I was quite shocked to see your article entitled "Should Drug Dealers Be Charged with Murder?"
Let'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 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 we see today in downtown areas would be impossible without the war on drugs.
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 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.
America wants to execute people for selling the kinds of medicines that have inspired entire religions. 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 -- 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), racism 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 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!!!
No Drug War Keychains The key to ending the Drug War is to spread the word about the fact that it is Anti-American, unscientific and anti-minority (for starters)
Monticello Betrayed Thomas Jefferson By demonizing plant medicine, the Drug War overthrew the Natural Law upon which Jefferson founded America -- and brazenly confiscated the Founding Father's poppy plants in 1987, in a symbolic coup against Jeffersonian freedoms.
The Drug War Censors Science Scientists: It's time to wake up to the fact that you are censored by the drug war. Drive the point home with these bumper stickers.
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. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.
It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it 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.
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
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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
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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
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Richards, William "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences Hardcover" 2015 Columbia University Press
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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
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.
