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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 Mysteries8. (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!













Notes for essay entitled Dirty Minded Drug Warriors:

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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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?

I've always wondered why we don't just let heroin users be -- or better yet, re-legalize drugs and give them choices. Why are they punished for using heroin daily while we praise 1 in 4 women for taking an even more dependence-causing drug every day of their life?

Getting off some drugs could actually be fun and instructive, by using a variety of other drugs to keep one's mind off the withdrawal process. But America believes that getting off a drug should be a big moral battle.

Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.

Thomas Szasz was not an extremist when it comes to drugs. The extremists are those who feel that psychiatrists know more about our mind and mood than we do.

Materialist scientists are drug war collaborators. They are more than happy to have their fight against idealism rigged by drug law, which outlaws precisely those substances whose use serves to cast their materialism into question.

America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of drug dependency. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing drugs of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.

This is why "rock stars" use drugs: not just for performance anxiety (which, BTW, is a completely UNDERSTANDABLE reason for drug use), but because they want to fully experience the music, even tho' they may be currently short on money and being hassled by creditors, etc.

I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.

It wasn't until western prudery and racism came along that we started to judge people by the substances that they chose to ingest, rather than by their actual behavior in the world.


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