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Chomsky's Revenge

how ending the drug war will help reset America's moral compass

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 27, 2022



In chapter 7 of "Who Rules the World?", Noam Chomsky shows how the Magna Carta is being rejected today by Americans thanks to the war on terror.

In 2011, President Obama targeted an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, for assassination, without the pretense of due process, but rather merely based on a "determination" made in the Oval Office. So much for habeas corpus. No wonder the US can't plausibly chastise Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for killing "drug users": if we can kill an American citizen based on White House discussions, why can't Rodrigo kill his own people after a quick strategy huddle in the Malacañang Palace? Chomsky goes on to show how free trade agreements are further eroding the Magna Carta by giving fabulously wealthy corporations the right to sue foreign countries which are attempting to protect their own natural resources. Pacific Rim was a Canadian company but they incorporated in the US in order to acquire "rights" under the Central American Free Trade Agreement-- the right, that is, to sue El Salvador over its attempts to prevent environmental damage to its own countryside. So much for the Magna Carta's "charter of the forest," which insisted that the commons was for the benefit of the public at large, not for private industry.

El Salvador won the lengthy court case in 2017, but during this same time, the Congo was experiencing the bloodiest conflict since World War II, with over 5.4 million killed and raped, a conflict financed by the combatants' sale of mining rights to the western companies that make our cell phones. This is another symptom of the decline of Magna Carta, the very fact that corporations can ignore their moral culpability in the public commons under the theory that they are simply following the dictates of the market, which seems to be a kind of modern-day Nuremberg Defense. The Nazis were just following orders, the corporations are just following market dictates. If corporations are "people" as the 1% would have it, then surely they should be required to have a conscience. If I, as an American freelancer, could somehow double my profits by providing my services to probable rapists and murderers, I would hopefully have the moral backbone to decline that chance for a windfall, rather than simply insisting on my a priori need to follow market dictates. Or is it America's Manifest Destiny to have cell phones, regardless of how many deaths this entails?

Considerations like these cause Chomsky to conclude that: "If the [Magna Carta's] fall from grace continues on this path over the next few years, the future of rights and liberties looks dim."

But there is hope. There is a way to combat this sense that government and corporations can be free to act amorally, as long as they seem to cater to the needs of the moment, or the decade (even if many of those needs are manufactured by Wall Street).

The hope lies in drug use: namely, the strategic use of those godsend medicines that have inspired entire religions: coca, opium 1 , psychedelics, (and perhaps hundreds of other psychoactive medicines which the government has mysteriously declared a priori to have no rational uses whatsoever, not now, not ever, not anywhere). By using drugs that expand our mind's ability to see the world in new ways, we are (to some extent) inoculated against the self-interested lies of Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex. Seen in this light, it is little wonder that the Drug War has such staying power, for the use of mind-expanding drugs can help us see behind the curtain where the pint-sized Wizard is frantically pulling the levers of his propaganda machine.

Even those drug users who lack the background education to see through this mist of lies will at last be able to FEEL that there's something wrong with American policy. What Ecstasy user, glorying in the oneness of the world, is going to "sign off" on state-ordered assassinations or the acquisition of high-tech minerals from mines controlled by mass rapists and mass murderers?

We are at a turning point now in America: on the one hand, you have states like Oregon, which have decriminalized all drugs -- on the other hand, you have the Trumps of the world, who can't wait for the next election so that they can start executing "drug dealers."

Talk about a house divided against itself.

America is both Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to the politically created boogieman called "drugs."

Assuming that Jekyll wins, however, there is hope that the advised use of entheogens and empathogens will reset America's moral compass, which has gone haywire in proportion as Americans have renounced their belief in the moral touchstone that they once referred to as God. Indeed, the regular use by the American people of substances that "bring us all together" cannot help but conduce to a moral rebirth, one in which we feel compelled to reaffirm the hard-earned rights of the individual that are being so glibly usurped today by both government and big business.





You shot, you scored, dude. I would just add that, when Brian refers to ending the Drug War, he is referring to the legalization (or rather re-legalization 2 ) of all psychoactive substances, since it's been so palpably proven over the last 100+ years that the criminalization of the same leads to inner-city deaths, civil wars overseas, the sale of super-addictive drugs, the pharmacological ignorance of the user, the creation of heavily armed cartels and gangs, etc, while giving America cover to intervene in South America at will, not to save it from drugs, of course, but to save it from any social system that does not countenance unbridled capitalism 3 .

Say what you will about the motives for the Drug War (which were clearly both consciously and unconsciously racist), but that war has done far worse than fail. It is not even a Pyrrhic victory, but rather a Pyrrhic failure. It was a war that caused all of the problems that it purported to solve, and then some.

The Links Police



That's it, pull over to the side of the Web page. No, put your driver's license back in your wallet. I just stopped you to remind you that Brian is not a Chomsky head. Brian's only now rummaging through the octogenarian pundit's musings and he (Brian) will let you know when he finds something that doesn't comport with reason. That said, let's remember why Brian "went there" in the first place, why he started reading Chomsky after a lifetime of assuming that the guy was beyond the pale. He did so because the Drug War has convinced him that the entire world can be profoundly wrong on major issues -- and if the mainstream American view is so deeply flawed when it comes to "drugs," Brian had to ask himself, "what other seemingly common sense views in America do not actually stand up to rigorous philosophical analysis?"

Oh, and your left rear tail light is out as well.
















Notes for essay entitled Chomsky's Revenge: how ending the drug war will help reset America's moral compass:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
2: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
3: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Big Pharma drugs have wrought disaster when used in psychotherapy, but it does not follow that the depressed should become Christian Scientists. The use of outlawed drugs can obviate the need for shock therapy.

Did the Vedic People have a substance disorder because they wanted to drink enough soma to see religious realities?

Imagine a world in which we were told about both the potential benefits AND the potential harms of drugs like cocaine and opium.

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.

Heroin versus Antidepressants https://abolishthedea.com/heroin_versus_antidepressants.php

Besides, why should I listen to the views of a microbe?

When we place the FDA in charge of deciding whether a psychoactive drug should be re-legalized or not, we are asking them to decide on things like the relative importance of appreciating a sunset, a task for which the FDA has no expertise whatsoever.

Some fat cat should treat the entire Supreme Court to a vacation at San Jose del Pacifico in Mexico, where they can partake of the magic mushroom in a ceremony led by a Zapotec guide.

Getting off some drugs could actually be fun and instructive, by using a variety of other drugs to keep one's mind off the withdrawal process. But America believes that getting off a drug should be a big moral battle.

Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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