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Drug War Uber Alles

How the Drug War has turned the entire world into one big Christian Science theocracy

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 12, 2022



Some of us believe with the fictional Sherlock Holmes (and the very real HG Wells, Marcus Aurelius, and Benjamin Franklin) that improving and expanding the mind is a categorical imperative rather than a mortal sin. For us, the real sin is to fail to maximize one's potential in life. So where can we go to practice our religion, to be all that we can be, to "know ourselves" in the Platonic acceptation of that phrase? Surely we can vote with our feet and simply leave the Christian Science theocracies, wherein all the empowering substances from coca to opium 1 are demonized rather than safely leveraged for the good of human beings and of humanity.

But not so. For so powerful is the propaganda of Drug War America, combined with the hidden biases of reductive materialism 2 which scorn all non-quantifiable healing, that the vast majority of powerful psychoactive substances are illegal EVERYWHERE ON THE PLANET, from the North Pole to the South Pole, from Bogata to Beijing, this despite the fact that many of them grow at our very feet.

Surely, this status quo represents a crime against humanity3, especially as it outlaws substances that could tame humanity's violence-prone heart and thus help us avoid the eventual nuclear annihilation toward which our species seems inevitably headed.

Then, for God's sake, speak up! If not on behalf of human potential and world peace, then on behalf of the many silent and unrecognized victims of Drug War ideology: the thousands of black Americans who die in inner cities every year thanks to drug-war prohibition, the dying children who go without godsend medicine in hospices, the victims of the ongoing civil war in Mexico that America creates and profits from in an unconscionable effort to keep boots on the ground south of the border -- or your own parents, who die in agony (by being "taken off of life support") because our Christian Science drug-war sensibilities will not allow us to give them morphine 4 even on their death beds.

Brian Quass

You may ask, what is this Drug War propaganda that is so effective as to turn the entire planet into Christian Scientists with respect to psychoactive medicine?

Answers:

1) The propaganda of omission in the media, 5 in which positive uses of criminalized substances are never mentioned in movies 6 7 , TV shows 8 or print.
2) The propaganda of omission in academia, in which positive uses of criminalized substances are never mentioned in drug-related research papers, with all such studies dealing only with abuse and misuse.
3) The propaganda of amnesia, in which we ignore historical incidents that clash with Drug War sensibilities, such as the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries9 and the fact that the Vedic-Hindu religion was inspired by psychoactive plant medicine.
4) The propaganda of lies, in which groups like the Partnership for a Drug Free America 10 tell us that the drugs which have inspired entire religions will actually "fry the brain11" (whereas if any drugs fry the brain, they are the Big Pharma 12 13 meds upon which 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent for life!) The lies of the DEA, which, since 1973, has been telling us that drugs that have inspired entire religions somehow have no positive uses whatsoever (a blatant lie, insomuch as every drug on the planet has some positive use for someone, somewhere, at some time, as even the deadly Botox has positive uses, both in cosmetic surgery and in the treatment of spastic diseases like dysphonia).











Notes for essay entitled Drug War Uber Alles: How the Drug War has turned the entire world into one big Christian Science theocracy:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
2: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
3: Drug Prohibition is a crime against humantiy DWP (up)
4: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
5: How the Media Puts Drugs on Show Trials: an open letter to Bennett Haeberle of NBC 5 Chicago DWP (up)
6: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
7: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
8: The Dead Man DWP (up)
9: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
10: Horses Kill The Partnership for a Death Free America (up)
11: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)
12: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
13: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Psst! Drug use has benefits too. Pass it on!

No drug causes addiction after one use. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis.

There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."

I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.

Timothy Leary's wife wrote: "We went to Puerto Rico and all we did was take cocaine and read Faust to one another." And there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with that!!! The drug war is all about scaring us and making illegal drug use as dangerous as possible.

The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.

Governor Kotek is "dealing" with the homelessness problem in Oregon by arresting her way out of it, in fealty to fearmongering drug warriors.

Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."

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!

Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.


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Book Cover

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

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Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

This is the only full-cast recording of Aleister Crowley's 1922 classic paeon to common sense. It is the first book -- and so far almost the only book -- to stake out a philosophy of drug use that is compatible with human freedom, one in which we learn to use drugs as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. This recording was produced by the Drug War Philosopher and your purchases help support his effort to push back against the tragically counterproductive policy of drug prohibition, in the name of human freedom and of humanity's right to heal.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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