" It is reported to me that the Anheuser-Busch Company and some of the Milwaukee companies are largely controlled by alien Germans (Prohibition activist Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League, writing to Attorney General Palmer)"
"A strong case can be made for viewing the Anti-Saloon League as the death knell for majority rule in the United States, the end of the sovereignty of the people and the transfer of political power to passionately committed special- interest groups who began to sow both money and intimidation throughout the halls of government to achieve their ends."
"New York speakeasy owners now paid more than $50 million every year from 1920 in graft to policemen and prohibition agents. (Historian Sean Dennis Cashman)"
" Most of the profits created by illegal alcohol went to organized crime, which filled the void previously occupied by legitimate businessmen, brewers, vintners, and distillers. "
" Prohibition turned organized crime into a growth industry; it was the greatest boon ever to the business of wrongdoing, "
" 'Nothing like it had ever happened before,' he writes (Historian Mike Dash). 'An entire American industry-- one of the most important in the country had been gifted by the government to gangsters.'"
"The Eighteenth Amendment would soon result in a far greater problem than price and availability. It would become, in effect, a means of legally sanctioned chemical warfare against the poor. Sometimes even the rich."
"It was the ultimate tragedy of the ultimate in legalized folly (i.e., the death from impure liquor concoctions)"
" The number of arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct in the United States during Prohibition increased 41 percent compared to figures before January 16, 1920."
"The number of arrests for drunken driving went up 81 percent (during Prohibition)."
" The population of federal prisons was up an unprecedented 366 percent and included, among others, both customers and vendors of alcoholic beverages (during Prohibition)."
"Federal expenditures on penal institutions of all sorts soared a thousand percent!"
"'Some of [the bootleggers] jokingly referred to the booze they manufactured for the low- end market as 'rotgut.' But it was not a joke: it was an accurate description of the effect of the bottle's contents.'"
"Regarding industrial alcohol: [The Anti-Saloon League], fearful of its misuse, insisted that industrial alcohol be made into an even more deadly compound by requiring that manufacturers add methanol, or wood alcohol, to it. "
" That the people who drank industrial alcohol, unaware they were doing so, would also be unaware of the addition of methanol seems not to have occurred to Wheeler and his fellow moralists. With a mantle of rectitude draped over his con- science and worn as proudly as a minister's raiments, Wheeler was as indifferent to the life or death of his fellow man as were the crooks who catered to their thirsts."
"'The person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide,' Wheeler declared, and to one who might have pointed out that a person didn't know he was drinking industrial alcohol, Wheeler would have been unmoved. "
"[Bootleggers] might have to resort to rubbing alcohol, engine fuels, brake fluids, kerosene, nicotine, shellac, sulfuric acid, formaldehyde, camphor, chloral hydrate, benzol, ether, and even perfume and hair tonic as bases-- it made no difference. All were gut-rotters to one extent or another. They might even add antifreeze to their product."
" The undiscerning in Kansas City, Missouri, ingested Sweet Whiskey, a wholesome name but 'a distillation of alcohol combined with nitric and sulfuric acids that soon destroyed the kidneys.'"
"During a single four-day period in 1928, thirty-four people died in New York City from placing orders for Coroner's Cocktails. Just four days. Just Manhattan. Just wood alcohol. "
" 'There is less drinking,' Churchill quoted his friend as saying, 'but there is worse drinking.'"
"The very term 'Mexican Drug War' is profoundly misleading, as it diverts attention from the American role in its creation... But we believe the term to be a misnomer, as the complex phenomena to which it refers were jointly constructed by Mexico and the United States over the last hundred years."
"The proscription of narcotics in 1914 (which, unlike the ban on alcohol, was never repealed) spawned a drug- trafficking industry in Mexico, the enormous profits from which were used to corrupt Mexican politicians and law enforcement."
"As David Musto notes, it was not fear of drugs per se that drove the prohibitionists, so much as fear of the social groups who used them."
" Seeking to stave off plans to fold the [the Federal Bureau of Narcotics] into a larger body, Anslinger gathered up news stories about marijuana's ability to drive men to violence and madness, and deployed them as evidence that it was an extremely dangerous drug, requiring oversight by an independent federal authority."
"This complicated system [the "French connection"] had been set in place back in 1947, as Alfred McCoy has demonstrated, courtesy of the youthful CIA, which had backed Corsican gangsters against the French Communist Party in their battle to control the Marseille docks."
