in response to a black DEA agent's complaints about agency bias
The Black community may be "woke" about the evils of racism, but they are fast asleep when it comes to the evils of the Drug War
Why are black agents in the DEA in the first place? The DEA was founded by a racist politician in the early '70s, at which time it popularized the notion of treating drug suspects like dirt. Suddenly suspects were openly referred to by the police as "scumbags," as any fans of old-school cop shows can attest. And why? Because they were simply selling the natural plants that politicians had criminalized in order to punish members of their political opposition. In fact the entire Drug War began as a racist attempt to punish the Chinese, with whom American bigots associated the use of opium.
Although George Floyd was not detained for a drug violation, his assailants actually joked about the Drug War during the murder, taunting the onlookers with the hackneyed phrase: "Just say no to drugs." In other words, the officers were taking full advantage of the Drug Warrior tendency to dehumanize and mock minorities, even in cases that had nothing to do with illegal substances. The officers knew that, from their own point of view, the Drug War was nothing but a good excuse to beat up on non-whites, especially those who did not reverence and fear the police in the way that a slave feared a harsh task master in slavery days.
The solution to this systemic disregard for human life is not to abolish the police, we need to abolish the DEA and everything that it stands for: like bullying and incarcerating minorities, blocking drug research, lying about psychoactive plants, and outlawing mother nature's medicines that are the birth right of all human beings. We should then hold the DEA responsible for past outrages as well. How many Americans know that DEA Chief John C Lawn poisoned Americans in the 1980s by spraying marijuana plants with Paraquat, a weed killer that has since been found to cause Parkinson's Disease? If we're in a war on drugs, then Lawn is a war criminal -- one who used chemical weapons on his own people. Yet he's still feted today by that corrupt agency.
It's a mystery to me, therefore, why blacks - or freedom-loving members of any other racial group - would want to work for this thoroughly corrupt agency, one that is responsible for turning inner cities into shooting galleries, thanks to the violence that naturally arises when one criminalizes mother nature's plant medicine.
For the Drug War is merely Christian Science Sharia, a religious war against those who dare attempt to heal or improve themselves, psychologically speaking, with the help of mother nature's medicines. It is thus doubly unconstitutional, first because it represents the de facto establishment of a religion, and second because it was a violation of natural law to criminalize mother nature's bounty in the first place, since John Locke himself declared that the citizen of a free republic has "the right to the use of the land and all that lies therein." There's no doubt therefore that the garden-loving Thomas Jefferson flipped in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello in jackboots in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants.
Meanwhile millions go without psychoactive godsends because the DEA blatantly LIES about mother nature's plants. saying (in the teeth of reams of evidence to the contrary) that they have no potential therapeutic uses whatsoever. Blatant lies -- that no one in Congress has yet had the guts to "call them" on. Of course, the Drug War does have its fans, however: starting with Russian President Putin, whose own drug czar is a former dealer who is currently in charge of making sure that drug dealers in Russia keep paying off the right people in order to keep the government looking the other way. Donald Trump himself is now eager to use the Drug War as an excuse to murder minorities - for the "dastardly" crime of selling plant medicine, that is - plant medicine that the government had no right to outlaw in the first place.
All this while America is the MOST ADDICTED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD -- not because of opium, not because of cocaine, not because of psychedelics -- but because of Big Pharma antidepressants. ONE IN FOUR AMERICAN WOMEN are addicted to SSRIs, some of which are harder to quit than heroin because they screw around with the brain chemistry that they falsely purport to "fix."
Why this addiction? Because the DEA lies about all psychoactive plant medicines and makes it almost impossible to study them, let alone to use them - forcing the suffering to rely instead on a handful of highly addictive and expensive pharmaceuticals, which sent Big Pharma profits soaring from $80 million a year to over $40 billion a year in just a few decades.
Again, I ask, why would any freedom-loving American want to work for this corrupt organization known as the DEA - as opposed to doing everything they can to abolish it, root and branch?
Look at "Running with the Devil" - the 2019 drug-war propaganda movie in which DEA agent Leslie Bibb TORTURES her suspects -- and she's the HERO of the film, as far as the script writers were concerned. And she SHOOTS the bad guy (Nicolas Cage) in cold blood and why?... for selling the coca plant - a rainforest medicine which has been used responsibly by non-Western cultures for millennia. AND SHE'S SMOKING A CIGARETTE while she shoots him. WHAT HYPOCRISY - proving once again that America's Drug War has nothing whatsoever to do with the nation's health; it's all about enforcing a Christian Science Sharia in which alcohol and Big Pharma antidepressants are given undeserved monopolies when it comes to "curing what ails ya."
You may say "It's only a movie," but I've never heard the DEA denounce it. If Donald Trump watched the flick, he was certainly cheering on Natalie when she got on her hypocritical high horse and shot her suspect point-blank through the foggy mist of toxic tobacco smoke that she was continually exhaling.
Is this really an agency that blacks -- or anybody who values American freedom -- should work for?
Not to mention the DEA's colonialist outrage of going overseas to supposedly sovereign countries in order to burn the poppy plant -- another plant that has been used responsibly for millennia by other cultures. They say we're going overseas to stop addiction at home. But under that logic, Muslims should be allowed to enter the States for the purpose of burning grape vines. (Make no mistake: the Drug Warrior is going overseas to extend Big Liquor's monopoly throughout the world, thus making alcohol the Christian Science go-to drug for the entire globe. Besides, it gives the US military a foothold in countries that we may need to overthrow if they start displaying symptoms of Socialism Praecox, or threaten to impede access to oil supplies.)
