1) Drugs are inherently evil substances that cannot be used responsibly. (Wrong. What we call "drugs" are simply morally neutral plant medicines that, like any substances, can be used for good or ill.)
2) Drugs are always associated with violence and despair. (Wrong. To the extent that this is true, it is true because of the Drug War itself and not the plant medicines that it criminalizes and demonizes.)
3) Drug dealers are evil incarnate. (Wrong. They're entrepreneurs who sell criminalized plant medicines to their fellow human beings, having been incentivized to do so by the Drug War itself.)
In light of these simple truths, we can see that the Drug War is nothing but a make-work program for law enforcement. It is your local police, setting out and literally asking for trouble. How? By wasting their time worrying about what substances you may be ingesting, when they should be focusing (like law enforcement has for the last 2,000 years) on how people are actually behaving.
I posted my comments to this effect at the bottom of the article about the Canadian cop show -- but given the Drug Warrior's aversion to simple truth, I bet that post will be taken down before you can say "Give me a urine sample!"
And so I end this essay, first by calling for the immediate cancellation of all cop shows, not just the Newfoundland series with Allan Hawco - and second by pasting the comments below that HuffPost is surely deleting from their servers even as we speak, lest Americans hear the truth about the folly of their unprecedented war on mother nature's plant medicines:
Like all cop-related shows, Republic of Doyle is full of Drug War propaganda (I call it copaganda). All the drug-war violence they fight is custom-created by Richard Nixon's Drug Wars and the unprecedented outlawing of Mother Nature's plants, which created a vicious black market. Meanwhile, like all cop-related shows, they give the impression that Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines can cause nothing but horror and addiction -- all lies: ask Ben Franklin and Marcus Aurelius -- this in a continent in which 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma antidepressants, many of which are harder to "kick" than heroin. All cop-related shows should be canceled, since 90% of their plots exist because of Nixon's Drug War -- the Drug War that is a make-work program for law enforcement.
Propaganda from Republic of Doyle
Jake speaking to Mayor. QUOTE: Yeah, you indulge in one little vice, what? Next thing you know you got a hooker in your lap and three grams of coke on your plate. It's a classic tale.
COMMENT: Yeah, a classic Drug War propaganda tale, designed to associate the coca plant with all things evil, ignoring the fact that authors like HG Wells, Jules Verne and Henrik Ibsen swore by coca wine, not for partying but for accomplishing a prodigious amount of focused work -- and that the coca plant has been used responsibly for millennia by non-western cultures, including the Incas, for whom the plant was considered divine.
QUOTE: She flipped on you because you are a piece of dog turd. (spoken by an inmate, Logan, who's been asked to help out with a kidnapping investigation. He's speaking to a suspected drug dealer.)
COMMENT: This is how Richard Nixon's Drug War has encouraged law enforcement to talk about suspected drug dealers. Nixon succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in forcing the world to take a jaundiced view of mother nature's plant medicines, to the point where we consider suspected "drug dealers" as non-human. Then we are startled by police murders of blacks -- when the police have been taught to demonize and dehumanize suspects -- and for bigoted officers, they're happy to extend that dehumanization to cases in which "drugs" are not even involved.
Jake's brother Christian, to Malachy, who has a bad back: QUOTE: Oh, you need some painkillers? I know a guy if you're lookin'.
COMMENT: Malachy and Jake respond to this facetious offer with goggle-eyed contempt, which can be loosely translated into English as follows: "What? You would dare infringe upon the holy monopoly of our esteemed medical profession to dispense with pain killers only as they see fit?" The presumption here is that modern medical establishment has all the answers. Really? Modern medicine has addicted 1 in 4 American women to antidepressants that are harder to kick than heroin, which were never intended for long term use, and which dull the senses rather than help the user achieve their goals in life. Yet we are supposed to rely on their absurdly limited pharmacy to treat what ails us, when we have a right to those plant medicines that they criminalized in violation of the natural law upon which America was founded?
EDITOR'S NOTE, March 26, 2022
It's bad, of course, that the Drug War has created the "cop show" genre in American television -- but the real problem is that the Drug War has created the very violence that made that genre possible in the first place. Cops had very little to do in the old days when they didn't spend their time worrying about what substances their citizens were ingesting. They had to content themselves with solving and preventing actual crime, rather than fighting the "pre-crime" of substance use. But America's notorious reform impulse had been building steam throughout the 19th-century as all the do-gooders spent their time deriding liquor (not "drugs") in hysterical pamphlets and sermons. And when the prohibition that they finally fostered failed dramatically (after single-handedly creating the American Mafia, of course), that reform impulse had to find some new seemingly worthy outlet, and so since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, the descendants of the teetotalers have been targeting their reformer indignation at psychoactive plant medicine, meanwhile giving liquor a humongous "mulligan" for all the wrongs for which it had been pilloried throughout the previous prudish century. (Who writes about the DT's these days? But American reform literature was full of terrifying highly specific accounts of the DT's during the 19th century.)
The problem with America's reform impulse is that it is unscientific in the extreme. It never looks at the actual statistical danger of a psychoactive substance, but rather focuses on specific highly atypical cases to demonize a substance. (And of course journalists love this, because their viewers and readers want shocking stories, not calm, rational analysis.) Take Ecstasy, for instance. Statistically speaking, it is the safest psychoactive drug on the planet, but when Ecstasy use was associated with one single raver death (a death that was not caused by Ecstasy but rather by the lack of "safe use" info, which was a direct result of the Drug War itself which discouraged and even outlawed unbiased research), the anti-Ecstasy critics took this one single solitary death as a knock-down argument that Ecstasy must be made illegal, not just in the UK, not just in the US, but everywhere around the world, for now and for all time. And so we saw logically clueless billboards like the following pop up around Great Britain in the 1990s: "Just one Ecstasy tablet killed Leah Betts."
Nonsense. The lack of safe use info killed the 100-pound Leah Betts, who, it turns out, merely needed to remain properly hydrated while dancing in order to avoid her fate.
Until America, Britain (and the rest of the Drug Warrior countries) start dealing with "facts not fear," the whole business of drug legislation is just a gigantic and highly political farce, a farce which has created cartels and street gangs out of whole cloth, in the same way that the war against liquor created the Mafia.
The answer? Facts not fear, education not demonization, and the re-establishment of Natural Law in America, upon which Jefferson founded this country, that hard-earned bulwark against tyrants which tells us, among other things, that government has no right to separate its citizens from the freely-given bounty of Mother Nature.
Author's Follow-up: February 3, 2023
The Clinton Administration broke the law in the late 1990s by colluding with the media to fashion TV show narratives to place "drug use" in a bad light.1
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. 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.
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
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
Miller, Richard Louis "Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle " 2017 Park Street Press
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
Rosenfeld, Harvey "Diary of a Dirty Little War: The Spanish-American War of 1898 " 2000 Praeger
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
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.
just ran across a 2014 article on HuffPost.com reporting that the Canadian cop-related show entitled "Republic of Doyle" had been canceled. Of course, this is old news in 2020, but it reminded me of my whole-hearted belief that almost all cop shows should be canceled -- and not even broadcast as re-runs, except perhaps with frequent disclaimers about their status as Drug War propaganda. Why? Because the whole genre of cop shows helps to propagate Drug War lies like the following: 
