wanted to ask your editors to please stop supporting the War on Drugs. Your piece about Matthew Perry was a typical hatchet job designed to blame drugs rather than drug law. How dare you "fight for justice" on behalf of Perry when you yourselves are the problem!!! You Drug Warriors are the ones who are causing thousands of Americans to die in the streets because you refuse to regulate the drug supply and you refuse to teach safe use. Then you get all self-righteous about the death of Matthew Perry, who would never have wanted your help!!!! You are ghouls!!!! You are the ones who killed him!!!
Wake up! The Drug War has already destroyed the 4th amendment and handed elections to racists by imprisoning millions of minorities.
Start fighting for safe supply and education -- and stop your self-righteous "fight for justice" and look in the mirror instead. You Drug Warriors are the MURDERERS!
Author's Follow-up:
May 01, 2025
It galls me to think that these drug-war editors throw back cold ones at the bar -- thereby consuming a drug that kills 178,000 a year1 -- and yet they are on no high horses whatsoever when they hear that their loved ones and neighbors are dying from kidney damage due to alcohol or due to drunk-driving accidents. These editors know that they are only supposed to fret about psychoactive downsides when they are writing about alcohol's many less-dangerous competitors.
Who makes psychoactive drugs dangerous? The Drug Warrior by refusing to teach safe use, by refusing to regulate product, and refusing to legalize alternatives. And they have no excuse whatsoever. Liquor prohibition brought machine-gun-fire to America's erstwhile tranquil streets. The prohibitionists know this. And yet they continue to champion drug prohibition today. They are responsible for drug-related deaths because they have done everything they can to make drug use as dangerous as possible.
American Drug Warriors are insane. They give pride of place to alcohol, the most dangerous psychoactive drug in the country, and then they outlaw all of liquors less dangerous competitors. They refuse to teach safe use or to regulate product, and then they get on a high horse about the very deaths that they themselves have caused with their drug policies.
This is why it is so galling that folks like Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman quietly support drug prohibition -- despite the fact that they make a living tantalizing Americans about upbeat drug effects. They claim to be interested in safety. Yes, but whose safety? In case anyone noticed, Matthew Perry died on THEIR WATCH, while THEIR laws were in effect. Who are Mike and Rick saving, after all? The 60,000 who have been disappeared in Mexico over the last two decades thanks to the War on Drugs2? The 67,000 who have been shot in inner cities over the last ten years due to the War on Drugs3? The young opiate users who have died totally unnecessarily on American streets because we refuse to regulate product and to teach safe use? They may think they are saving their young white loved ones, but even if that were true, they are only doing so by outsourcing the dangers of drug prohibitions to minorities and foreigners -- meanwhile destroying the rule of law in Latin America and now in the United States -- based on the insane idea that we have to end constitutional protections to protect Americans from themselves.
Prohibition kills. They know this. This is why prohibitionists are murderers. This is why it sickens me when they get on a high-horse and sate their hypocritical indignation on the dealers and drug providers that their inhumane drug policies have created out of whole cloth. The drug dealers and providers are no more evil than Matthew Perry -- they both were set up to fail by inhumane drug law that tries to tell Americans how and how much they can think and feel in this life. Had this drug ideology been in effect in 1500BCE in the Punjab, there would be no Hindu religion today4.
Rick has the typical Drug War attitude about DMT: If a drug can be a problem at one dose for one demographic when used for one reason, it must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
It is hard to imagine a more idiotic and cruel dictum.
Does Rick think that dogmatic ignorance and prohibition is the answer? Does he not realize prohibition forces those who seek transcendence to use highly dangerous chemicals to extract the DMT themselves from organic matter? And these are the people whom we refuse to educate about safe use in fealty to the bizarre and anti-democratic Drug War notion that ignorance is the best policy. Where is the concern for THEIR safety?
As for Mike, it is astonishing that a well-educated botanist living in a presumably freedom-loving country would have no problem with the government telling him what mushrooms he can legally study, for God's sake. If I ran a botany club, I would not admit any members who believed that government had a right to run interference between myself and the plants and fungi that I study. Yet I seem to be in the minority, judging by the fact that most mycologist websites either ignore psychoactive mushrooms or make it indignantly clear that they will have nothing to do with the same, making it clear that they believe that Mother Nature is a drug kingpin rather than a beneficent goddess. Moreover, they seem to have never read the book of Genesis, in which God himself assured us that his creation was good.