The DEA doesn't really mind being called "biased." That's something that they can at least pretend to fix without losing their central mission of enforcing Drug War Sharia. So if the DEA's black agents really want to bring about change, they will denounce the DEA root and branch, first and foremost by pointing out, loudly and clearly, that the DEA's Drug War actually causes all of the violence that it purports to be fighting! In short, the DEA's Drug War is simply a make-work program for law enforcement.
The answer therefore is to abolish the DEA, not the police.
There is precedent for this. The Israelis recently abolished their own drug agency. It's time for America to do the same.
PS There's nothing realistic, or even desirable, about defunding the police. Let's set ourselves a realistic and laudable goal: end the Drug War that for decades now has given the police carte blanche to treat suspects like dirt.
May 24, 2022
Since inditing the above broadside, Brian has had a rethink. He's been asking himself: "Brian," he says, "why do we have police in the first place?" And the answer (or so he figures) at least in America, seems to point back to racism following the civil war and a desire on the part of white America to keep minorities in their place. At least Brian believes that's a plausible thesis, and so he hereby recants his categorical dismissal of the anti-police push, at least until he learns more on the subject. (Don't ya love this man? When he's wrong, or even potentially wrong, the guy flags himself!)
The Links Police
Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, I stopped you to tell you why the black community is fast asleep when it comes to the evils of the Drug War. (Good guess!) Well, it's because national reporters like Lisa Ling ignore the Drug War completely. 797 blacks were killed in Chicago in 2021 by gunfire -- which would not have taken place without the Drug War to incentivize drug dealing and violence (especially in poor, and poorly educated, communities). And yet Lisa Ling's recent documentary about Chicago violence DOESN'T EVEN MENTION THE WAR ON DRUGS!!!!! I repeat: SHE DOES NOT EVEN MENTION THE DRUG WAR IN A ONE-HOUR DOCUMENTARY ABOUT CHICAGO GUN VIOLENCE!!!! It seems the Drug War has become so much a part of national life that everyone takes it as a normal baseline, as if God himself not only created heaven and earth but the Drug War as well.
Fair play to Hugo Chavez, he kicked the DEA out of Venezuela in 2005. Now if Americans weren't so emasculated by the drug-war ideology of substance demonization, for which they obediently urinate for their billionaire employers, we'd give the DEA the bum's rush out of the country which they have been busy bloodying and arresting since they first (dis)graced the American scene in 1973 with their presence. You remember 1973: that was the year when the DEA (Drug Demonization Enforcement Agency) first begin abjectly lying about naturally occurring psychoactive substances, falsely claiming that they had no potential value whatsoever, this despite the fact that God him or herself says otherwise in the Old Testament and that humankind has created whole religions in grateful response to the psychoactive power of these naturally occurring meds.
Just drove through Pennsylvania and passed a sign protesting the "Defund the Police" movement, whining about getting folks to respect cops again, blah blah blah. Listen, I would respect the hell out of the cops if their job was to help little old ladies across the street and stop bank robberies. But that's not how it works in Drug War society. In the age of the Drug War, police are forced to be noxious busybodies, no longer happy to merely fight crime, now they have to poke about in everybody's business in an effort to stop a sort of "pre-crime," namely the mere possession of godsend medicine of which pharmacologically clueless politicians disapprove.
I'd love and respect the police if they were fighting terrorism, preventing robberies and keeping gunmen from attacking grade schools. But that's only a side job of the police in the age of the Drug War: the real money-earner and focus of modern policemen is to be a nosy snooping busybody, a kind of thought police which keeps us from using substances that might encourage us to frown on the excesses of modern capitalism. The police, in short, are the thought police, and if the 1% want to make me respect them, they'll have to do more than put up a few road signs in red-leaning townships of Pennsylvania: they'll have to end the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the Drug War, which prioritizes ignorance over education and incarceration over personal autonomy.
Author's Follow-up: December 21, 2022
In "Liberalism and its Discontents," Francis Fukuyama tell us that liberals are crazy because they want to get rid of the police in cities where violence and drug dealing is rife. Yes, but why is violence and drug dealing rife, Francis? It's because of substance prohibition, which the police are in the business of enforcing. So having the police help "solve" the crime problem in inner cities is like having an arsonist help put out a fire. The real issue is the incentivizing of violence in poor and poorly educated communities, and the culprit for that crime is the Drug War. But Francis has no useful suggestions to make about inner-city violence because he NEVER EVEN MENTIONS the war on drugs in his book, yet another sign that authors self-censor themselves (usually without even realizing it) in the age of the Drug War.
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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.
Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, I stopped you to tell you why the black community is fast asleep when it comes to the evils of the Drug War. (Good guess!) Well, it's because national reporters like Lisa Ling ignore the Drug War completely. 797 blacks were killed in Chicago in 2021 by gunfire -- which would not have taken place without the Drug War to incentivize drug dealing and violence (especially in poor, and poorly educated, communities). And yet Lisa Ling's recent documentary about Chicago violence DOESN'T EVEN MENTION THE WAR ON DRUGS!!!!! I repeat: SHE DOES NOT EVEN MENTION THE DRUG WAR IN A ONE-HOUR DOCUMENTARY ABOUT CHICAGO GUN VIOLENCE!!!! It seems the Drug War has become so much a part of national life that everyone takes it as a normal baseline, as if God himself not only created heaven and earth but the Drug War as well.
