open letter to US Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine
May 24, 2023
The following screed was rapped out in double-time by a dude who by rights should be working on his freelance assignment right now (the nature of which work, however, shall remain a secret here in deference to the time sensitivities of the no-doubt harried reader). Brian couldn't stop himself, so pissed was he with the ongoing attempt by the US government to blame every imaginable earthly ill on the politically created boogieman called "drugs." These comments, by the way, were sent directly to the esteemed representatives via their websites, despite the nagging suspicion by the author that the duo in question have been hopelessly brainwashed by the Christian Science ideology of the war on Americans, AKA the War on Drugs.
By the way, the efficient causes of this harangue (if one might wax philosophical for just a moment) were the superstitious tweets of one Alex Berenson which Brian, alas, read this morning, in which the prohibitionist author tweaked reformers for the problems that he blamed on marijuana legalization. As usual, all the problems that he cited (to the extent that they were not just the figments of a nature-fearing imagination) were actually the result of the ongoing prohibition of all of marijuana's competitors. With this niggling impetus then -- and with the anxious knowledge of tomorrow's US Senate vote on the troglodytic HALT Act -- Brian could do nought else but expostulate, even if it meant that the poor guy would be up past midnight tonight catching up on that undefined freelancing work of his that I alluded to above.
Dear Senators
Prohibition has been the biggest mistake in American history. It is wrong root and branch. Our attitude towards "drugs" is prehistoric and anti-scientific. We come at the issue from the wrong direction. We should be awestruck at Nature's healing power (which God said was good) and be seeking all sorts of ways to use it safely and wisely. Instead, we believe that all psychoactive substances are bad -- without even asking for proof.
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, which leads to folks seeking transcendence from a corrupted drug supply furnished by dealers interested in the bottom line.
Please end this folly. We need an amendment that prohibits prohibition -- which causes death and sorrow and denies godsend medicines to the distressed. Even now, in America's hysterical attempt to blame opioids for every evil under the sun, we are denying godsend pain medicine to kids in hospice --based on our superstitious belief in the evil of opiates. Opium was considered a godsend by Avicenna, Galen and Paracelsus. It is not evil. Bad social policies are evil.
FREE SCIENCE. Stop the NIDA campaign to make us think that drugs can only be used for evil. It is propaganda, not science, because they completely ignore the reason people use "drugs": in order to transcend self and improve their lives. That is the truth. NIDA is all about ignoring that fact.
The Drug War has led to the election of Drug Warriors like Trump by jailing hundreds of thousands of blacks. If unchecked, the Drug War will completely destroy America. It is not wrong in parts -- it is wrong ROOT AND BRANCH. It is a WRONG WAY OF LOOKING AT THE WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!!
No wonder it leads to chaos, inner-city deaths, and the end of the rule of law in Latin America!!!!
Please vote NO ON HALT!
May 24, 2023
"The biggest mistake in American history." Well, slavery was worse. (Remember, the old boy wrote this in a hurry.) That said, however, the Drug War can be seen as the extension of slavery by other means, as the book Whiteout makes abundantly clear.
5% of proceeds from the sale of the above product will go toward getting Brian a decent haircut for once. Honestly. 9% will go toward shoes. 50% will go toward miscellaneous. 9% of the remainder will go toward relaxation, which could encompass anything from a spin around town to an outdoor barbecue at Brian's brother's house in Stanardsville (both gas and the ice-cream cake that Brian usually supplies).
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
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.
