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Connecticut Drug Warriors want to charge drug dealers with murder

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 27, 2022



2025 update



in response to Should Drug Dealers be Charged with Murder? Connecticut Ponders, Associated Press article by Dave Collins, published February 25, 2019 in the Hartford Courant

Hey, Dave.

I was quite shocked to see your article entitled "Should Drug Dealers Be Charged with Murder?"


Front cover of book: Mark Twain: A Connecticut Drug Warrior in King Arthur's Court, medieval figures on horse, in background, sign on wall reads: Ye Olde DEALet's rephrase the headline in equivalent language in order to illustrate my concerns:

"Should Plant Dealers be Charged with Murder?"

"Should a Person Be Charged with Murder for selling plant medicine of which politicians disapprove?"

The Problem is Prohibition, not Fentanyl

The whole idea of executing drug dealers only arises because of America's policy of Demonizing and Criminalizing Psychoactive Plant Medicine. This is what incentivizes drug dealing, which is hugely profitable thanks to prohibition.

If we're going to charge anyone with murder, it should be the Drug Warriors whose policies, even as we speak, are causing civil wars in South America, drive-by shootings in inner cities, and empowering a self-proclaimed DRUG WAR HITLER in the Philippines. Yes, charge the Drug Warriors, whose laws create the drug dealers out of whole cloth, incentivizing them to sell the most addictive drugs possible without regard for substance quality.

Then we should charge the DEA with lying about plant medicine for the last 50 years and with poisoning Americans with Paraquat, a weed killer that causes Parkinson's disease -- and with criminalizing one of the safest drugs known to man, MDMA, against the recommendations of their own counsel, thereby forcing American soldiers to go without godsend treatment for PTSD for the last 40 years. The Prohibitionists are responsible for 797 deaths in Chicago alone last year, for as Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014, the kind of gun-related deaths 1 we see today in downtown areas would be impossible without the War on Drugs2.

The fact that we ask such questions as yours in modern-day America shows how far the Drug War has led us in the direction of fascism. Witness all the movies 3 4 in which the DEA agents are heroes for shooting unarmed drug suspects at point-blank range ("Running with the Devil") and considering SWAT raids to be a success even when they kill black teenager "scumbags" (Jason Chase's "The Runner").

Please avoid headlines that would encourage folks like Trump to start killing people for selling plant medicine of which politicians disapprove.

Thomas Jefferson used to be a dealer, too, you know, selling poppies to "scumbags" like Benjamin Franklin, right?

The real scumbags were the Drug Warriors, who told the entire world that we had to adopt the jaundiced Christian Science attitude toward a boogieman called "drugs," rather than learning how to use naturally occurring substances as safely as possible -- through education, not fear and criminalization.

Still believe in the Drug War approach?

Then how about we charge the liquor industry with murder for killing 100,000 Americans a year?

How about we remove those who drink from the workforce through drug testing?

Drug warriors say no to that. Why? Because the Drug War is meant to crack down on those other guys, not on the Drug Warriors themselves.


Oh, bless me, if there isn't another article by Brian on the self-same topic:
See also President Calls for Executing Drug Dealers

Author's Follow-up: September 21, 2022



America wants to execute people for selling the kinds of medicines that have inspired entire religions.
(abolishthedea.com) America wants to dominate South America by outlawing the coca leaf that the Peruvian Indians have used long before the Spanish arrived to enslave them (the health-giving coca leaf that is demonized today based not on its effects, but rather on the fact that it contains an alkaloid called cocaine 5 6 -- which is kind of like demonizing peaches because they contain prussic acid). Americans are willful idiots when it comes to drug policy who have swallowed Drug War propaganda hook, line and sinker. So instead of educating the public, they've been taught to divide it by creating scapegoats for our anti-scientific views of medicine. There are many professors today in academia who actually agree with the anti-scientific notion that there are such things as "drugs": namely, substances for which there is no good use: not now, not ever, not anywhere. But the fact is that there are no such substances on the planet. Even deadly Botox has wise, rational uses.