"The feds, too, were wracked by corruption. As Douglas Valentine shows, Anslinger's Federal Bureau of Narcotics was honeycombed with it. This was a state of affairs from which he averted his eyes until his retirement in 1962, only to have it blow up in a 1968 investigation, which demonstrated that the bureau was itself a major source of supply and protection of heroin."
"In a parallel to events in Mexico, the regional office of the BNDD achieved a symbiosis with local Mafiosi, accepting regular bribes to arrest only those dealers nominated by syndicate, which allowed federal agents to accumulate impressive arrest records and rapid promotion, while eliminating unwanted competitors for the mob."
"Society's prevailing view is that being medicated by a doctor is drug use, while self-medication is drug abuse. This justification rests on the principle of professionalism, not on pharmacology. [This] concept of drug abuse symbolizes scientific medicine's fundamental policy that laymen should place their care under the supervision of a physician. This is similar to the belief, prior to the Reformation, that laymen should not communicate directly with God but should place their spiritual care under the supervision of a duly accredited priest. The self-interest of the church and of medicine in such policies are obvious. These policies also relieve individuals of the burden of responsibility for themselves."
"In more than 150 countries around the world, access to morphine is virtually nonexistent, in part due to excessively strict drug control regulations."
"When used to excess, it is like everything else, prejudicial to the health, yet of all the narcotics used by man Coca is the least injurious and the most soothing and invigorating. -Clements Markham."
"It is said that for years His Holiness (Pope Leo XIII) has been supported in his ascetic retirement by a preparation of Mariani's Coca, of which a flask constantly worn is, like the widow’s cruse, never empty."
"The chewing of Coca not only removes extreme fatigue, but prevents it. Hunger and thirst are suspended, but eventually appetite and digestion are unaffected. No injury whatever is sustained at the time or subsequently in occasional trials."
"These were cases of simple neurasthenia, which appropriate hygienic measures, combined with the administration of Coca remedy, which the homoeopaths have long associated as a specific in cases of timidity and bashfulness-- completely cured."
"Linnaeus considered that a medicine differed from a poison not so much in its nature as in its dose."
"To this has been added a modern confusion through confounding stimulants with intoxicants, which is erroneous in fact. Quickly digested food is a stimulant, a cup of hot water slowly sipped may be a stimulant, and these or any substance which increases natural action-- which is the true definition of stimulant-- will not necessarily be followed by a period of depression corresponding to the previous sense of well being."
"It is indeed a remarkable irony that the basic premise of modern materialism should initially have been founded upon theology! (i.e., Descartes' notion that God is veracious)"
"There's something that happens with ayahuasca in that you get reverse tolerance. The more you drink, the less you need. I have seen shamans who just smell it, it's enough for them to be able to sing."
"In Guatemala and Honduras, entire villages have been labeled 'narco-communities' as if to justify mass displacement."
"Between 1980 and 2005, the number of people in US prisons and jails on drug charges increased by 1,100 percent (according to writer John Gibler)."
"(According to Gordon Liddy) Operation Intercept... (a '60s project to prevent marijuana from reaching the US via Mexico) was an exercise in international extortion, pure, simple, and effective, designed to bend Mexico to our will."
"Massacres linked to drug trafficking have shaken Guatemala in recent years, and in 2011, Honduras had the highest murder rate in the world."
"Molly Molloy, a librarian at New Mexico State University, affirms that since December 2006 (to 2014), over 153,000 people have been murdered in Mexico."
"South American Indians who chew coca leaves ordinarily swallow low doses of cocaine and do not become abusers of that stimulant."
" During the Vietnam War many American soldiers got into the habit of smoking large amounts of the high-grade heroin that was cheap and easily available to them in Southeast Asia.... Pharmacologists predicted that most of
these soldiers would become heroin addicts, but in fact most stopped using opiates as soon as they came home. "
"There are no good or bad drugs; there are only good and bad relationships with drugs."
" Johann Sebastian Bach is rumored to have been a coffee addict. He extolled the virtues of the new drink in his famous Coffee Cantata."
" The pharmaceutical industry has tried hard to convince doctors and patients that these chemicals are revolutionary drugs that specifically reduce anxiety, making people calm and relaxed. In fact, the benzodiazepines are just another variation on the theme of alcohol and other sedative-hypnotics, with the same tendency to produce adverse effects and dependence."
" The American-led war against the cocaine trade has caused incalculable social, political, economic, and ecological devastation in the producing countries of South America."
