Essay date: August 6, 2022

American City Homicide Awards 2021





ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the American City Homicide Awards for 2021, brought to you by drug prohibition, doing its part to keep the guns firing fast and furious in the 'hood. Now here is your host, Paxil Buspar.



PAXIL: Paxil Buspar here with co-host Adderall Zoloft, and it's an exciting night here in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Georgia.


GUNSHOT



ADDERALL: Oh! It sounds like someone's trying to make sure that Atlanta, Georgia, comes out on top tonight when it comes to the homicide totals.




PAXIL: The joke is on them because it's already 2022, so any murders that are committed tonight are going to have no effect on tonight's award show.


"Yeah!"



ADDERALL: Speaking of which, it's going to be a close competition tonight.




PAXIL: That's right, Adderall. Now that Covid restrictions are easing up, we're seeing record homicide numbers throughout the country, and not just in the usual cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.



ADDERALL: That's right, Paxil. Homicide totals are up all over the country, including in unlikely cities like Columbus, Ohio; Portland, Oregon; Detroit, Michigan; Atlanta, Georgia; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Milwaukee, Wisconsin...




PAXIL: Yes, we get the idea, Adderall.



ADDERALL: ...Portland, Oregon; Toledo, Ohio; San Francisco, California; Memphis, Tennessee...



PAXIL: Enough, already.



ADDERALL: ...Springfield, Missouri; Billings, Montana; Davenport, Iowa; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Berkeley, California; Chattanooga, Tennessee...



LAUGHTER



PAXIL: Long story short, Adderall...



ADDERALL: Yes, Paxil?




PAXIL: ...if it's a city, it's a deathtrap.




"Word"



ADDERALL: Well, you've got to give a lot of credit to America's War on Drugs, Paxil.




PAXIL: That's right, Adderall.



ADDERALL: In fact, do you know what Heather Ann Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014?




PAXIL: What's that, Adderall?






ADDERALL: She wrote, and I quote... ahem! ahem!
"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."






PAXIL: Nice impersonation.




ADDERALL: Thanks, Paxil.





PAXIL: All in the name of the God-fearing Drug War, Adderall.


CHURCH ORGAN PLAYING




ADDERALL: Amen.






PAXIL: Could you hand me the envelope, please? Oh, this is so exciting.


ENVELOPE CRINKLING




ADDERALL: Do you need some help with that?



PAXIL: No, thanks, I've got it.




The American city with the third-highest homicide rate per capita in 2021 is...



DRUM ROLL PLAYING



...Detroit Michigan...



CHEERING



...with 309 homicides out of a population of just over 630,000. Accepting the Silver Bullet Award on behalf of Detroit is gang member Reginald Perez from the Fiver Percenters.




REGINALD: Yo, I'd like to thank the DEA for outlawing Mother Nature's godsend medicines.



PAXIL: Oh, yeah?





REGINALD: Are you kidding me? It opened up endless entrepreneurial opportunities in the 'hood.





PAXIL: Opportunities in which guns came in handy, right, Reginald?





REGINALD: The white lady knows whereof she speaks.



CHEERING




ADDERALL: Okay, now it's my turn, Paxil.



PAXIL: Say the magic words, Adderall.





ADDERALL: Oh, great. I've always wanted to say this. Ahem. May I have the envelope, please?

ENVELOPE CRINKLING



What kind of envelopes are these, anyway? Guess they made it out of some kind of funky organic material, like seaweed. Here we go.



DRUM ROLL PLAYING



The American city with the second-highest homicide rate per capita in 2021 is New Orleans, Louisiana...



CHEERING



...with 218 homicides out of a population of 384,000. It looks like New Orleans has been pulling out all the stops...



CORK POPS





PAXIL: And all the AK47's, for that matter.


ADDERALL: To accept tonight's award on behalf of New Orleans, I'd like to welcome Tanya Wingate to the stage. She's chairwoman of the Stop the Violence Campaign in the city's historic 9th Ward.



CROWD MURMURING




What's that? Oh, that's terrible. I've just gotten word that Tanya was killed by a stray bullet while she was pulling out of her driveway this morning to catch a plane for Atlanta.


PAXIL: Oh, God, that is awful.


ADDERALL: Well, I guess I will accept this award on behalf of Tanya's next-of-kin.


PAXIL: Good idea.



ADDERALL: And congratulations once again to New Orleans for coming in second place in the 2021 homicide awards here in Atlanta, Georgia's State Farm Arena.



PAXIL: That's a hard act to follow, Adderall.



ADDERALL: I know, right? Especially if you're not wearing a bullet-proof vest.

LAUGHTER




PAXIL: But it's time now to announce the winner for the American City Homicide Awards of 2021.




ADDERALL: Here's the envelope, Paxil.




PAXIL: Nice try, Adderall, but you're not going to deprive me of the opportunity of saying those magic words once again tonight.


ADDERALL: Oh, right.


PAXIL: May I have the envelope, please?



ADDERALL: I thought you'd never ask.



ENVELOPE CRINKLING



PAXIL: Excuse me just one moment.



CHAINSAW BUZZES




There.

