10 Idiots who helped spread drug war propaganda on Listverse
in response to the listverse article entitled 10 historical figures who were dependent on opium
t's hard to be a good writer when fighting America's insane drug war because it's just so irritating and dispiriting to do the research. I guess I'm thin-skinned, but I get truly pissed when I see how much wrong-headed thinking there is on this subject, probably because I know that it's this kind of anti-philosophical thinking that has resulted in laws that keep me from accessing plant medicines that should be mine as a birthright under natural law.
Thanks to drug law, I not only go without those medicinal godsends but I'm shunted off onto highly addictive Big Pharma meds that I'm forced to take for life -- drugs with which no one in America seems to have a problem even though they're harder to quit than heroin.
One website that really rattled my cage this morning featured a Listverse page entitled "10 Historical Figures Who Were Dependent on Opium."
The title itself betrays the hypocritical drug warrior habit of denouncing supposed "dependence" to natural plant medicines while remaining silent about full-blown addiction to Big Pharma meds. In the minds of the modern American, it is almost a moral duty for a depressed or anxious person to "take their meds." Why then do we consider it a moral fault when historical figures "took their meds" in order to achieve self-actualization in the world? (Probably because America wants to medicalize human behavior, and so the doctors get upset when the use of such meds leaves the medical establishment out of the loop, financially speaking.)
Of course, the truly irritating part of the page is the comments section. Since DISQUS's algorithms are all about "getting eyeballs," they place the most idiotic comments at the very top of the comments page. Check out the following gem from a certain Chaos, an anonymous member of the Cult of the American Drug War. It currently appears at the very top of the comments section for the Listverse page about opium users, ahead of 75 other entries.
I think that taking, drinking, eating, smoking or injecting drugs is like someone blowing his brains off in an extreme slow-motion sequence.
(Personally, I think that reading drug war propaganda of this kind is like blowing one's brains off in an extreme slow-motion sequence.)
Meanwhile I tried to approach the matter rationally, and where do my comments appear? At the bottom of the page, separated by at least 30 inane comments from Chaos's musings, the interval between us being filled with such enlightening observations as: "quit bogarting the joint" and "the bust of Aurelius is obviously stone(d)" ha ha.
The good thing is, such chop logic motivates me to write comments like the following, when my depression might otherwise prevent me from doing so -- that depression that logic-challenged drug warriors will not let me treat effectively thanks to their ungrateful demonization of mother nature's plant medicines.
The drug war has fried American brains by convincing them that they can't even say the word 'opium' without raising eyebrows. Do you know how many TV shows and movies portray opium and cocaine use in a positive light? Zero. It's drug war censorship at work.
There's nothing moral or scientific about renouncing our right to medical godsends of mother nature. But the drug warrior spouts lies that make us think otherwise. The "frying pan" ad by the Partnership for a Drug Free America is the biggest lie in advertising history. Drugs like cocaine focus the brain -- as Sigmund Freud knew. Opium conduces to creativity -- as Benjamin Franklin knew. Psychedelics inspired Francis Crick to visualize the DNA helix.
But we've been taught in the west to think of Mother Nature as a drug kingpin rather than as a dispenser of godsend medicines. The drug war is Christian Science, telling us that we must not treat our conscious mind with "drugs".
Until 1914, we judged people on their actual behavior. Now we judge them on what they have in their digestive systems. It's all a sick and superstitious way of looking at the world. And it's hypocritical. If any drugs "fry" the brain, it's modern antidepressants, to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted. Many SSRIs and SNRIs are harder to quit than heroin. (source: Julie Holland).
I "take" Effexor -- paying dearly for it every month of my life, helping finance Maseratis for Big Pharma execs -- and my shrink says not to bother trying to get off it since its recidivism rate is so high. Yet America's drug war cult refuses to even RECOGNIZE that addiction. Because the drug war has nothing to do with America's health -- it's all about fomenting violence via prohibition and thus empowering the police and the military to crack heads -- and to take America's mind off of social problems (like the drug war itself) that lead to drug abuse.
