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Breaking News: Scientists Realize That Marijuana may not be Evil Incarnate After All!

More Glacial Progress in the war against Substance Prohibition

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

January 13, 2024



A friend of mine just forwarded me a link to a NY Times article suggesting that the penny has finally dropped for scientists on the subject of marijuana1. I responded as follows:

Thanks. Yeah, I saw the headline. Actually, the article will probably just depress me. To me it's all about the GLACIAL progress of materialist science when it comes to "drugs." We've had 100+ years of prohibition and they're only now starting to apologetically say that marijuana might not be devil spawn -- but in saying that, they're taking a swipe at heroin 2 as being worse, thereby betraying their ongoing belief that the problem is drugs and not prohibition. Even heroin has positive uses -- and its popularity is due to the outlawing of opium 3 . So such "reads" are depressing to me, reminding me how far away we still are from looking at these matters sensibly.


https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/health/marijuana-fda-dea.html

At this rate, scientists may realize that laughing gas 4 could help the depressed in, say, 20 more years or so5!

Meanwhile, the status quo has not changed: scientists still believe in the anti-scientific doctrine that drugs can be voted up or down and that a cost-benefit analysis of prohibition need not include the hundreds of thousands of collateral deaths that this hateful policy has racked up over the years, and continues to rack up to this day in inner cities and in Latin America6. For prohibition is the entrapment of the poor: it presents that the opportunity for huge sudden profit -- then when young people jump at the bait, the feds step in to remove them from American life and take them off the voting rolls. Hateful, hateful, hateful.









Notes for essay entitled Breaking News: Scientists Realize That Marijuana may not be Evil Incarnate After All!: More Glacial Progress in the war against Substance Prohibition:

1: Federal Scientists Recommend Easing Restrictions on Marijuana Jewett, Christina, New York Times, 2024 (up)
2: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
4: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
5: Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas DWP (up)
6: ThriftBooks. 2026. “Drug War Capitalism.” ThriftBooks. 2026. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/drug-war-capitalism/9217021/?resultid=e8667266-257a-41bf-83e3-78200e3527f3#edition=8539401&idiq=10283063. (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.

The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.

Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.

If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault.

In a compassionate world, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.

A company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.

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.

Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."

The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.

The drug war is the defeatist doctrine that we will never be able to use psychoactive drugs wisely. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the government does everything it can to make drug use dangerous.


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