.
Folks who call for less drug use are unfamiliar with how Ecstasy brought peace and love to the British dance floor, how shrooms stopped Paul Stamets from stuttering, how Plato got his view of the afterlife from psychedelics, etc.
You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.
A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.
The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.
It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)
If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.
PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.
Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)
Selected Bibliography
Andrew, Christopher "The Secret World: A History of Intelligence" 2019 Yale University Press
Aurelius, Marcus "Meditations" 2021 East India Publishing Company
Mate, Gabriel "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" 2009 Vintage Canada
Maupassant, Guy de "Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques - Guy de Maupassant: Les classiques du fantastique " 2019
McKenna, Terence "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution " 1992 Bantam
Miller, Richard Louis "Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle " 2017 Park Street Press
Pinchbeck, Daniel "When Plants Dream" 2019 Watkins Publishing
Poe, Edgar Allan "The Essential Poe" 2020 Warbler Classics
Pollan, Michael "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence " 2018 Penguin Books
Reynolds, David S. "Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville " 1988 Oxford University Press
Richards, William "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences Hardcover" 2015 Columbia University Press
Rosenfeld, Harvey "Diary of a Dirty Little War: The Spanish-American War of 1898 " 2000 Praeger
Straussman, Rick "DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences " 2001 Park Street Press
Streatfield, Dominic "Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography" 2003 Picador USA
Swartzwelder, Scott "Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy" 1998 W.W. Norton
Szasz, Thomas "Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers" 1974 Anchor Press/Doubleday
Whitaker, Robert "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America " 2010 Crown
Zinn, Howard "A People's History of the United States: 1492 - present" 2009
Zuboff , Shoshana "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2019 Public Affairs
Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.
