an open letter to UNODC, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 29, 2024
There are no drugs of abuse. There are bad laws and social policies (like a refusal to educate) that make drugs dangerous.
Thousands of young people were not dying in the streets when opium 1 was legal in America. They're dying in the streets now from opiates because prohibition limits their ability to find safe drugs with known dosages, while promoting fear instead of knowledge.
These deaths were all preventable -- and they were all caused by DRUG WARRIORS!
End the Drug War: get out of the business of ruining people's lives because they are trying to use time-honored medicines!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Start educating, stop arresting!
Start regulating, rather than demanding that everyone in the world stop using indigenous godsends!!! DRUG WARRIORS are as biased and insane as Francisco Pizarro when it comes to drug policy. They are in complete denial: they blame all the downsides of prohibition on "drugs" themselves.
No wonder. They don't want to accept the sad truth: that THEY are responsible for the thousands of deaths of young people on American streets.
An Englishman's home is his castle.
An American's home is a bouncy castle for the DEA.
The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.
I hated the show "The Apprentice," because it taught a cynical and hate-filled lesson about the proper way to "get ahead" in the world. I saw Trump as a menace back then, long before he started declaring that American elections were corrupt before the very first vote was cast!
Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.
The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.
There would be almost no relapses for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.
Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug:
Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits.
My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine, 1884
We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks. People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!
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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