The Drug War, in short, represents all that is wrong with America, including wilful stupidity on the part of a censored Academia (an Academia that doesn't even recognize or care that it's censored), racism7 and the enforcement of Christian Science as America's -- and now the world's -- official religion, at least when it comes to psychoactive medicine.



Author's Follow-up: October 11, 2022



Why doesn't Connecticut 'get real' and charge Phillips Morris International with murder or their American spinoff called Atria? That's revenge for their killing half a million Americans a year. Why don't they hang the Big Pharma 8 9 execs who turned American women into Stepford Wives by addicting 1 in 4 to their tranquilizing "meds." Why don't they hold Anheuser Busch to account for killing 90,000 a year?

Or better yet, why don't they wake up and start educating their residents about all psychoactive substances without regard for the hypocritical Chicken Little squawking of Drug Warriors? Why don't they end the substance prohibition which incentivizes bad actors to sell bad drugs in the first place?

Why? Because residents of The Nutmeg State have swallowed the Drug Warrior lie that we are to fear and demonize psychoactive substances rather than to understand them.

I wonder how many Nutmeggers realize that nutmeg itself is a psychoactive drug at the right doses. Perhaps they'll want to boycott Indonesia and change their state nickname. That may sound rash, but then the Drug War is all about hysteria, not rational thought. Maybe execute the head of McCormick Brands as a warning to all evil-bad-horrible drug pushers.

The '50s had its communists, the 2020s have their drug dealers. The more things change...

Boycott Connecticut: whose nickname is Nutmeg, a psychoactive drug!!!



Author's Follow-up: February 20, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




Connecticut ponders?! Connecticut ponders?!



I can see Connecticuters now, with their thumbs up their... gazing upward in stalwart reflection, their right index finger on their chin (or at least one of their chins):

"Gee, should we execute people for selling the kind of plant medicine that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson loved and which inspired the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius himself? Should we execute people for selling the plant medicine that grows at our very feet and which has inspired entire religions around the world?"

"What a poser!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"


No, no, no: I refuse to think that Connecticuters are so bone-idle stupid!!! Maybe their racist demagogue politicians ponder in this way, but any sane resident of the Nutmeg State knows that the Drug War is racist and unscientific to the core. Imagine a world view that tells us that a drug that can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person at one dose and for one reason, must not be used by anyone, anywhere, at any dose, for any reason, ever. It is a veto on human progress and the outlawing of the religious impulse and of new ways of being in the world10. It is, moreover, a policy custom-made to destroy democratic freedoms, a task at which it has been all too successful in the last 50 years. Witness the destruction of the 4th amendment and the repeated refusal of courts to recognize religions that use psychoactive sacraments, this despite the fact that the Hindu religion was inspired by the psychedelic Soma, that the worshipers of Ceres partook of opium 11 in religious ceremonies, and that the Incas of Peru consider coca to be a divine plant.


--------------------------


I apologize to Big Liquor, by the way. Alcohol is not responsible for 90,000 or 100,000 deaths a year in America as I noted above. It is actually responsible for 178,000 deaths as per the CDC12.

I cite such statistics, however, simply to point out the hateful irony behind America's attempts to demonize drugs like MDMA, which has, properly speaking, killed nobody at all and whose biggest offense is the fact that they brought unprecedented peace, love and understanding to the dance floors of Britain. The handful of deaths that the media has associated with the drug were all due to the Drug War, which discourages education about safe use, meanwhile refusing to regulate supply as to dose and quality13.

I do not really hold Big Liquor responsible for deaths. My point is that Drug Warriors are logically obliged to do so, or else to confess that the Drug War is all about enforcing western prejudices when it comes to the propriety of specific psychoactive substances. This is an imperialist viewpoint that casts judgment a priori on the psychoactive medicines of the rest of the world. America behaves like a country in which a beloved race car has a design flaw which has been found to cause occasional terrible accidents. The country responds to this flaw by outlawing every race car in the world EXCEPT the one car most associated with that flaw.