It's sad to see so many comments here panning "drugs" when drugs are nothing but the plant medicines that grow at our very feet. Those plant medicines are ours by birth under natural law. Only America decided in 1914 that the government would determine what plants we can have access to.
That's tyranny. It's a clear violation of the natural law on which America was founded.
The drug war is just a nature-hating Christian Science cult. It is the establishment of a religion. Drug law enforcement is Christian Science Sharia.
Even the title of this page demonstrates drug warrior bias. It hypocritically uses the word "dependence" as if it was some kind of character flaw. How many of us are "dependent" on coffee, sugar and salt? How about alcohol and tobacco? And how many of us are "dependent" on Big Pharma meds? Why not create a page showing all the famous Americans who are "dependent" on antidepressants?
America wants to moralize and medicalize the subject of substance use rather than judging people like everyone in the world did before 1914: by HOW THEY ACTUALLY BEHAVED and by what they actually accomplished in the world.
In America, we no longer judge a person by the color of their skin, we judge them by the contents of their digestive system.
And so the anemic epitaph of the drug warrior reads: "May not have accomplished much... but gladly gave up his/her right to all of mother nature's godsend plant medicines!"
I hope that one day, when America has outgrown its superstitions about naturally occurring substances, there will be a Listverse page entitled "10 idiots who helped spread drug war propaganda on Listverse." The author of such a post will certainly have a wide field to choose from, judging by all the logic-challenged comments that drugs-related pages attract on that Web resource.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
DRUG WARRIORS REBUTTED
Over 45% of traumatic brain injuries are caused by horseback riding (ABC News). Tell your representatives to outlaw horseback riding and make it a federal offence to teach a child how to ride! Brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
OPIUM
Drug warriors do not seem to see any irony in the fact that their outlawing of opium eventually resulted in an "opioid crisis." The message is clear: people want transcendence. If we don't let them find it safely, they will find it dangerously.
John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!
THE MEDIA AND THE DRUG WAR
I guess the motto for their owner, Hubbard Broadcasting, is PANEM ET CIRCENSES, i.e., bread and circuses.
Breaking news : "McDonald's will stay open after petition gathered enough signatures!" If only WTOP would give such front-page coverage to petitions to end the drug war.
Over 45% of traumatic brain injuries are caused by horseback riding (ABC News). Tell your representatives to outlaw horseback riding and make it a federal offence to teach a child how to ride! Brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Sana Collective Group committed to making psychedelic therapy available to all regardless of income.
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. (For proof of that latter charge, check out how the US and UK have criminalized the substances that William James himself told us to study in order to understand reality.) It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions (like the Vedic), Nazifies the English language (referring to folks who emulate drug-loving Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin as "scumbags") and militarizes police forces nationwide (resulting in gestapo SWAT teams breaking into houses of peaceable Americans and shouting "GO GO GO!").
(Speaking of Nazification, L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates thought that drug users should be shot. What a softie! The real hardliners are the William Bennetts of the world who want drug users to be beheaded instead. That will teach them to use time-honored plant medicine of which politicians disapprove! Mary Baker Eddy must be ecstatic in her drug-free heaven, as she looks down and sees this modern inquisition on behalf of the drug-hating principles that she herself maintained. I bet she never dared hope that her religion would become the viciously enforced religion of America, let alone of the entire freakin' world!)
In short, the drug war 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.
PPS Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
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
Bache, Christopher "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven" 2019 Park Street Press
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
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
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
Whitaker, Robert "Mad in America"2002 Perseus Publishing
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.
t's hard to be a good writer when fighting America's insane drug war because it's just so irritating and dispiriting to do the research. I guess I'm thin-skinned, but I get truly pissed when I see how much wrong-headed thinking there is on this subject, probably because I know that it's this kind of anti-philosophical thinking that has resulted in laws that keep me from accessing plant medicines that should be mine as a birthright under natural law. 