DRUM ROLL PLAYING


And the winner for the American City Homicide Awards for 2021 is... St. Louis, Missouri...





CHEERING



...with 195 homicides out of a population of just 300,000.




ST. LOUIS HOMEBOY: St. Louis does not accept your stupid award.





ADDERALL: And who might you be?



ST. LOUIS HOMEBOY: I might be the guy that's gonna shove that microphone down your throat if you don't stop glamorizing gun violence.


AUDIENCE GASPS


PAXIL: You should be happy. Your city won the American City Homicide competition for 2021.



ST. LOUIS HOMEBOY: Yeah, but only because the racist Drug War incentivized drug dealing, thereby filling my hometown with guns.




PAXIL: You say potato and I say potahto.



ST. LOUIS HOMEBOY: Say what?




ADDERALL: Can we get some security officers up here, please?



PAXIL: Well, I'll tell you what. I used to live in St. Louis myself so I will accept this Silver Bullet Award on behalf of my former hometown.



ADDERALL: I didn't know you used to live in St. Louis.



PAXIL: Oh, yeah, I grew up there.




ADDERALL: Why did you leave?




PAXIL: Because between you and me, it was way too violent.



CHEERING


ANNOUNCER: You have been listening to the American City Homicide Awards for 2021, brought to you by Drug War prohibition: helping to keep the 'hood exciting by incentivizing drug dealing among the poor and powerless. Do your part to marginalize and kill American minorities: tell your Congress people to ratchet up the patriotic War on Drugs today. The War on Drugs: proudly keeping Mother Nature's godsends from the American people for over 100 years.


Next essay: Richard Feynman and the Drug War
Previous essay: Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant

More Essays Here


essays about
BLACKS AND THE DRUG WAR

Black Lives Don't Matter
Spike Lee is Bamboozled by the Drug War
Grandmaster Flash: Drug War Collaborator
The Invisible Mass Shootings
The Unpeople of Southeast Washington, D.C.

essays about
COMEDY AND THE DRUG WAR

Dragnet meets the Drug War
The Joy of Drug Testing
Drug War Copaganda
One of these things is not like the other
Comedian Adderall Zoloft Riffs on the Drug War
Plants Divine, All Plants Excelling
Testing Employee Urine for Fun and Profit
Rat Out Your Neighbors
The Church of the Most Holy and Righteous Drug War
A Drug Warrior in our Midst
Public Service Announcements for the Post-Drug War Era
Se Llama Mushrooms
Hey, You, Get Off Of My Creed!
Drug Warriors Anonymous
Partnership for a Death Free America
A Misguided Tour of Monticello
Drug War Jeopardy!




old time radio playing Drug War comedy sketches














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.

Brian Quass
The Drug War Philosopher
abolishthedea.com

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

  • Bandow, Doug "From Fighting The Drug War To Protecting The Right To Use Drugs"2018
  • Barrett, Damon "Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Polices on Young People"2011 IDEBATE Press
  • Bilton, Anton "DMT Entity Encounters: Dialogues on the Spirit Molecule"2021 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Boullosa , Carmen "A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the 'Mexican Drug War'"2016 OR Books
  • Brereton, William "The Truth about Opium / Being a Refutation of the Fallacies of the Anti-Opium Society and a Defence of the Indo-China Opium Trade"2017 Anna Ruggieri
  • Burns, Eric "1920: The year that made the decade roar"2015 Pegasus Books
  • Carpenter, Ted Galen "The Fire Next Door: Mexico's Drug Violence and the Danger to America"2012 Cato Institute
  • Chesterton, GK "Saint Thomas Acquinas"2014 BookBaby
  • Filan, Kenaz "The Power of the Poppy: Harnessing Nature's Most Dangerous Plant Ally"2011 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Griffiths, William "Psilocybin: A Trip into the World of Magic Mushrooms"2021 William Griffiths
  • Hofmann, Albert "The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications"2005 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Irwin-Rogers, Keir "Illicit Drug Markets, Consumer Capitalism and the Rise of Social Media: A Toxic Trap for Young People"2019
  • James, William "The Varieties of Religious Experience"1902 Philosophical Library
  • Mariani, Angelo "Coca and its Therapeutic Application, Third Edition"1896 Gutenberg.org
  • Mortimer MD, W. Golden "Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas"2017 Ronin Publishing
  • Partridge, Chiristopher "Alistair Crowley on Drugs"2021 uploaded by Misael Hernandez
  • Rudgley, Richard "The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances"2014 Macmillan Publishers
  • Shulgin, Alexander "PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story"1991 Transform Press
  • Shulgin, Alexander "The Nature of Drugs Vol. 1: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact"2021 Transform Press
  • Smith, Wolfgang "Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief"0
  • Smith, Wolfgang "Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology"2022
  • St John, Graham "Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT"2021
  • Szasz, Thomas "Interview With Thomas Szasz: by Randall C. Wyatt"0
  • Wedel, Janine "Unaccountable: How the Establishment Corrupted Our Finances, Freedom and Politics and Created an Outsider Class"2014 Pegasus Books
  • Weil, Andrew "From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs"2004 Open Road Integrated Media
  • 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.