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Dr. Scumbag, you're wanted in the penitentiary. Dr. Scumbag to the penitentiary, please.
FRIDAY: My name is Friday. I carry a drug testing kit.
I had just gotten the call from headquarters. It seems some children in a Van Nuys hospice center were being given morphine to treat some quote unquote severe pain. I thought I'd check out the report. If doctors are really dealing junk to children, heads have got to roll.
So thinking, I turned to my partner Frank and said...
Chop-chop, baby. There's a report of some bigtime drug abuse at Panorama City Medical Center.
FRANK: Panorama City Medical? Isn't that in a drug free zone?
FRIDAY: That's right, Frank. It's practically right across the street from Ranchito Avenue Elementary School.
FRANK: Yeah. Those drug dealing scumbags will be eligible for the death penalty if we catch them trying to dope up those helpless kids.
FRIDAY: Turn on the light show, Frank, my scumbag radar is going off.
FRANK: Say, what is a hospice anyway, Joe?
FRIDAY: A hospice? I don't know exactly, but it's obviously some kind of hospital.
FRANK: Whee doggie, you mean we're going to be arresting doctors?
FRIDAY: That's right, Frank. At least if we can keep ourselves from shooting them in cold blood when we see them dealing junk to the unsuspecting children.
2:38 P.M. We arrived at the hospital and made a self-righteous beeline for the Admissions department, where we were greeted by the receptionist.
RECEPTIONIST: How may I help you, gentlemen?
FRIDAY: We're looking for the Hospice Center.
RECEPTIONIST: Upstairs and to the left. Next?
FRANK: I'm with him!
RECEPTIONIST: All right, keep your shirt on. Jesus.
FRIDAY: 2:39 P.M. With guns drawn, we ran up the stairs and out into an open area full of hospital beds where we stopped to reconnoiter.
FRANK: I give up, Joe? Where exactly is this hospice center? All I see is a bunch of sick children.
FRIDAY: Did you say sick children, Frank?
FRANK: Yes, I did, Joe. Why?
FRIDAY: Then this must actually BE the hospice center.
FRANK: Good catch, Joe. What now?
FRIDAY: Now we just hide ourselves behind this water cooler and wait for a doctor to come along with the goodies.
FRANK: How can they do it, Joe? I mean, the kids are already sick. And now they want to turn them into addicts as well?
FRIDAY: I know, right? But get behind the water cooler so that we can catch them in flagrante delicto.
FRANK: In fragrant what?
FRIDAY: Never mind, Frank, just hide.
2:41 P.M. We waited for what seemed like hours but was actually only three minutes. Finally our patience was rewarded as a doctor walked in carrying a very suspicious looking syringe.
GIRL: Doctor, it hurts.
DOCTOR: Don't worry, sweetie. This will make you feel better.
FRANK: No it most certainly won't. Drop the syringe now!
DOCTOR: Who are you?
FRIDAY: We're your worst nightmare. Now drop the syringe and come away from the little girl.
DOCTOR: But she's in pain.
FRANK: The nerve of this guy, trying to use the little girl's unfortunate medical condition to excuse his own sordid drug pushing.
GIRL: What's happening?
FRIDAY: Everything's fine, honey. This man isn't going to bother you ever again.
2:55 P.M. We arrived back at headquarters with scumbag in tow. Our lab guys verified that the syringe was indeed filled with medical-grade morphine, enough to bring peaceful sleep to dozens of hospice kids, thereby turning them into mindless junkified addicts for life.
FRANK: When will folks learn that drugs are not the answer, Joe?
FRIDAY: Hopefully not before December 31st, 2045, Frank.
FRANK: Why's that, Joe?
FRIDAY: Because that's when I retire from the police force, Frank.
FRANK: Oh.
ANNOUNCER: On November 9th, trial was held in the superior court of Los Angeles county. The scumbag was found guilty of 7 counts of drug possession, drug dealing, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He is currently on death row. In a strange twist, the hospice is reporting an unusually high rate of deaths among their young clientele. Police theorize that the creep was not only injecting kids with drugs, but with contaminated drugs at that.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
COPS AND THE DRUG WAR
It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.
And these are the people that Trump has promised to execute if he is elected.
What are drug dealers doing, after all? Only selling substances that people want and have always had a right to, until racist politicians came along and decided government had the right to ration out pain relief and mystical experience.
LA Police Chief Daryl Gates said drug users should be summarily executed. William Bennett said drug dealers should be beheaded. These are the attitudes that the drug war inculcates. This racist and brutal ideology must be wiped out.
Alcohol is a drug in liquid form. If drug warriors want to punish people who use drugs, they should start punishing themselves.
Sana Collective Group committed to making psychedelic therapy available to all regardless of income.
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. (For proof of that latter charge, check out how the US and UK have criminalized the substances that William James himself told us to study in order to understand reality.) It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions (like the Vedic), Nazifies the English language (referring to folks who emulate drug-loving Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin as "scumbags") and militarizes police forces nationwide (resulting in gestapo SWAT teams breaking into houses of peaceable Americans and shouting "GO GO GO!").
(Speaking of Nazification, L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates thought that drug users should be shot. What a softie! The real hardliners are the William Bennetts of the world who want drug users to be beheaded instead. That will teach them to use time-honored plant medicine of which politicians disapprove! Mary Baker Eddy must be ecstatic in her drug-free heaven, as she looks down and sees this modern inquisition on behalf of the drug-hating principles that she herself maintained. I bet she never dared hope that her religion would become the viciously enforced religion of America, let alone of the entire freakin' world!)
In short, the drug war 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.
PPS Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
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
Bache, Christopher "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven" 2019 Park Street Press
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
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
Whitaker, Robert "Mad in America"2002 Perseus Publishing
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.
