Today's Saturday, guys. I had planned to take a vacation from the whole topic of drugs. Unfortunately, I just took a quick peek at Twitter and saw Canadian columnist Cory Morgan spreading the same old Drug War propaganda that has militarized police forces around the world, turning American inner cities into no-go zones, and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America.
I've vowed not to spend time on this today, but Cory's harangue plucked my single solitary last and final nerve. So I'll just post my response to Cory here (which I sent to him via his email account at Western Standard). The offending Tweet, by the way, was his attempt to blame "meth" for the sins of the world, rather than the fearmongering and corrupt supply that leads to its misuse. That's typical "Drug Warrior" strategy for you, folks: blame the drug, but never the social policies that lead to its misuse.
With all due respect Cory, you are like all Drug Warriors: you judge drugs based on their worst possible use. This is anti-scientific. It makes such drugs unavailable for any use at any dose for any reason ever. And please stop confusing the issue: there IS such a thing as safe supply. To claim otherwise is at best to misuse words and at worst to lie. The dangers of meth are caused by prohibitionists who insist that we teach fear rather than safe use. Those who are "thin as a rail" need medical help and education: not a multi-billion-dollar military campaign that turns inner cities into shooting galleries and destroys the rule of law in Mexico and knocks down the doors of American grandmothers with stormtroopers shouting GO GO GO on a highly choreographed scene for the six o'clock news.
It is fearmonger attitudes like yours that have forced me to go a lifetime without godsend medicines, shunting me off onto dependence-causing Big Pharma drugs that turn me into an eternal patient.
Please stop the anti-scientific practice of judging drugs based on their worst possible use. That practice has stopped us from finding treatments for Alzheimer's and autism by outlawing drugs that grow new neurons in the brain. It has turned America into an anti-scientific country and censored scientists.
Here's more I might have added:
Thanks, Cory, for that one-hour-long grilling I got when I entered Canada as a 30-year-old male 30 years ago. I was a drug suspect because folks like you were blaming every problem in the world on drugs. That Nazi grilling put me off Canada for years. I'd like to see Cory grilled for alcohol use and see how he comes thru it. I'd like to show him some drunkards in an alley going through DTs and blame their problems on alcohol proponents like Cory. For every one speed user who's "thin as a rail," I'll show him 20 graves of alcoholics.
Fortunately, for Cory, I am not like him. I do not judge substances based on their worst imaginable use. I know that that is anti-scientific. What's more I want to help alcoholics, not send them to jail. Nor do I wish to stop everyone in the world from using alcohol because Americans tend to misuse that drug.
Cory's attitude is extremely hypocritical. Prohibition causes all of the problems that folks like Cory love to blame on the political boogieman they call "drugs."
July 15, 2023 To our younger readers, bless them, the title of this essay is an allusion to the Guess Who hit of 1970 entitled "American Woman."
Author's Follow-up: January 4, 2025
Had I written this today, I trust I would have been more diplomatic. I don't think Cory was purposefully being wrong-headed. Like all of us westerners, she lives, breathes and eats Drug War ideology. Had the world chosen to demonize skateboarding in the same way -- by censoring all stories of "safe use," by threatening to execute skateboard dealers, and by throwing skateboard users in jail for 20 years at a time -- I think Cory would have been throwing down just as single-mindedly on the evils of skateboards.
The Drug War is all about fearmongering, after all. Shooting guns is considered safe, driving cars is considered safe, climbing a cliff face without climbing gear is considered safe: Only when it comes to "drugs" are we taught that safety is simply impossible.
It's a load of nonsense, of course, but it helps fascist politicians win elections. How? By incentivizing vastly lucrative drug dealing among the poor and thereby ultimately throwing millions of minorities in jail. That's what the Drug War is all about: eroding democracy by facilitating the election of tyrants.
Author's Follow-up: January 8, 2025
About 30 years ago, I flew on my own from Virginia to Montreal, where I was to join my sister and brother-in-law for a vacation in Quebec. Upon landing, I was singled out by customs for no stated reason and led to an office, where I was asked to sit down and wait. And wait I did... for almost an hour, before a grim-looking policewoman finally sat down across a desk from me and pawed listlessly through my French books, saying little or nothing. I thought to myself: "Either it's a crime for an American to bone up on their French language skills in Montreal or she thinks that I am carrying rotten, evil, dirty, hateful DRUGS!"
No other passengers were harassed -- but then they were almost all Canadian, and those who were not, were traveling in groups of two or more.
After another ten minutes or so of silence, they finally signaled that I could leave. I can only suppose in retrospect that they were waiting for me to "crack" and admit to being a drug courier.
This incident left a sour taste in my mouth about Canada that lasts to this day. I found it humiliating and a slap in the face. Here I was, enthusiastically attempting to speak the lingo, and the customs agents destroyed all my amicable feelings toward their province in one afternoon. When I conjure the event in hindsight, I picture the customs police as Nazi officers with German accents. Not that they talked much in any language, of course. They were apparently just hoping that I would get nervous and thereby betray my supposed guilt. Then they would surely pounce, lean over the table, get all up in my face, and ask:
"Vie did you really come to Montreal?! Vie? Vie? Vie?"
As a white American, this episode also gave me at least some idea of what it must be like to be driving while black: you are already considered a suspect in a crime merely for being who you are.
These are all downsides of the Drug War that are never acknowledged, mainly because we fail to associate them with the Drug War. People groan about "profiling," but why is profiling even a "thing"? There would be little or no profiling of blacks if the Drug War did not exist.
This is the whole problem: the Drug War will never end until we hold it responsible for the evil that it causes. Instead, the press calls inner-city violence inexplicable and writes about 60,000 disappeared in Mexico without even mentioning the causative Drug War in both cases. It is the Drug War that gave police carte blanche to harass blacks, but the media misdirects our indignation on that score by referring such harassment to "profiling." Voila. Magic-like, the drug-war is made to disappear.
Fearmongering
The drug war is the ultimate case of fearmongering. And yet academics and historians fail to recognize it as such. They will protest eloquently against the outrages of the witch hunts of yore, but they are blind to the witch hunts of the present. What is a drug dealer but a modern service magician, someone who sells psychoactive medicine designed to effect personal ends for the user? They are simply providing an alternative to materialistic medicine, which ignores common sense and so ignores the glaringly obvious value of such substances.
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.
By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.
If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"
We've all been taught since grade school that human beings cannot use psychoactive medicines wisely. That is just a big fat lie. It's criminal to keep substances illegal that can awaken the mind and remind us of our full potential in life.
Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
The Drug War is based on a huge number of misconceptions and prejudices. Obviously it's about power and racism too. It's all of the above. But every time I don't mention one specifically, someone makes out that I'm a moron. Gotta love Twitter.
There are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
Rick Strassman reportedly stopped his DMT trials because some folks had bad experiences at high doses. That is like giving up on aspirin because high doses of NSAIDs can kill.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away: an open letter to Cory Morgan, columnist for the Western Standard, published on July 15, 2023 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)