" Nicotine is so strong and dangerous that the body quickly develops tolerance for it to protect itself. If someone begins smoking regularly, tolerance for the poisonous effects of nicotine develops in a matter of hours (as compared to days or weeks for heroin and months for alcohol)."
" Although the Chinese had used opium for centuries, widespread opium addiction did not occur in China until the early 1700s, when Portuguese sailors introduced the practice of mixing it with tobacco and smoking it."
" Given by injection, [opium] is a far more powerful and dangerous drug than when taken by mouth. Injection of drugs is relatively recent, dating only to the invention of the hypodermic syringe in 1853. Interestingly, the world's first morphine addict was the wife of the man who came up with that device."
" Heroin addicts occasionally die of overdoses, but such deaths result from poor quality control in street supplies of the drug rather than from the properties of heroin itself. "
" Cravings for opiates are no different from cravings for alcohol among alcoholics, and they are less strong than cravings for cigarettes, because nicotine is a more addictive drug."
" By making heroin illegal, a society ensures that its heroin addicts will all be criminals. It is clear that drug laws have done nothing to discourage people from becoming addicts. There are more addicts than ever, and the kinds of addiction are worse than before those laws were passed."
"Some addicts steal to fund their habits, but that ofen reflects high prices resulting from prohibition. Most of the crimes atributed to cocaine and even crack result from turning drugs over to an illegal market."
"Contrary to conventional wisdom, drug use should be treated as a protected liberty."
"The psychiatric profession lives off the fact that only physicians can prescribe drugs, and the government has made most drugs that people want prescription drugs."
"[Kids are] poisoned in schools with the illegal street drug called speed, which, when called Ritalin, is a miracle cure for them."
"The only arbiter of what ails a person 'mentally' and what makes him feel or function better, as he defines better, is the patient."
"Isn't it interesting, and troubling, that most people who go to jail for drug abuse, or drug selling, are black and minority, and those that have the license to prescribe are often non-minority, and they get to be heroes in society for essentially selling what is sometimes the same merchandise."
"This tendency to call more and more human problems diseases and then try to remedy them, or attack them, as if they were diseases is what I call the therapeutic state."
"The worst metaphysics is generally to be found among those who claim not to have any at all."
"A worldview based upon physics is bound, therefore, to exclude the "qualitative dimension" of the cosmos -- not because it is not there -- but because this science is categorically incapable of grasping that dimension, that aspect of the world."
" Our very conception of "science"-- of rationality almost-- entails the reduction of wholes to an assembly of parts. One might say that the implicit denial of irreducible wholeness has virtually become for us a mark of enlightenment."
"Our generation is the first, ever, to have made the search for self-awareness a
crime, if it is done with the use of plants or chemical compounds as the means of
opening the psychic doors."
"To many people, psychedelic drugs are simply another form of entertainment; nothing profound is looked for, thus usually nothing profound is experienced."
"It should be noted that nobody remarked on such drug use (of marijuana) by black people until their new music, which they called jazz, began to attract the attention of whites"
"(on Mescaline) This world was also marvelous in its detail. I could see the intimate structure of a bee putting something into a sack on its hind leg to take to its hive, yet I was completely at peace with the bee's closeness to my face. The world was a wonder of interpretive insight. I saw people as caricatures which revealed both their pains and their hopes, and they seemed not to mind my seeing them this way."
"Mushrooms have also been used for thousands of years by the people of Mesoamerica ritually. The Aztecs called it the "flesh of the gods," mushrooms have been widely eaten by cultures throughout the Americas in religious ceremonies. Cave paintings in Spain and Algeria reveal ritualized consumption from 9000 years ago."
"There are more than 200 different types of mushrooms on our planet which are
"magic." "Magic" refers to the fact that these surprising mushroom types (also
called psilocybin mushrooms, shrooms), if eaten or brewed like a tea in the right
quantity, can temporarily change your perception, vision and sensations."
"That 'God looks on all things and saw that they were good' contains a subtlety which the popular pessimist cannot follow... it is the thesis that there are no bad things but only bad uses of things."
"in August 2010 former president Vicente Fox stunned both Mexican and U.S. political leaders by advocating an end to the drug war. In a post on his personal blog, Fox called for a rapid end to the military's domestic anti-drug operations. He asserted that the rampant violence was undermining the government's legitimacy."
"(regarding the use of psilocybin for the dying) What a horrible thing that is to have the law and the medical system tell you what kind of care you can have or not have. People should be able to make a living world where you can decide how you want your parting, legal and certified, so your family can have the method of combatting that system, so you can die how you want."
" These four drugs constitute the four most broadly used psychotropic drugs in the world [tobacco, caffeine, alcohol, betel nut].... In a world of about six billion you're talking about one out of six having used one of these drugs."
" What the hell is hard and soft about a narcotic? I mean, if you scrunch it in your hands or it grits between the teeth, it's hard? And if it flows, it's soft? I frankly do not know what a person means when they say they were hooked on hard narcotics. "
" The American philosopher Denis Donoghue stated it exactly: "To choose vice is better than having virtue chosen for you."
"
" Tobacco was actually outlawed in several countries and, for short periods of time, had a death penalty associated with its use. The concept of smoking was not in the Bible and was absolutely contrary to any teaching. "
" If it has this or this or this action, and it is intended for humans, it is a crime, a felony, to have that drug unless it has been approved by the FDA, which, in essence, puts the FDA in the position of approving all human research [regarding the Designer Drug Act of 1986]."
"When his colleagues recommended [physician Avicenna] to slow down, he reportedly said, 'I prefer a short life with width to a narrow one with length.' "
"Understanding the allure of opiates requires far more than a simple knowledge of biology and chemistry. We must learn what they mean to Western culture and what they have meant to others."
"If the objection to opium on the part of the Chinese is so strong, it is rather remarkable that they should not only greedily purchase all the Indian opium we can send them, but cultivate the drug to an enormous extent in their own country."
"I have daily had in my office Chinese of all classes, seeing them, speaking to them, interrogating them upon different subjects, and I have never found amongst them anyof these miserable victims to opium smoking. On the contrary, more acute, knowing, and intelligent people than these very opium smokers I have rarely met with."
"My opinion of it is that it [opium smoking] may become a habit, but that that habit is not necessarily an increasing one. Nine out of twelve men smoke a certain number of pipes a day, just as a tobacco smoker would, or as a wine or beer drinker might drink his two or three glasses a day, without desiring more. - Dr. Ayers."
"Many people in this country, I dare say, owing to the false and exaggerated stories which have been disseminated by the advocates of the Anti-Opium Society, think that if they went to Hong Kong they would see swarms of wretched creatures, wan and wasted, leaning upon crutches, the victims of opium smoking. If they went to the colony they would be greatly disappointed, for no such people are to be met with."
"The Anti-Opium Society... has been got up to carry out the opinions of a few individuals, most respectable, I admit, but at the same time most enthusiastic-- I may say, indeed, fanatical-- holding views the most incorrect and delusive upon a subject with which they are most imperfectly acquainted."
"All these anti-opium articles, speeches, and resolutions are based upon the same model. They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts."
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question--for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness.
"
" Had drugs been decriminalized seventeen years ago, crack would never have been invented. It was invented because the high cost of illegal drugs made it profitable to provide a cheaper version. --Sept. 7, 1989, WSJ"
You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.
A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.
The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.
It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)
If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.
PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.
Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)
Selected Bibliography
Andrew, Christopher "The Secret World: A History of Intelligence" 2019 Yale University Press
Aurelius, Marcus "Meditations" 2021 East India Publishing Company
Mate, Gabriel "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" 2009 Vintage Canada
Maupassant, Guy de "Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques - Guy de Maupassant: Les classiques du fantastique " 2019
McKenna, Terence "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution " 1992 Bantam
Pinchbeck, Daniel "When Plants Dream" 2019 Watkins Publishing
Poe, Edgar Allan "The Essential Poe" 2020 Warbler Classics
Pollan, Michael "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence " 2018 Penguin Books
Reynolds, David S. "Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville " 1988 Oxford University Press
Richards, William "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences Hardcover" 2015 Columbia University Press
Rosenfeld, Harvey "Diary of a Dirty Little War: The Spanish-American War of 1898 " 2000 Praeger
Straussman, Rick "DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences " 2001 Park Street Press
Streatfield, Dominic "Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography" 2003 Picador USA
Swartzwelder, Scott "Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy" 1998 W.W. Norton
Szasz, Thomas "Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers" 1974 Anchor Press/Doubleday
Whitaker, Robert "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America " 2010 Crown
Zinn, Howard "A People's History of the United States: 1492 - present" 2009
Zuboff , Shoshana "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2019 Public Affairs
Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.
