ietzsche brought the western world's attention to its unrecognized and unacknowledged reliance on Christian moral precepts. It's time now for someone to bring the western world's attention to the fact that the Drug War is premised on the exact same religious attitudes. More specifically, the Drug War is premised on the Christian Science precept that it is immoral to use "drugs." Why? According to Christian Science, it is wrong because Jesus is the answer.
Of course, the Drug Warriors cannot rely on that argument in a country that at least gives lip service to the freedom of religion. That's why the Drug War is all about the demonization of plant medicine, a demonization that is practiced by outright lies (like the highly mendacious "frying pan" ad, which claims that a substance fries the brain the moment it is criminalized by a politician) and the censorship of all history and biography that tends to illustrate the responsible use of substances that the Drug Warrior desires us to hate. Thus we suppress Poe's short stories which dare tell us of the perceptual and creative powers of morphine and opium. We hide the fact that Marcus Aurelius and Ben Franklin enjoyed opium. We never -- but never -- mention Freud's conviction that cocaine was a godsend for depression or the fact that HG Wells and Jules Verne both swore by the invigorating power of Coca Wine when writing their stories. And we're completely hush-hush when it comes to politically incorrect histories such as the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries, the Vedic religion's link to the worship of psychoactive plant(s) known as soma, and the widespread Mesoamerican use of mushrooms for religious enlightenment and ritual.
American philosophers have long since "grokked" the general principle that the west is founded and continues to act (subconsciously, as it were) according to Christian precepts... but they have yet to recognize that the Drug War is the prime example of that fact and that it therefore represents the establishment of a state religion, namely the state religion called Christian Science, albeit a hypocritical version that is applied exclusively to psychoactive medicines and makes exceptions for the Drug Warrior's own favorite drugs of alcohol and tobacco. That's why, when in a mischievous mood, I like to imagine a Drug War that cracks down exclusively on those two biggest killers in the drug world, depriving jobs to any American who has so much as sipped alcohol in the last month or who is found to have a crushed cigarette butt in their car. I envision THOSE "drug fiends" tossed into overcrowded jails and removed from the voting rolls, denied public housing, and forced to attend government re-education camps known as "12 step groups." Now that's a Drug War that I could support, if only to give America's Christian Science Drug Warriors a taste of their own violence-spawning and racist medicine.
Author's Follow-up: August 18, 2022
How powerful words can be. The whole Drug War depends on the use of the word "drugs," which is not a subjective or scientific term in the modern world, but rather a political one. To use the word "drugs" without realizing this fact (as almost every writer does today, including Michael Pollan) is like using the word "scabs" to describe workers who fail to take part in a strike. There's nothing objective about such writing. No matter what the conclusions of the author who uses the word "scab," they are making an argument against strike breaking merely by employing said term. In the exact same way, today's authors are advancing an argument in favor of Drug War ideology every time they uncritically use the word "drugs," even if they imagine they are doing otherwise.
Why? Because "drugs" as defined today means:
"Psychoactive medicine for which there is no positive or legitimate use whatsoever: not now, not ever, not here in the United States or in the remotest corners of the globe." Presumably this definition will be broadened to include other planets should life be found in outer space.
Of course, there is no such substance in the world. Even the deadly botox has valid uses. Moreover, valid uses will never be discovered if we determine, a priori, via fiat as it were, that they do not exist.
How do we account for such a palpably false and anti-nature premise? Easy. For Drug War ideology existed over half a century before Congress first criminalized plant medicine. But back then it was honestly acknowledged as the religion that it was, namely Christian Science.
And so the Drug War is a religion, given its faith-driven belief in a dangerous mother nature from which human beings must be protected -- a religion that runs riot over the rights of those of us who consider Mother Nature to be a loving provider rather than a drug kingpin.
It does not just deny me my religious freedom (the freedom to value and rely on Mother Nature), but it does everything it can to convert me to the hypocritically-defined sobriety of mainstream Christian churches. How? First, by arresting me for using plant medicine that has inspired entire religions; then by forcing me into treatment centers where I'm forced to acknowledge my own powerlessness along with my need for a thinly disguised Christian god known as a 'higher power.' The fact is, however, that to the extent that I really feel powerless, it is because the state has denied me access to godsend medicines that could help me feel otherwise.
How many 'good Christians' would feel powerless if we took away their alcohol, their coffee, their tobacco and their anti-depressants cocktails, which 1 in 8 of them take daily?
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.
ietzsche brought the western world's attention to its unrecognized and unacknowledged reliance on Christian moral precepts. It's time now for someone to bring the western world's attention to the fact that the Drug War is premised on the exact same religious attitudes. More specifically, the Drug War is premised on the Christian Science precept that it is immoral to use "drugs." Why? According to Christian Science, it is wrong because Jesus is the answer. 
