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Drug War Bait and Switch

How the DEA takes our eyes off the prize by conflating coca with cocaine and opium with fentanyl

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

January 9, 2022



The coca leaf was used successfully for millennia by the Peruvian Indians to create universal harmony and group cohesion, long before the creation of cocaine in the late 19th century as an anesthetic for eye surgery. That's why the DEA never talks about outlawing coca, but rather about outlawing cocaine -- a drug which they can more plausibly associate with blacks and violence. Nor does the DEA want us to know about coca wine, which likewise was used uneventfully by such 19th-century luminaries as Jules Verne, HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alexandre Dumas.

Opium had been used culturally and harmoniously by the Chinese for millennia (notwithstanding the hysterical reports of the Christian Anti-Opium Society of 19th-century England) long before British merchants sought to profit from this cultural preference. THE DEA strategy? Never talk about opium 1 -- talk about its synthesized rivals instead.

That's why the DEA's full-time job is to keep us frightened of the latest forms of crack cocaine and opioids -- anything to keep our minds off of the fact that the DEA has outlawed time-honored medicines and that the DEA has thereby turned Americans into flagrant imperialists, whose armies range around the globe, digging up harvests and spraying godsend medicine with weed killers that cause Parkinson's disease.

The DEA fails to notice (or to care) that they have thereby incentivized the use of all these more dangerous substances by banning all their less dangerous competition.


Author's Follow-up: January 9, 2023

Of course, even crack cocaine can be used non-addictively, but that's a factoid that the DEA will never bother to tell you.











Notes:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

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People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.

Wanna show drug warriors the error of their ways? Legalize all less dangerous drugs than alcohol and then deny work to those who test positive for liquor and confiscate their property if beer cans are found on-site.

Now the folks who helped Matthew get Ketamine must be sacrificed on the altar of the Drug War, lest people start thinking that the Drug War itself was at fault.y

Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.

The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.

In the board game "Sky Team," you collect "coffees" to improve your flying skills. Funny how the use of any other brain-focusing "drug" in real life is considered to be an obvious sign of impairment.

Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.

Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.

Almost every article about suicide is shallow because it takes drug prohibition as a natural baseline, even though drug prohibition outlaws substances that could so clearly elevate mood.

Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote: "The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."


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