he DEA has blocked soldiers receiving MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder, in defiance of their own judge's recommendation that the therapy move forward. That judge said the therapy could go forward in 1985 -- but the DEA shut it down, based partly on bogus scientific reports written to curry favor with Drug Warriors.
In doing this, the DEA is responsible for 30 years' (and counting) worth of unnecessary suffering for American soldiers.
They have blocked depressives and alcoholics from receiving godsend medications for four decades and counting.
In doing this, the DEA is responsible for 45 years' (and counting) worth of unnecessary suffering for alcoholics and the depressed.
They have blocked study of ayahuasca, even though it has been shown to grow new neurons in the brain. Pity the DEA fools who reach retirement age and start to unnecessarily suffer from Alzheimer's because they blocked this godsend plant from even being studied.
The question is no longer if the DEA is acting rightly. The answer is clear: the DEA is a despotic, violence-causing anti-democratic force determined to keep their jobs at the expense of the health and happiness of the American people. Just as alcohol prohibition single-handedly created the Mafia, substance prohibition has resulted in the creation of inner-city shooting galleries.
Abolishing the DEA is just the first step: Its officers need to be tried for crimes against humanity, to be hauled before a court to answer for their lies about mother nature's medicines, their self-dealing, their withholding of godsend therapies from the depressed, alcoholics and America's soldiers.
These are not simple crimes: they are crimes against humanity, from an anti-scientific anti-minority agency with a blatant conflict of interest in "scheduling" substances, since their very jobs depend on substances being illegal.
{^When the DEA rates substances like psilocybin and MDMA as "schedule one," they are protecting their own jobs, not the American people. The overwhelming scientific evidence is that both medicines can be therapeutic godsends. But the DEA rating system is not about science, it's about preserving DEA jobs and the oppressive reign of the DEA itself.}{
Yes, abolish the DEA... but then place its officers on trial for knowingly withholding godsend medications from the American people.
{^Join the DEA today, start busting heads tomorrow. Help needed to keep godsend medications out of the hands of soldiers suffering from PTSD. Ideal candidate will be heartless and have a contempt for Mother Nature's pharmacy. Experience breaking down doors a plus. Jackboots will be provided.}{
Author's Follow-up: September 29, 2022
The DEA are the thought police, enforcing Christian Science sharia, and the Drug War is a make-work program for law enforcement. Paul Stamets stuttered as a kid and couldn't look girls in the face. As a teen, he ate some psilocybin mushrooms and overcame his stuttering during the "trip," because the shroom helped him look at himself objectively, from outside of his own ego, and he was able to tell himself firmly and successfully that "I will stutter no more," and he did not. What's more he was able to stare women in the face from then on. Think of it: he overcame his stuttering in one day -- and yet Americans who want help with 'mental health' are shunted off to expense psychiatrists who make them chemically dependent for life on ineffective Big Pharma meds -- meds that, believe me, have never stopped someone from stuttering in one insightful afternoon.
I mention this story to underscore the vicious idiocy of the DEA trying to stop us from using plant medicines.
Nor is this story unique. Read the work of Stan Grof, James Fadimore, Amanda Feilding, Charles Grob, and others. And what about the coca leaf? Folks, America could defeat depression overnight merely by legalizing (or rather re-legalizing) the coca leaf. Read the work of W. Golden Mortimer, PhD on this topic. But the Drug Warrior demonizes drugs, so we conflate the coca leaf with cocaine, even though they are two very different drugs.
I mention this to underscore the vicious idiocy of the DEA.
The Vedic-Hindu religion was inspired by psychedelics. The Mayans considered 'magic mushrooms' to be divine. The Inca of Peru believed there was divinity in the coca plant.
I mention this to underscore the vicious idiocy of the DEA, an agency that is seeking to ruin our lives if we dare use plant medicines that have inspired entire religions!
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
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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.
he DEA has blocked soldiers receiving MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder, in defiance of their own judge's recommendation that the therapy move forward. That judge said the therapy could go forward in 1985 -- but the DEA shut it down, based partly on bogus scientific reports written to curry favor with Drug Warriors.
The DEA are the thought police, enforcing Christian Science sharia, and the Drug War is a make-work program for law enforcement. Paul Stamets stuttered as a kid and couldn't look girls in the face. As a teen, he ate some psilocybin mushrooms and overcame his stuttering during the "trip," because the shroom helped him look at himself objectively, from outside of his own ego, and he was able to tell himself firmly and successfully that "I will stutter no more," and he did not. What's more he was able to stare women in the face from then on. Think of it: he overcame his stuttering in one day -- and yet Americans who want help with 'mental health' are shunted off to expense psychiatrists who make them chemically dependent for life on ineffective Big Pharma meds -- meds that, believe me, have never stopped someone from stuttering in one insightful afternoon.
