The ongoing failure of drug reformers to attack the DEA
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 24, 2020
magine there was a government agency that everybody agreed was telling lies. Not only that, but everyone knew that these lies had caused millions of depressed patients and wounded soldiers to go without godsend medicines for almost half a century. Now imagine that the agency in question was also known to have deliberately poisoned American citizens with weed killer, and that this weed killer was subsequently found to cause Parkinson's Disease1.
Now, imagine that this all occurred in a supposedly free democratic country and yet no one complained. To the contrary, movie studios cranked out propaganda in which this same lying and murderous agency was portrayed as a hero, a hero that clandestinely uses torture and murder to achieve its goals.
Sounds like fiction, huh?
Well, unfortunately, this is not an imaginary scenario. The agency described above is Richard Nixon's Drug Enforcement Agency, and even the most vocal drug policy reformers have been loath to criticize it. Sure, they may point out in passing that the agency is lying about psychoactive substances through their politically motivated drug scheduling system, but they never take the obvious next step and call loudly and clearly for the agency's abolition, let alone for a criminal trial that would hold its leaders responsible for the great unnecessary suffering that they have knowingly caused over the last four and a half decades.
That's the reason why I created the website AbolishTheDEA.com just over a year ago: to finally speak truth to power and tell the DEA in the words of Shakespeare's Laertes: 'Thus diddest thou!'
That's also why I fret over the MAPS' organizations approach of 'working through the system' to decriminalize psychedelics2, since it obliges them to cooperate with the DEA, thereby granting that agency a kind of moral street cred that it does not deserve. This, after all, is the agency that is fighting tooth and nail to keep godsend medications out of the hands of suffering Americans, and why? Merely in order to preserve its own jobs - which brings up another problem with the DEA about which Americans remain mostly silent: the fact that it has a glaringly obvious conflict of interest in establishing the legality of substances, since their whole raison d'etre is to crack down on illegal drugs. And they freely act on that interest, as was demonstrated in 1985 when the agency went against the advice of its own legal counsel and criminalized MDMA, thus throwing thousands of soldiers under the bus by denying them a godsend therapy for PTSD3.
For those who need more reasons to hate the DEA, consider that former DEA Chief John C. Lawn poisoned marijuana with paraquat back in the 1980s, a weed killer that has subsequently been shown to cause Parkinson's Disease. That's the moral equivalent of genocide to punish those who violate a controversial and unpopular law. This is a ruthless agency that has no one's interests at heart but their own, an absurd nature-hating agency that requires researchers to protect supplies of drugs like psilocybin as if they were fissionable nuclear material rather than Godsend plant medicines from Mother Nature.
Such an agency should be a laughable dinosaur in 21st-century America and treated accordingly. It's time for the United States to do the same, preferably replacing it with the Drug EDUCATION Agency, an organization tasked with presenting the objective statistical facts about all psychoactive substances, including alcohol and Big Pharma anti-depressants, including both their pros and cons.
But Goliath is still defiantly loitering in the Valley of Elah, taunting free-spirited Americans with his contempt for constitutional niceties and his disdain for human life, practically daring some modern David to come forth and topple him.
Are we going to rise to the challenge and set out, slingshot in hand, or is the DEA a modern-day Stasi that even rebel spirits are afraid to challenge head on?
"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
The sick thing is that the DEA is still saying that psilocybin has no medical uses and is addictive. They should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for using such lies to keep people from using the gifts of Mother Nature.
The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary
Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!
We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.
There are endless creative ways to ward off addiction if all psychoactive medicines were at our disposal. The use of the drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin could combat the psychological downsides of withdrawal by providing strategic "as-needed" relief.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, A Goliath that even David is afraid of: The ongoing failure of drug reformers to attack the DEA, published on April 24, 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)
magine there was a government agency that everybody agreed was telling lies. Not only that, but everyone knew that these lies had caused millions of depressed patients and wounded soldiers to go without godsend medicines for almost half a century. Now imagine that the agency in question was also known to have deliberately poisoned American citizens with weed killer, and that this weed killer was subsequently found to cause Parkinson's Disease1. 
You have been reading an article entitled, A Goliath that even David is afraid of: The ongoing failure of drug reformers to attack the DEA, published on April 24, 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)