Irony of ironies, that the indignant 19th-century hatred of liquor should ultimately result in the outlawing of virtually every mind-affecting substance on the planet EXCEPT for liquor. Basically, America appeased the Carrie Nations of the world by handing them the mother of all consolation prizes. "Nah, ya can't outlaw our liquor, Carrie, but cheer up: we'll let you outlaw every single one of liquor's competitors! Our only condition is that you stop ceaselessly harping about the evils of booze!14"

The dealers aren't the problem: it is those who incentivized drug dealing by passing tyrannical laws, thereby turning inner-cities into shooting galleries and causing civil wars overseas. If we must execute anyone, let's start with the Drug Warriors themselves.



Author's Follow-up: February 21, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




I can empathize with the Connecticut Drug Warriors. I almost died five years ago after eating some Chinese food on which I had sprinkled too many chili flakes. I went into anaphylactic shock and had to be rushed to the hospital. I saw my entire drug-free life flash before me: the Dare rallies, the urine testing 15 , the long lines at the Mexican border as jackbooted custom agents sought to determine if I was in possession of substances of which racist politicians disapprove. It was all there!

Ever since that incident, I have been trying to track down the scumbags who sold me that ridiculously dangerous condiment in the first place. Of course, I started by going to the Food Lion where I had purchased the killer flakes, and would you believe it? They were still peddling that junk, right there, as plain as day in the condiment aisle. Who knew that the scumbags in question were so brazen and callous, and me there, as it were, just returned from the grave!

Naturally, I'm "on the circuit" now, going from grade school to grade school to tell my story and to warn kids about the death-dealing condiment market. Meanwhile, I'm working with legislators to craft legislation that will throw the scumbags in jail who peddle this crap, knowing full well that it is subject to misuse and abuse. The fact is, I had been abusing chili powder for years before I almost bit the big one. I guess it was peer pressure that made me constantly up the ante. First I would add just a smidgen to my Chinese dishes, then a pinch, later a dash. Before you knew it, I had removed the cap from the condiment bottle and was adding the chili flakes wholesale, and all because I didn't want my friends to think that I was a dweeb. I wanted to show them that I could handle chili pepper!

What I did not realize then was that NOBODY can handle chili pepper. My life story is testament to that fact. I had to almost die for that truth to sink in. I think God gave me a second chance for a reason, though. He wanted me to tell my cautionary tale to young people everywhere. He wanted me to warn them about the evils of such condiments and to draw attention to the scumbags that are still peddling them to this very day, when they know full well that such junk is subject to abuse.

Of course, lectures alone will not be enough. It may take as much as a decade worth of SWAT raids and extrajudicial detainments to wipe out the market for such killer condiments entirely, but those years will be well spent if the crackdown saves so much as one young person from the hell that I went through.

Meanwhile, I ask kids the same question everywhere I go. "You think chili flakes are cool, kids? There's nothing cool about being in a hospital suffering from anaphylactic shock!"

Ooh, I've got to say folks, I am catching a bit of a buzz. Ooh, criminy! I never realized how thrilling it was to be an indignant fearmonger. No WONDER the Drug War is so popular!









Notes for essay entitled Connecticut Drug Warriors want to charge drug dealers with murder:

1: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
2: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
3: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
4: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
5: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
6: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
7: US Sentencing Commission: Over 65% of Federal Prisoners are Black or Hispanic Defender Services Office Training Division (up)
8: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
9: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
10: “Being-In-The-World.” n.d. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262540568/being-in-the-world/. (up)
11: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
12: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
13: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
14: Blast-off for Planet Hypocrisy! DWP (up)
15: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.

If Americans cannot handle the truth about drugs, then there is something wrong with Americans, not with drugs.

Americans love to hate heroin. But there is no rational reason why folks should not use heroin daily in a world in which we consider it their medical duty to use antidepressants daily.

Drug Prohibition Downside #1,529: aviation accidents caused by pilots who failed to use mind-sharpening drugs to improve their situational awareness. (See, for instance, Comair flight 5191)

ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."

Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.

Amphetamines are "meds" when they help kids think more clearly but they are "drugs" when they help adults think more clearly. That shows you just how bewildered Americans are when it comes to drugs.

The Shipiba have learned to heal human beings physically, psychologically and spiritually with what they call "onanyati," plant allies and guides, such as Bobinsana, which "envelops seekers in a cocoon of love." You know: what the DEA would call "junk."

I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.

That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.


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






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