Another Academic Toes the Drug Warrior Line

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Another Academic Toes the Drug Warrior Line

in response to the paper entitled LSD, Ecstasy and the Music of Politics by AV Satish Chandra

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 15, 2021

Written in response to the paper "LSD, Ecstasy and the Music of Politics," by AV Satish Chandra at Academia.edu.

Dear Satish:

The Drug War represents a substance demonization campaign that is unprecedented in human history. Yet you write as if LSD and Ecstasy can be judged to be evil merely if they cause one single problem. That's the odd standard that folks hold for psychoactive substances of which politicians disapprove. If alcohol, tobacco (or even coffee or aspirin) were held to that standard, all three would be immediately outlawed.

The fact is that LSD was successfully treating alcoholics in the 1950s, before President Richard Nixon outlawed it, NOT in order to improve public health but in order to charge his political enemies with felonies and thereby remove them from the voting rolls.

The 1990s Rave Scene in England represented the first time that groups of every race and color came together peacefully on the dance floor. It should have been seen as a way forward for world peace and a way to escape nuclear armageddon ¹ ² ³ ⁴ . (Pakistan and North Korea have "the bomb," as will Iran. Does anyone really think that anything but a major inner change in human hearts is going to prevent eventual wholesale catastrophes?)

And yet the Drug Warriors hated that peaceful scene because it was induced by a substance that politicians had chosen to demonize. The fact is that MDMA is a godsend for depression and could be used to end gun massacres because it brings out a love for humanity and one's fellow creature. It has been shown to help soldiers with PTSD when nothing else works.

But Drug Warriors don't care. They'd rather have the ravers using aggression-inducing drugs like alcohol.

When they cracked down on Ecstasy, the dance scene became so violent that special forces troops were called in to keep the peace. Special Forces!

I invite you to read my article entitled: "How the Drug War Killed Leah Betts and ended the peaceful rave scene."

http://www.abolishthedea.com/how_the_drug_war_killed_leah_betts.php

I ask you, Satish: Which sounds like the best way forward to you : a world in which all plants are legal and are evaluated without bias for their actual beneficial uses -- or a world in which botanically clueless politicians decide in advance which plant substances are bad and forbid science from even studying them after that -- and even send armies overseas to eradicate the hated substances from the face of the earth? Which system sounds more grown-up to you?

Benjamin Franklin enjoyed opium ⁵ . Sigmund Freud thought cocaine ⁶ ⁷ was a godsend for his depression. Francis Crick discovered the DNA helix with the help of generous amounts of psychedelics. Thomas Jefferson rolled over in his grave when Drug Warriors confiscated his poppy plants.

If you want to see what the Drug War has accomplished, look at America's crowded prisons and the extrajudicial killings in the Philippines and the civil war in Mexico.

So, please, reconsider the Drug Warrior habit of demonizing a substance merely because it is susceptible of misuse by a teenager. Whole religions have been founded based on the psychoactive power of plants. Don't let politicians demonize plant medicine -- let's be rational and praise substances that conduce to world peace, rather than dogmatically implying that they are evil. That's the judgment of racist politicians, not science -- and it is ahistorical, since time out of mind, the substances that we banish have been used to enhance creativity and increase religiosity.

June 14, 2022

Almost all academic papers about the politically created category of "drugs" have to do with misuse, abuse and addiction. This is really a kind of Drug War propaganda in and of itself, because the collective effect of these papers is to give the layperson the impression that psychoactive substances are pure evil the moment that they have been outlawed by pharmacologically clueless politicians. In a sane world, we'd have articles that talked about morphine 's ability to give the properly educated user an intense appreciation of Mother Nature, a la the morphine -fueled delights of amateur naturalist Augustus Bedloe in Poe's short story entitled "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains." We'd find articles about the ability of pedagogically employed psilocybin to heighten musical appreciation, and the power of coca to aid in focus on a wide variety of computational tasks, including everything from proofreading to creating crosswords -- or, as Jules Verne and HG Wells knew, to increase our ability to focus long enough to write coherent and powerful short stories.

Instead, researchers just crank out paper after paper about the abuse and misuse of psychoactive substances, in lockstep with the Drug Warrior lie that such demonized substances can be used for nothing but hedonistic and immoral purposes. For the Drug War ideology insists that we assume, a priori, that demonized plant medicines have no legitimate uses whatsoever, a glaring falsehood that has fried the brains of not just the public, but of American psychologists and scientists as well, almost all of whom find it more than their jobs are worth to push back against the know-nothing mendacity of the Drug War ⁸.

