reader of this site, especially one raised on Drug War propaganda (which is to say literally everyone these days), may say to themselves: "Gee, this guy is awfully hung up about drugs. "
But that's got the whole situation backwards. The fact is that the whole world has been "hung up" about drugs, ever since the Harrison narcotics act of 1914 criminalized a mere plant (the poppy plant) in contravention of the natural law upon which America was founded. Since then, "drugs" have become the national (and, alas, international) boogeyman and scapegoat, responsible for all social ills and therefore something that the police and military have mobilized around the world to combat, letting civil liberties fend for themselves.
It is thus society that is hung up about "drugs," not me. My whole goal in writing these essays is to stop the world from superstitiously scapegoating drugs. Drugs are not the problem. To the extent that there's a problem that's ASSOCIATED with drug use, it stems from a lack of education, not the substances themselves. To think otherwise, is to reason like our prehistoric ancestors: if they got hit by lightning, then the evil lightning was to blame, not the fact that they had stupidly stood out in the open and attracted the lightning bolt.
There was no drug problem in Ancient Egypt. There was no drug problem in Ancient Greece. There was no drug problem in Ancient Mesopotamia. There was no drug problem in Ancient Rome. There was no drug problem in the Mongol Kingdom. There was no drug problem in the Viking Age.
Why then is there suddenly a huge "drug" problem today? Answer: Because racist politicians (especially Francis Burton Harrison and Nixon) wanted to punish the people with whom they associated certain substance use, and since they could not enact any laws that were OBVIOUSLY racist, they drafted drug laws that would throw their enemies in jail, often for life, for using their substance of choice, thus often taking away their right to vote in American elections and ensuring the future election of yet more drug-warrior racists.
The Drug War thus created has nothing to do with America's health. If it did, then its first targets would be Big Pharma antidepressants, to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted. Then it would move on to crack down on "liquor abuse," which one could plausibly argue is "rampant" in America. Yet the Drug Warrior is blind to such problems. When they say they want to crack down on "drug use," they are using the word "drugs" as they have defined the term for their own strategic political purposes: namely, a substance that fails to enrich Big Pharma and Big Liquor, and a substance whose ingestion could help Americans bypass the expensive and highly addictive pill mill of psychiatry, thus leaving the medical establishment out of the loop when it comes to the profits to be reaped by addicting one's fellow human beings.
So the Drug Warrior willfully lies about these substances that they have hypocritically labelled "drugs" for political reasons, claiming that such substances have no therapeutic value, thus lying in the teeth of contrary anecdotal evidence that dates back millennia. They say coca is pure evil: yet it was an Incan God and helped Jules Verne and HG Wells create the best sci-fi stories in the world. They say opium is even PURER evil: yet Benjamin Franklin and even Thomas Jefferson himself partook.
No, I'm not the one who's hung up about drugs: it's the racist politicians who are fixated on "drugs," but not any drugs, mind: just the drugs that they have decided to demonize in order to achieve their racist political goals (namely, getting elected by marginalizing their opponents through the enactment of harsh drug laws). Sadly, they have hoodwinked liberals to play along, by convincing them that it's all about health, encouraging leftists to embrace the superstitious reasoning that amoral substances can be blamed for problems, rather than the lack of free and objective education that could render drug misuse impossible.
Author's Follow-up: August 28, 2022
Speaking of America's obsession with "drugs": "Just say no" classes are like DIY instruction for rebellious kids. They say, in effect: "If you ever decide to rebel, kids, here are some nasty substances that you can take to really piss off your parents and other authority figures." Besides that, such classes are anti-scientific, because they promote the pernicious idea that some substances can be bad without regard for how, when, or why they are used. In reality, there are no such substances in the world. Even the highly toxic Botox can have positive uses in the correct context. Moreover, it is this lie about substances that, even as we write, is censoring scientists by outlawing their thorough research of psychoactive medicines, some of which have great promise for combating Alzheimer's disease and autism. But American drug policy is all about scaring Americans, not educating them. That's why Joe Biden's Office of National Drug Control Policy was originally set up with a charter that prevented its board members from even considering positive uses for the substances that politicians had outlawed.
One wonders when scientists are going to recognize this fact, come out soundly against the status quo, and insist that we stop politicizing substances -- and thus science -- altogether.
Re-affirm natural law and forbid politicians from barring the world's use of medicines simply because they do not pass moral muster with racist WASP politicians.
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.
reader of this site, especially one raised on Drug War propaganda (which is to say literally everyone these days), may say to themselves: "Gee, this guy is awfully hung up about drugs. "
