Dirty Minded Drug Warriors

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Dirty Minded Drug Warriors

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 18, 2020

A 1988 court ruling gave Native Americans the right to use peyote in worship. Native Americans only, mind, not Caucasians, nor African-Americans, nor Hispanics, nor Jews. Why not? (Wait for it, folks...) Because these latter groups do not have a history of religious peyote use.

Huh? Elizabeth, I'm comin' to join ya!

Only imagine: a court telling you that you cannot engage in a religious practice because your ancestors never found it necessary to do so. Pope Leo X should have rolled out a papal bull to that effect back in 1521 and he could have forestalled the entire Reformation. "Sorry, Martin Luther, but your descendants have no history of being saved by grace, so you must continue to find your salvation in DEEDS just like the rest of us, thank you very much."

The Conquistadores certainly never required that the Aztecs demonstrate a family history of Christian worship before welcoming them into the faith. To the contrary, the Spanish warriors downright insisted on the heathens becoming Christian or else.

This, of course, is all par for the tyrannical course.

The surprising part of this story is that many Native Americans agree with the judicial ruling mentioned above (though not necessarily with the "reasoning" behind it), contending that non-native Americans do not have the correct mind set to use peyote with due reverence.

Now, I loathe both the court ruling and the racial prejudice that informs it, and yet the Native Americans in question have a valid and a very telling point.

Non-native Americans are like little children when it comes to "drugs." They have been taught to consider the use of Mother Nature's psychoactive medicines as prima facie evidence of hedonism and "getting high." And so when they see a Native American using a "drug" for religious purposes, the non-native is kind of like a little kid in an art museum pointing at the statue of David and saying: "Aww, he's nekkid, dude!" - only in our case, the childish little kid is saying: "Aww! He's getting high, dude!! Tee-hee-hee!"

I encounter this childish attitude when a fellow Caucasian finds out inadvertently that I'm publishing a website called "Abolish the DEA dot com." They usually respond in a kind of awed and conspiratorial voice, as if to tell me: "Oh, yeah, dude, drugs! You're all about partying hearty and gettin' it on! I gotcha! Wink, wink, wink!"

And I'm thinking to myself: "No, dude. I am all about the restoration of natural law, the re-legalization ¹ of plants, and the overthrow of America's State Religion, i.e. Christian Science."

But America is under the spell of Drug War propaganda which insists that Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines can only be used for "getting high." And that mindset is constantly re-enforced by books, magazines, news, TV shows ² , and movies ³ ⁴ , all of which studiously ban the positive depiction of illegal "drug use" and simply remove from the history books any references to, say, Freud's use of cocaine ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ , or Benjamin Franklin's use of opium , or Plato's use of psychedelics in the Eleusinian Mysteries ⁸. (Of course, JFK's use of "speed," as Monty Python would put it, is "right out.")

This propaganda of omission has turned Americans into little children with respect to psychoactive substances, and in two ways:

First, by convincing us that we could never possibly learn to use such substances wisely, that we are children for life as far as that is concerned; and second, by convincing us that banned psychoactive substances can only be used for naughty purposes.

If the latter proposition is true, then we non-natives can, indeed, only sit back and snicker at the profound ceremonies of the First Americans, thinking to ourselves, "Religion, indeed! Ha ha!"

In short, we are dirty minded, just like the child tittering foolishly in front of Michelangelo's masterpiece.

Given this state of affairs, one can almost say that the judicial ruling mentioned above was actually right, though certainly not for the absurd reasons that were adduced by the blatantly racist judge in the case. Non-natives cannot be allowed to use peyote in religious ceremonies. Why not? Because they are simply too immature to do so reverently. Drug War propaganda has seen to that.

Of course, there's an even bigger threat to the respectful use of sacred substances such as peyote, and that is capitalism ⁹ itself. If non-natives can use peyote, then the substance could presumably be marketed freely, in which case irreverent advertising would not be far behind. But that's a topic for another essay.

Author's Follow-up: October 29, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

This situation is one of endless absurdities that naturally result when we outlaw Mother Nature. We simply cannot take that absurd step without absurd consequences following. The answer to this situation, one that respects both individual freedom and tribal rights, is to re-legalize Mother Nature while prohibiting commercial exploitation of sacred medicines - prohibiting their exploitation but NOT their use. For let's be freedom-loving adults with common sense for a moment: It is palpably ABSURD for the government to outlaw Mother Nature -- and a clear violation of our right to the pursuit of happiness -- and a violation of everything that the opium ¹⁰ -loving Thomas Jefferson stood for in writing the Declaration of Independence. Imagine, the silly and idiotic DEA stomping onto Monticello ¹¹ in 1987 and confiscating the founding father's poppy plants. Is it not just childish madness and the height of injustice? Where in the Bible are we told that God created plant and fungi for governments? It's mad and blasphemous to think so, and yet most Drug Warriors I've known claim to be devout Christians. It's all just insanity -- and till it ends, we will run into crazy consequences like the above, with government telling us that we can only belong to religions that were practiced by our forebears! Madness, madness, madness!

Drug War Ghouls

Notes:

1: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
2: The Dead Man DWP (up)
3: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
4: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
5: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
6: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
7: “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)
8: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
9: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)
10: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
11: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)

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Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.

To treat opioid use disorder, we should re-normalize the peaceable smoking of opium at home as an alternative to drinking alcohol.

Psychiatrists refuse to acknowledge that it is hugely disempowering to turn patients into wards of the healthcare state with dependence-causing "meds." End drug prohibition and end the psychiatric pill mill.

Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.

Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.

Psychiatrists never acknowledge the biggest downside to modern antidepressants: the fact that they turn you into a patient for life. That's demoralizing, especially since the best drugs for depression are outlawed by the government.

Opium and cocaine have a vast host of potential rational uses -- yet we all have to pretend otherwise in the age of the Drug War.

The FDA is not qualified to tell us whether holistic medicines work. They hold such drugs to materialist standards and that's pharmacological colonialism.

The FDA will be accepting comments through September 20th on the subject of ways to fight PTSD. PTSD@reaganudall.org Ask them why they support brain-damaging shock therapy but won't approve drugs like MDMA that could make ECT unnecessary.

If fearmongering drug warriors were right about the weakness of humankind, there would be no social drinkers, only drunkards.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

(up)

Dirty Minded Drug Warriors

Author's Follow-up: October 29, 2024

Drug War Ghouls

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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