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.
The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.
American businesses judge people, not by the color of their skin but by the contents of their digestive systems.
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
Besides, why should I listen to the views of a microbe?
If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol massacres. The problem is drug prohibition, not drugs.
Even the worst forms of "abuse" can be combatted with a wise use of a wide range of psychoactive drugs, to combat both physical and psychological cravings. But drug warriors NEED addiction to be a HUGE problem. That's their golden goose.
Doc to Franklin: "I'm sorry, Ben, but I see no benefits of opium use under my microscope. The idea that you are living a fulfilled life is clearly a mistake on your part. If you want to be scientific, stop using opium and be scientifically depressed like the rest of us."
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987.
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.
If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.
Of course, even crack cocaine can be used non-addictively, but that's a factoid that the DEA will never bother to tell you.
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