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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



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 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. 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 could help the depressed in, say, 20 more years or so2!

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 America3. 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:

1 Jewett, Christina, Federal Scientists Recommend Easing Restrictions on Marijuana, New York Times, 2024 (up)
2 Quass, Brian, Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas, 2023 (up)
3 Paley, Dawn, Drug War Capitalism, AK Press, Chico, California, 2014 (up)



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Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
The FDA will be accepting comments through September 20th on the subject of ways to fight PTSD. PTSD@reaganudall.org Ask them why they support brain-damaging shock therapy but won't approve drugs like MDMA that could make ECT unnecessary.
The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.
Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
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.
The so-called "herbs" that witches used were drugs, in the same way that "meds" are drugs. If academics made that connection, the study of witchcraft would shed a lot of light on the fearmongering of modern prohibitionists.
Many articles in science mags need this disclaimer: "Author has declined to consider the insights gained from drug-induced states on this topic out of fealty to Christian Science orthodoxy." They don't do this because they know readers already assume that drugs will be ignored.
What is the end game of the drug warrior? A world in which no one wants drugs? That's not science. It's the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. You know, the American religion that outsources its Inquisition to drug-testing labs.
That's why I created the satirical Partnership for a Death Free America. It demonstrates clearly that drug warriors aren't worried about our health, otherwise they'd outlaw shopping carts, etc. The question then becomes: what are they REALLY afraid of? Answer: Free thinkers.
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The latest hits from Drug War Records, featuring Freddie and the Fearmongers!


1. Requiem for the Fourth Amendment



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3. O Say Can You See (what the Drug War's done to you and me)






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You have been reading an article entitled, Breaking News: Scientists Realize That Marijuana may not be Evil Incarnate After All!: More Glacial Progress in the war against Substance Prohibition, published on January 13, 2024 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)