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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 for essay entitled Drug War Bait and Switch: How the DEA takes our eyes off the prize by conflating coca with cocaine and opium with fentanyl:

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




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.

The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.

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

When Americans "obtain their majority" and wish to partake of drugs safely, they should be paired with older adults who have done just that. Instead, we introduce them to "drug abusers" in prerecorded morality plays to reinforce our biased notions that drug use is wrong.

It's just plain totalitarian nonsense to outlaw mother nature and to outlaw moods and mental states thru drug law. These truths can't be said enough by us "little people" because the people in power are simply not saying them.

Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.

And so, by ignoring all "up" sides to drugs, the DEA points to potential addiction as a knock-down argument for their prohibition. This is the logic of children (and uneducated children at that). It is a cost-benefit analysis that ignores all benefits.

"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.

For most drugs, dependency is a bug. For Big Pharma antidepressants, it is a feature.

The Drug Warriors say: "Don't tread on me! (That said, please continue to tell me what plants I can use, how much pain relief I can get, and whether my religion is true or not.)"


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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