how ending the drug war will help reset America's moral compass
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
July 27, 2022
n 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, 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) 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.
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?"
Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.
Getting off antidepressants can make things worse for only one reason: because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help with the transition. Right now, getting off any drug basically means becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist. No wonder withdrawal is hard.
The drug war follows me wherever I go. I was just researching "fun facts" about dogs, and http://petpedia.co told me that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as... searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands? Prohibitionists, j'accuse!
Alcohol is a drug in liquid form. If drug warriors want to punish people who use drugs, they should start punishing themselves.
This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.
The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.
Health is not a quality, it's a balance. To decide legality based on 'health' grounds thus opens a Pandora's box of different points of view.
Democratic societies need to outlaw prohibition for many reasons, the first being the fact that prohibition removes millions of minorities from the voting rolls, thereby handing elections to fascists and insurrectionists.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
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, Chomsky's Revenge: how ending the drug war will help reset America's moral compass, published on July 27, 2022 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)
n 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. 
You have been reading an article entitled, Chomsky's Revenge: how ending the drug war will help reset America's moral compass, published on July 27, 2022 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)