But then I suppose that racist beer-guzzling politicians know best. [sigh]
Drug War Ghouls
The Drug War Ghouls get busy any time a well-known figure dies prematurely, especially when the figure in question is a rock star or actor. You can just hear them whispering childishly: "Aww! Were they on any drugs? Were they on any drugs?" The presumption behind such tittering is that drugs are evil and can only lead to death and destruction. Of course, those who hold this viewpoint always forget that the drug war does everything it can to make such outcomes of drug use a self-fulfilling prophecy by discouraging education about safe use and by ensuring corrupt and uncertain drug supply with their eternal kneejerk prohibition. This is all completely inexcusable. The drug warriors cause death. They are the villains. They are the criminals. Take the so-called opiate crisis. Young people were not dying en masse from opioids when such drugs were legal in the United States. It took prohibition to bring that about.
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. The media has played its role with movies like "Running with the DEA," "The Crisis" and "The Runner." In the first of these three, the DEA are the "good guys" for murdering a suspect in cold blood. In the second, the DEA plants evidence to cover up the murder of a drug suspect by an indignant mother. And in the third, a white detective stages a raid that kills a young Black teenager that said detective refers to as "a waste of space."
The Drug War is all about making us hate -- making us hate anybody except for the folks that brought about the violence and drug problems in the first place: the damned prohibitionists who, having failed to outlaw liquor, turned their scapegoating on every less dangerous substance in the world.
Meanwhile, the media have done all they can to support this drug war by holding the use of outlawed substances to safety standards that are never applied to any other risky activity on earth, meanwhile ignoring the fact that prohibition encourages ignorance and leads to contaminated drug supply. Thousands of American young people die each month because of unregulated supply and ignorance, not from drugs themselves.
The media also supports the drug war by failing to hold it accountable for all the problems that it causes. Just read any article on inner-city shootings -- today's journalists will trace the problem to a lack of jobs or to global warming, to anything but the drug war which incentivized violence in the first place. As for violence overseas, we're told that it's caused by evil rotten drug cartels -- without any acknowledgement that it was American drug policy that created those cartels out of whole cloth, just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia here in the States.
Meanwhile, the media have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's fentanyl... It's all part of the DEA's tried-and-true formula to stay relevant, as academic Philip Jenkins clearly demonstrates in "Synthetic Panics": Take a local drug problem and publicize it so that it goes national. Then work with a film crew at "48 Hours" to show that the drug in question threatens the white American middle class. Then go to Congress, hat in hand, and accept billions to 'solve' the latest drug problem.
And Americans fall for it every time. In fact, their gullibility seems to be increasing over time. They love to hate drugs, so much so that drugs have become the new horror trope. Recent movies have taken to personifying "evil" drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. It's sad that America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs -- and the media can take much of the blame.
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!
Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.
In fact, we throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The words as used today are extremely judgmental. The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.
They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."
"Can I use poppies, coca, laughing gas, MDMA?" "NO," says the materialist, "We must be SCIENTIFIC! We must fry your brain and give you a lobotomy and make you a patient for life with the psychiatric pill mill! That's true SCIENCE!"
The drug war encourages us to judge people based on what they use and in what context. Even if the couch potato had no conscious health goals, their use of MJ is very possibly shielding them from health problems, like headaches, sleeplessness, and overreliance on alcohol.
The goal of drug-law reform should be to outlaw prohibition. Anything short of that, and our basic rights will always be subject to veto by fearmongers. Outlawing prohibition would restore the Natural Law of Jefferson, which the DEA scorned in 1987 with its raid on Monticello.
There will always be people who don't use drugs wisely, just as there are car drivers who don't drive wisely, and rock climbers who fall to their death. America needs to grow up and accept this, while ending prohibition and teaching safe use.
Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal":
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."
Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Drug War Murderers: an open letter to People magazine, published on September 16, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
wanted to ask your editors to please stop supporting the War on Drugs. Your piece about Matthew Perry was a typical hatchet job designed to blame drugs rather than drug law. How dare you "fight for justice" on behalf of Perry when you yourselves are the problem!!! You Drug Warriors are the ones who are causing thousands of Americans to die in the streets because you refuse to regulate the drug supply and you refuse to teach safe use. Then you get all self-righteous about the death of Matthew Perry, who would never have wanted your help!!!! You are ghouls!!!! You are the ones who killed him!!!
You have been reading an article entitled, Drug War Murderers: an open letter to People magazine, published on September 16, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
