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Drug Warriors can go to Hell

a little well-intentioned feedback from a victim of America's war on mind medicine

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 12, 2022



Editor's Comments:

May 28, 2025

female editor holding pencil


Don't look at me, I told the Herr Philosopher that he should delete this post. But he told me, "Ellen" he said -- my name is Ellen -- "Ellen," he said, "this post should rather remain online as testimony to the fact that I, too, am human, that I, too, am subject to mercurial moods, for..." and here he raised his right index finger into the air by way of emphasis, "...I come from a race that has been noted, time out of mind, for vigour of fancy and ardour of passion." I was like, wow! What can one say to THAT? Of course, I later realized that Brian was just facetiously quoting the opening to "Eleonora" by Edgar Allan Poe, but his response really impressed me at the time -- I figured for the moment that he actually did come from a race of tempestuous visionaries. Why not? But you had to be there, I guess, confronted as I was by his lofty forehead and his scintillating orbs. "Those eyes! Those large, those shining, those divine orbs! They became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers." Or so I thought at the time. It later occurred to me that the boss was just joking, however -- except for the bit about his simple humanity, of course. I think the Human League said it best: Brian is only human, born to make mistakes, in light of which bombshell I ask the reader to place the most generous possible construction on the perhaps somewhat unhinged harangue that follows.

DISCUSSION QUESTION:

Is the term "unhinged harangue" redundant? Why or why not?


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Dear Drug Warrior:

You've made me live my whole life without godsend medicine that grows at my very feet. You've made sure that newly discovered godsends for depression like MDMA 1 and nitrous oxide are unavailable to me. You've forced me to rely on the psychiatric pill mill 2 with its expensive and ineffective meds that cause chemical dependency, thanks to which I have to take these mind-numbing pills every day of my life for the rest of my life. You have overthrown natural law by denying me the freely given bounty of Mother Nature and established America as a drug-hating Christian Science republic, completely ignorant of the fact that psychoactive medicines spawned entire religions, that Benjamin Franklin enjoyed opium 3 , that HG Wells enjoyed coca wine, and that Plato's views of the afterlife were inspired by the psychedelic mysteries at Eleusis.

You've ensured, in short, that I've been unnecessarily depressed my entire life thanks to your unprecedented hubris in outlawing godsend medicines.

But wait, there's more: while screwing me over royally like this, you have created a world of violence out of whole cloth, including civil wars overseas and thousands of deaths a year in the States, with almost 800 a year in Chicago alone -- all caused by the prohibition of substances about which you lie lie lie, insisting against all evidence that they can only be used for evil.

No, you are the evil, Drug Warrior -- you and your anti-patient, anti-nature, anti-scientific war against Godsend medicines.

And what has your Drug War accomplished? There were no young people dying on our streets when opiates were legal. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that. How? By refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate product as to quantity and quality, and refusing to re-legalize the endless alternative substances that could keep using from obsessing about one substance in the first place.

Oh, did I mention that you have stolen elections for fascist conservatives like Trump because you wrote your hateful unconstitutional anti-medicine laws with an eye toward disfranchising millions of minorities?

I think what I'm trying to say here, Drug Warrior, is, um... Oh, yes here's what I'm driving at: Go to hell!









Notes for essay entitled Drug Warriors can go to Hell: a little well-intentioned feedback from a victim of America's war on mind medicine:

1: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
2: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




If there was free speech in America, we would see billboards demanding freedom to use psychoactive substances for religious purposes, or to heal, or to follow-up on the research of William James regarding the nature of human consciousness.

So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987.

We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.

"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau

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

Materialists are always trying to outdo each other in describing the insignificance of humankind. Crick at least said we were "a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Musk downsizes us further to one single microbe. He wins!

The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?

The DEA is still saying that psilocybin has no medical uses and is addictive. They should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for using such lies to keep people from using the gifts of Mother Nature.

Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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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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