the only comedian whose stand-up routine is listed as Schedule One by the DEA
MCEE: Introducing the man who has passed more drugs tests than any other comedian on the planet.
ADDERALL: On Planet Mars, that is.
[laughter]
EMCEE: Let's hear it for Adderall Zoloft.
ADDERALL: Hey, use me only as directed, folks.
[applause]
ADDERALL: Here's a little riddle to warm you guys up. What do you get when you cross banisteriopsis caapi with psychotria viridis?
PAXIL: I don't know. What do you get when you cross banisteriopsis caapi with psychotria viridis?
ADDERALL: Ten to twenty years in the state penitentiary.
[drum]
[laughter]
No, seriously. You actually get ayahuasca if you're lucky.
PAXIL: Ayahuasca?
ADDERALL: That's right. Ayahuasca. Speaking of which, did you know that there's actually a church in America that has won the legal right to use ayahuasca in its religious rituals?
[applause]
I kid you not. Needless to say, the DEA fought that one all the way to the Supreme Court.
PAXIL: That figures.
ADDERALL: I'm happy to report however that they lost that final case, 9 to freakin' zero.
[applause]
PICTURE1
I don't like to gloat, but when I heard that outcome, I was like, "In your face, with a can of mace!"
[laughter]
PAXIL: I know what you mean, Adderall.
ADDERALL: Really?
PAXIL: Yeah. I myself was like, "Up your nose with a garden hose!"
[laughter]
ADDERALL: Paxil Busspar, ladies and gentlemen, my loyal sidekick. How are you tonight, Paxil?
[applause]
PAXIL: I'm doing great, Adderall.
ADDERALL: Oh, really?
PAXIL: Yes, I just passed my drug test to work at Taco Bell.
[laughter]
ADDERALL: Your parents must be so proud of you.
PAXIL: I know, right?
ADDERALL: But I'm a little puzzled.
PAXIL: Oh, really? How so?
ADDERALL: I thought you agreed with me that drug testing was so much Christian Science bull [bleep].
PAXIL: Yes, I usually do, but this drug test was actually fair for a change.
ADDERALL: The drug test was fair? What do you mean?
PAXIL: Well, after the test was over, the lab guys actually congratulated me for the drug that I had in my system. They said I had chosen well.
ADDERALL: That's interesting. And what drug did you have in your system, Paxil?
PAXIL: I can't tell you and give away the answer.
[drum]
[laughter]
ADDERALL: Fair point.
PAXIL: Suffice it to say that it was a so called entheogen, and it helped sharpen my thinking and made me more friendly and compassionate. The lab guys actually said that it would help make me a valuable addition to the Taco Bell work force.
[laughter]
ADDERALL: Aha. I bet it was a mushroom from the genus psilocybe.
PAXIL: Tut tut Adderall. Nice try, but I'm not going to give away the answer, since you haven't taken this particular drug test yet.
ADDERALL: Fair enough, Paxil. Fair enough. I'm actually waiting for someone to create a church around the ritual use of psilocybin.
[applause]
PAXIL: Good for you.
ADDERALL: Say, Paxil, is it legal to murder a ghost?
PAXIL: I don't know. There's precious little case law in that area. Why do you ask?
ADDERALL: I was thinking of summoning the ghost of Francis Burton Harrison via Ouija Board and then beating the crap out of him, for outlawing opium in 1914.
PAXIL: I'm afraid that would never work, Adderall.
ADDERALL: Why not, Paxil?
PAXIL: Because Francis's ghost would realize that the seance was a set-up job, and so he would never appear.
[laughter]
ADDERALL: Well, I'm still mighty sore at that bonehead.
PAXIL: Me too, Adderall.
ADDERALL: That man up-ended American democracy with his so-called Narcotics Act which, for the first time in American history, criminalized a freakin' plant.
[boo]
PAXIL: Now, Adderall, watch your blood pressure.
ADDERALL: I know, Paxil, but the man succeeded single-handedly in replacing the natural law on which America was founded with common law, criminalizing plants, which are the birth right of anyone who is born on planet earth.
[applaud]
PAXIL: Well, I'm sure he meant well, Paxil.
ADDERALL: Meant well? The man is responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths.
PAXIL: Remember your blood pressure.
ADDERALL: And he single-handedly created a violent movie genre in which sanctimonious Americans go south to intervene in supposedly sovereign countries in order to shoot Latinos.
[gasp]
[boo]
And why? Because they're selling plant-based medicines that have been used responsibly for millennia by non-western cultures.
PAXIL: We've talked about this, Adderall. Your audiences don't like it when you get on your high horse.
ADDERALL: It's just pops my buttons, that's all.
PAXIL: I know.
ADDERALL: I mean, stop the god [bleep] war on mother nature's [bleep] plants already.
PAXIL: It sounds like somebody didn't get a nap this afternoon.
[baby cries]
[laughter]
ADDERALL: Sorry about that, Paxil. Now then, where were we?
PAXIL: I think we were just getting to the part where everything that we say is hilarious and elicits hearty guffaws from the audience.
ADDERALL: You hear that, audience? Watch for your cue now.
[laughter]
PAXIL: I know, why don't you tell a joke?
ADDERALL: Good idea. Okay, let's see. What do you get when you cross an anti-Chinese electorate with WASP Americans who have a jaundiced view of mother nature's plants and fungi?
PAXIL: I don't know. What do you get when you cross an anti-Chinese electorate with WASP Americans who have a jaundiced view of mother nature's plants and fungi?
ADDERALL: You get the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, that's what you get.
[drum]
[laughter]
PAXIL: Oh, there you go again!
[drum]
[laughter]
EMCEE: Let's hear it for the only comedian whose stand-up routine is listed as schedule one by the DEA.
ADDERALL: That's right folks. They can't even study me in laboratories without an act of Congress.
EMCEE: Adderall Zoloft!
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
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.
MCEE: Introducing the man who has passed more drugs tests than any other comedian on the planet.