For more information on how academics (even many of those who denounce drug prohibition) are getting it wrong when it comes to the Drug War, check out "The Problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts."

editor note from abolishthedea.com

October 2, 2022

It's strange that Satish Chandra is blasting psychoactive medicines for statistical trifles given the fact that the Vedic-Hindu religion itself was inspired by psychedelic medicine. But it's also not surprising since it's US government policy to ignore all beneficial uses of psychoactive plant medicine. Just look at the original charter of Joe Biden ⁹ ¹⁰'s Office of National Drug Control Policy, and you find a proviso which forbids government employees from even discussing potential positive uses of "drugs" -- i.e., those medicinal godsends from Mother Nature which botanically and historically clueless politicians have decided to outlaw.

The Mayans considered 'magic mushrooms' divine, the Inca had the same idea about the coca plant. And Plato's view of the afterlife was inspired by the psychedelic fueled Eleusinian Mysteries ¹¹, and yet so-called 'scientific' America has taught the world to demonize all such substances and to turn the hypocritically defined category of "drugs" into an all-purpose scapegoat for social problems. That's a conscious move by conservatives who are determined to keep America's eye OFF the prize, so that Americans are too busy being arrested and drug-tested to demand social policies that the skin-flint 3% do not wish to help pay for.

It's hard to overstate how huge of a scandal this is. There is a prima facie case for using drugs like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA ¹² to treat Alzheimer's ¹³ and autism sufferers, given the fact that said substances have been shown to create new neuronal connections and even grow new neurons in the brain. Yet our government demands that we ignore such obvious approaches to treating these modern-day scourges, because they believe that substances called "drugs" can have no good uses for anyone, anywhere, ever: an idea that would be laughable were it not productive of so much unnecessary suffering in the world.

And to their shame, scientists are willing to play ball. That's why you never see an academic paper on treating Alzheimer's or autism in which the researcher is honest with the reader and publishes a disclaimer saying that the solutions that they can entertain are limited by the US government and its laws against almost every powerful psychoactive medicine in the world. And that's, of course, another reason for the Drug War's staying power, i.e., the fact that American researchers pretend as if the Drug War does not exist, that they are working from a natural baseline when fighting mental problems, which is absolutely false.

¹⁴

editor note from abolishthedea.com

October 24, 2022

Of course, we have scarcely touched on the injustice of the Drug War. As if censoring science, warehousing minorities, killing blacks, denying morphine ¹⁵ to dying children, and Nazifying the English language were not enough, the Drug War is busy making Latin America safe for capitalism by fostering right-wing corruption at every level of government.

Paley, Dawn. "Drug War capitalism ." AK Press. October 20, 2014. https://www.scribd.com/read/432856229/Drug-War-capitalism ¹⁶ .

MDMA/Ecstasy

Notes for essay entitled Another Academic Toes the Drug Warrior Line: in response to the paper entitled LSD, Ecstasy and the Music of Politics by AV Satish Chandra:

1: 8 Nuclear Close Calls that Nearly Spelled Disaster Davidson, Lucy, History Hit, 2022 (up)
2: 35 Facts About Goldsboro Accident Hartwell, Therese, Facts.Net, 2025 (up)
3: A Darkening Horizon: Nuclear Dangers Around the World with Matthew Bunn Bunn, Matthew, Harvard Kennedy School, 2023 (up)
4: “Google Books.” 2019. Google.com. 2019. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Command_and_Control/H0-CJckES44C?hl=en. (up)
5: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
6: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
7: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
8: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
9: Joe Biden (up)
10: Joe Biden’s Drug War Record Is So Much Worse Than You Think Bienenstock, David, Leafly, 2019 (up)
11: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
12: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
13: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
14: Healing Traditions of Latin America Alive, 2024 (up)
15: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
16: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.

Drug warriors are full of hate for "users." Many of them make it clear that they want users to die (like Gates and Bennett...). The drug war has weaponized inhumanity.

Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."

Guess who's in charge of protecting us from AI? Chuck Schumer! The same guy who protected us from drugs -- by turning America into a prison camp full of minorities and so handing two presidential elections to Donald Trump.

"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.

Drug prohibition began as a racist attempt to prevent so-called "miscegenation." The racist's fear was not that a white woman would use opium or marijuana or cocaine, but that she might actually fall in love with a Chinese, Hispanic or Black person respectively.

Westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight.

I've found that no one thinks I "have standing" when I comment about drugs. I'm just a guy who's been turned into a patient for life thanks to drug prohibition. People think that the real experts are the doctors and scientists who profit from the status quo.

I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.

Drug war pundits need to stop using the word "snorts" when it comes to cocaine. We "take" our "meds," and yet we "snort" cocaine, just like a pig. That is NOT neutral language, folks!

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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(up)

Another Academic Toes the Drug Warrior Line

in response to the paper entitled LSD, Ecstasy and the Music of Politics by AV Satish Chandra

MDMA/Ecstasy

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend