I'm still waiting for a university to take up my suggestion that they open up a Department of Drug War Studies. While I'm waiting, I thought I'd create a sample course schedule. I came up with more than a dozen classes without breaking a sweat, and there are still many topics I haven't covered: like how the Drug War censors scientists and authors, how it indoctrinates kids with the anti-scientific notion that Mother Nature's meds are evil (a viewpoint that God himself did not share); and how it militarizes police forces around the world and empowers dictators, including a self-proclaimed "Drug War Hitler" in the Philippines. But I hope I have ticked off some of the more important downsides of America's unprecedented war on godsend medicines -- or more accurately against those who would dare to use or sell them.
Review of the principal lies of the prohibitionists, including the anti-scientific claim that certain substances can have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, ever. PREREQUISITE: common sense.
DW 102. The Outlawing of Philosophy. 3 Credits.
This course examines how prohibition criminalizes the use of the very substances that inspired the philosophy of William James, thereby outlawing the study of ultimate reality. PREREQUISITE: belief in academic freedom.
DW 103 The Drug War and the Psychiatric Pill Mill. 3 Credits.
Students learn the origins of the pill mill, which would not exist without the outlawing of almost all psychoactive competition. Special emphasis will be placed on the great pharmacological dystopia represented by this expensive and demoralizing paradigm, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women have been turned into Big Pharma patients for life. PREREQUISITE: a belief that lives should be lived, not slept through.
DW 104 Drug War and Pain Management 3 Credits.
An investigation into how the Drug War puts politicians in charge of deciding how much pain relief a patient is allowed to have. Special emphasis will be placed on the fate of children undergoing surgery and/or in hospice, who must suffer merely because the doctors fear repercussions if they prescribe adequate pain relief.
DW 201 The Drug War and Natural Law. 3 Credits.
Students will learn how the Drug War violates natural law by outlawing Mother Nature's bounty. Special emphasis will be placed on the DEA raid on Monticello in 1987 for the purpose of confiscating the poppy plants of Thomas Jefferson, as well as the Monticello Foundation's failure to defend the legacy of Jefferson by allowing the raid in the first place. PREREQUISITE: a belief in the rights of the individual implicit in the American Declaration of Independence.
DW 202 Drug War Beneficiaries (AKA The Drug War: Cui Bono?) 3 Credits.
A survey of the many businesses and organizations that profit from substance prohibition, including the pharmaceutical industry, psychiatrists, corrections workers, and police forces. PREREQUISITE: a sincere desire to unmask self-interest in the body politic. (To learn how politicians profit from the Drug War, see DW 403 How Drug Laws Help Steal Elections for Conservatives)
DW 204 The Fallacy of Saving Junior. 3 Credits.
Many Drug Warriors tell us that prohibition will be worth it if it saves one child. This child, of course, is usually a white American, however. The fact that prohibition kills thousands of Blacks and Mexicans is not considered, nor the fact that the kind of substances being prohibited have inspired entire religions. The course will attempt to account for this hypocrisy with reference to racism, xenophobia, Machiavellian politics, drug-war brainwashing, and/or the deplorable state of public education, thanks to which rational deliberation is not exactly the forte of John Q Public. Finally, students will methodically rip to pieces the laughable presupposition that fearmongering (as opposed to a top-notch education) will protect poor widdle Johnny Whitebread in the first place, especially in light of the iron law of prohibition (which see the upcoming course on this topic) thanks to which drug dangers increase in proportion as drug laws get tougher.
DW 205 The Unconstitutional Idiocy of 'Drug Free Zones'. 3 Credits.
Students will consider how the presence of Drug Free Zones around schools teaches children the superstitious notion that substances can be bad "in and of themselves," without reference to how or why or when or where they are used. The professor will then demonstrate how Catholic orthodoxy has always insisted that evil resides in people, not in things. This means that the Drug War mentality behind the signs is not simply anti-scientific, but it advances a religious viewpoint as well, albeit a jaundiced one, and is therefore a clear violation of the constitutionally mandated separation of Church and State, at least insofar as the school in question is operated with the help of government funding.
DW 252 The War on Drugs in Ancient Greece and Rome. 3 credits.
The psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries lasted almost 2,000 consecutive years and inspired the philosophy of men like Plato, Plutarch and Cicero. It was banned in 392 CE by Emperor Theodosius I as a threat to Christianity. The class will explore the all-too-obvious parallels between this pagan-bashing emperor's edict and the drug prohibition of today. Special emphasis will be placed on the violation of religious freedom inherent in this religiously fueled criminalization of mind medicine. PREREQUISITE: A desire to restore religious freedom in America, and worldwide for that matter.
DW 301 Materialism and the Drug War. 3 Credits.
Students learn how prohibition bolsters a materialist understanding of the world by outlawing substances whose use conduces to a more holistic view of reality. Students will also learn how materialism blinds researchers to godsend medicines, by demanding "real" (i.e. reductionist) "cures," and pooh-poohing the mere subjectively reported feelings of the substance user. It will be shown how this purblind focus resulted in the psychiatric pill mill, by creating substances that mucked about with brain chemistry, creating the largest single outbreak of chemical dependency in the modern world. PREREQUISITE: the brains God gave you -- or at any rate, the brains that did not originate out of blind chance for no real reason whatsoever, as materialists would have it.
DW 302 The Naïve Psychology of the Drug War. 3 Credits.
In the age of the Drug War, psychologists downplay or ignore the power of anticipation and virtuous circles. They have to, because otherwise they would see that ANY substance that elates and inspires has, by definition, a potential therapeutic role and is not, as the Drug Warrior claims, devoid of any positive uses whatsoever. Students will also see how the phenomenon of "choking" cries out, as it were, for the strategic use of uplifting drugs, with a goal of creating a virtuous circle for the afflicted individual. PREREQUISITE: a desire to wrench the godsend medicines out of the grasping hands of materialists.
DW 303 Addicted to Nonsense. 3 Credits.
Addiction is a political term in the age of the Drug War. This class shows how "addiction treatment" is based on a host of false assumptions and has the goal of both medicalizing and pathologizing the user's implicit protest against the stingy pharmacopoeia of Prohibition America.
DW 304 Sigmund Freud and the Drug War. 3 Credits.
Freud did not treat his own depression with psychotherapy: he went for the real politik of cocaine. No wonder, considering that psychotherapy leads its practitioners to ignore obvious treatments (like the intermittent use of medicines that elate and inform) and to push instead for a lengthy far-distant "cure" based on a highly speculative theory about primordial urges, combined with the dubious claim that merely understanding those urges will prove therapeutic. DW 344 Objective News Coverage and the Drug War. 3 Credits.
This course is targeted at journalists but is open to all students. The professor will draw attention to the anthropomorphic nature of modern news coverage about drugs (which we're told are "killers" and "scourges"), reminding the student that psychoactive substances are inanimate and that good and evil reside in human beings and their actions, not in "drugs." Emphasis will be placed on how today's superstitious reportage diverts public attention from the real killer: namely, prohibition, which, in this century alone, has killed thousands of African-American kids, resulted in over 100,000 deaths in Mexico, and destroyed the rule of law in Central America. PREREQUISITE: At least a grain of common sense.
DW 401 12-Step Programs as Christian Science Indoctrination. 3 Credits.
The goal of 12-step programs is to enforce a hypocritically defined sobriety, based on the unspoken assumption that Mother Nature's psychoactive pharmacy is evil and should not be employed. This, however, is a religious judgment insofar as God himself said otherwise in Genesis. Students will see how the requirement of embracing a "higher power" and shunning "drugs" represents a Christian Science agenda, not some logical protocol that suggests itself naturally to an unbiased mind.
DW 402 Drug War as a War against kids and world peace 3 Credits.
As utopian as it will sound in the age of a Drug War, the most plausible way of ensuring world peace and preventing school shootings is to popularize the use of empathogens, substances (like MDMA and shrooms) that help folks feel compassion toward their fellow human beings. Students will analyze the fanaticism that makes most Drug Warriors prefer prohibition to the safety of their kids and the longevity of the human race.
DW 403 How the Drug War Steals Elections for Conservatives. 3 Credits.
A review of how drug laws resulted in the election of Donald Trump by removing millions of Blacks from the voting rolls.
DW 404 Drug War? What Drug War? 3 Credits.
Thousands of Blacks are killed every year in American inner cities thanks to gun violence, most of which, as Ann Heather Thompson wrote, would not exist without the Drug War. And yet most media coverage of inner-city violence today never mentions the Drug War. Students will examine the motives and presuppositions behind this dereliction of duty on the part of the modern media. In particular, class will discuss Lisa Ling's CNN documentary about Chicago gun violence, in which she never even mentions the war on drugs. No, not once. She mentions "drugs" only a couple of times and in such a way as to suggest that she embraces the usual Drug War narrative about those substances being evil in and of themselves.
DW 405 Pissed Off about Drug Testing. 3 Credits.
Students will examine drug testing as the extrajudicial enforcement of the drug-hating precepts of Mary Baker Eddy, noting that such testing rarely punishes anyone for impairment, but simply for their previous use of substances that have inspired entire religions in the past and have been used by other cultures for millennia. Special emphasis will be placed on the spiteful sneakiness of this practice, which can deny a citizen the right to earn a living in the United States, all without so much as even charging him or her with a crime. Students will analyze the Drug War as an end run around constitutional protections and a violation of the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. PREREQUISITE: common sense and a desire for the re-establishment of due process and reasonable search in America, not to mention the outlawing of a form of cruel and unusual punishment which denies Americans the right to feed their families, all without formal charges or a trial.
Students will ingest DMT during the first part of the lab. Then they will write a detailed description of their experience along with thoughts relevant to the probable ontological status of the phenomena encountered. Students will then discuss the potential meanings of the DMT experience as a group, bearing in mind the observation of William James that: "No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." REQUIRED TEXTS: DMT Trip Reports - Experience What It's Like Taking 5 Meo Dimethyltrptamine by Alex Gibbons and The Variety of Religious Experience by William James.
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
Miller, Richard Louis "Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle " 2017 Park Street Press
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.
