What Liberals ALWAYS get wrong about the drug war

as exemplified by Karolina Zieba's 2018 article entitled 'In case you choose not to say no to drugs'

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 25, 2020

have nothing against liberals. I consider myself to be one. But they never seem to really understand the full problem with the Drug War. If you want to read a typical liberal article on this subject, check out Karolina Zieba's post entitled "In case you choose not to say no to drugs, kids," published September 10, 2018, in The Student Newspaper.

She seems to mean well and she argues against harsh penalties for drug possession, etc., but like almost every other liberal on the planet, she fails to grasp the full evil of the Drug War, writing instead as if the Drug War was a good idea which cannot work or which needs to be tweaked significantly in order to be fair. To which I say, no: the Drug War needs to be eliminated root and branch. It has no right to succeed. Points that I attempt to make in the comment that I have posted below.


Karolina appears to say the following: yes, drugs are bad, but people are going to use them anyway. But what are drugs? They are often just "plant medicines," albeit ones that politicians dislike and have criminalized in order to punish their opponents and remove them from the voting rolls (as was the case with the fiercest Drug Warrior of all time, former President Richard Nixon).

And why is it morally good for me to avoid plant medicines? Those who think that I should do so are just asserting their Christian Science prejudice on this topic. There is nothing moral about avoiding mother nature's godsends, no matter how hard government tries to demonize them - especially when that same government wilfully overlooks the fact that 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma antidepressants, many of which are harder to "kick" than heroin (source: Julie Holland).

Moreover, Karolina seems to assume that the only possible use of mother nature's psychoactive plant medicines is to get a cheap high, but that is just Drug Warrior propaganda. HG Wells and Jules Verne praised coca wine for its benefits in helping them focus and write imaginative stories. Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius used opium to increase productivity. Francis Crick used plenty of psychedelics to help him figure out the DNA helix. And the age-old Vedic religion was founded to worship the psychedelic insights provided by a plant-based medicine known as soma.

Liberals don't realize that 'drugs' is a pejorative term for 'mother nature's plant medicine' and that the Drug War is therefore Christian Science Sharia.

It is therefore simply Christian Science indoctrination for adults to tell kids that plant medicines have nothing to offer them as adults. The government can force us to say that to kids, but that's not science at work, it's politics - politics inspired by a Christian Science contempt for the value of mother nature's plant medicines. If we're going to warn kids about psychoactive snares, we should be telling them about the great antidepressant addiction of our time - but we are hypocritically silent about that, and ignore it completely, while yet criminalizing mother nature's bounty.

I appreciate that Karolina dislikes harsh drug laws, but I think she could do more to attack them if she realized that the word "drugs" is often just a pejorative political term for "mother nature's plants."

Why should we recognize that? Because Donald Trump is getting ready to start executing folks for selling "drugs." The best way to stop him is to point out that they're not selling drugs: in many cases they're simply selling "mother nature's plant medicines" - albeit the ones that politicians have decided to criminalize, usually for cynical political motives. These are medicines that no government has the right to deny us, since they grow at our very feet. In fact, to deprive us of such plant medicine is a violation of the natural law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. That's why Jefferson was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the garden-loving Jefferson's poppy plants.


May 26, 2022

The very title of Karolina's article would not make sense unless one accepted the pejorative meaning of the word 'drugs' that was created in the 20th century by Drug Warriors themselves. Just to ask such a question is to profess loyalty to Drug War ideology. If you had asked Marco Polo if he was going to say no to drugs, he would considerate it a crazy question. "No," he would say, "I'm not going to say no to sugar, nor to coffee." If he visited us via time machine and you wanted a good modern answer to that question, you'd have to alert him to the fact that "drugs" now refers to psychoactive medicines of which pharmaceutically clueless politicians disapprove. At which point, he'd tell the modern world and their Drug Warriors to go to hell, since he'd finally realize that the Drug Warrior wished to deprive him of the wonders of the poppy plant, of which Polo was a big fan.

The whole problem is that such Drug War ideology blinds us to godsends that could even end school shootings. Drugs like Ecstasy and psilocybin can be used therapeutically to give a natural-born hater a feeling of love for their fellow human beings. If Americans were not blinded by the Drug War ideology of substance demonization, we would embrace such medicines as a way to end tragedies like that in Uvalde and Newtown -- or at least to make them far less frequent.

Author's Follow-up: May 1, 2023

I wrote this almost three years ago now, when I was still a kid. Reading this now at age 64, I realize that I should have written that I am a liberal AS OPPOSED TO a neo-liberal. You know, neo-liberals: those erstwhile hippies who disastrously embraced Reagan in the late '70s, a president whose anti-scientific efforts at substance demonization locked up hundreds of thousands of blacks and removed America's eyes from the prize when it came to social justice -- and empowered the Francis Fukuyama's of the world, white pundits who, despite their seeming intellect, are 100% blind to all the endless downsides of prohibition, including the fact that it causes wars overseas, militarizes police forces and causes endless "drug" deaths by putting profit-driven dealers in charge of supply -- all in quest of the Quixotic and tyrannical help of getting everyone to think like a materialist and capitalistic Christian: i.e. to renounce their desire for self-transcendence. Neo-liberals are also more than happy to urinate for their government: just ask them where and when. Though most of those who call themselves neo-liberals are in the higher classes and thus have positions where they make YOU piss, not the other way around. You know you've made it in America when you can force your workers to piss, while yet declaring the hands-off sanctity of "your own private urine."

Next essay: Why the Drug War
is Christian Science Sharia

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You have been reading an article entitled, What Liberals ALWAYS get wrong about the drug war: as exemplified by Karolina Zieba's 2018 article entitled 'In case you choose not to say no to drugs', published on June 25, 2020 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)