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Drugs: the great American scapegoat

for all social ills

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher


March 26, 2021

here is no drug problem in America. There never has been. However there is a HUGE problem with how America deals with drugs. Instead of learning about them and teaching Americans how to use them wisely and for good purposes -- such as religious inspiration, creativity and increased mental focus, the way that "drugs" have been used since caveman days -- we demonize such substances and blame every possible social problem on them. Why? Because if we were to acknowledge that drugs aren't a real problem, we'd have to look at the real causes of our problems with drugs: namely, modern cynicism, unfettered capitalism, and America's scientistic expectation that all "drugs" should act like aspirin, that we should simply take them and wait placidly for some specific effect, with no effort on our part to make ourselves open to the drug-aided inspiration and epiphany that we're expecting. And of course when this naive attitude inevitably leads to "bad trips," we blame the substance rather than our inability to use it wisely.

And so American politicians blame "drugs" for all of America's problems, thereby shooting the messenger that's trying to tell us that Americans are immature and improperly educated. Other nations have been deeply awed by psychoactive substances to the point of creating entire religions around them and the hints of cosmic truth that their ingestion provides. But Americans titter like grade-schoolers at such substances and imagine ways of harnessing them to achieve carnal self-fulfillment. At least that's the image that the Drug Warriors seek to perpetuate, desperate as they are to hide the fact that so-called "drugs" have ever been used for anything but evil. And so we see nothing but horrifying depictions of hedonist "drug use" on television, drug "fiends" shooting up with dirty needles and scumbag thugs "snorting blow" as loudly as they possibly can.

Check out the unintentionally hilarious scene in the drug-war propaganda film called "Crisis" from 2021, wherein Jake, the self-righteous undercover DEA agent, is shuttling a nefarious "drug dealer" (is there any other kind?) across town in an unmarked police car as the latter horrible "druggie" snorts like a disgruntled water buffalo, frequently swiping his forefinger under his nose, just in case the audio clues are insufficient to convince the viewer that the bad guy in question has been "doing" that evil drug par excellence called cocaine. (Oh, the shameless hussy!) The producers do everything but insert a lower-third graphic reading "rotten evil druggie" with an arrow pointing upward at the offender's constantly wriggling proboscis. One thinks for a moment that the indignant Christian Science good guy in the driver's seat is going to lose his cool, come out from undercover and shout, "Oh, hell no," as he slams on the brakes and begins to pummel his passenger for daring to flaunt his terrible evil drug use in such a noisy and plebeian fashion, like an open invitation for SWAT teams to start raiding his home at once and start kicking his grandmother in the face. ("And here's another kick for raising that scumbag son of yours!")

Meanwhile we censor our history books to expunge the fact that folks like Marco Polo, Benjamin Franklin, and Marcus Aurelius used opium; that MesoAmericans employed coca and psychedelics in their religious rituals, and above all the fact that Sigmund Freud himself considered cocaine to be a godsend cure for his depression.

America is in such deep denial about its childish inability to handle "drugs" that it has forced the entire world to adopt its own jaundiced attitude about the plant medicine that grows unbidden around us. Desperate to ignore the fact that there's a problem with our own attitudes toward psychoactive substances, we not only demonize such substances but we insist that the entire world do the same, on penalty of our Army marching into their countries unbidden to burn the plants and fungi that we have turned into scapegoats for our own social problems. Nor do corrupt politicians have the least incentive to change this status quo, since they know that drug laws can be used like poll taxes to suppress voting by minorities simply by targeting them with "drug-related" felonies in order to remove them from the voting rolls -- plus, we can invade countries at will, merely by associating its leadership in any way with the sale of non-western medicine. Just the excuse that an imperialist government needs to carry on business as usual despite today's ostensible anti-colonial sentiment.







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Previous essay: America's Juvenile Attitude Toward Drugs

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Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

I think we should start taking names. All politicians and government officials who work to keep godsends like psilocybin from the public should be held to account for crimes against humanity when the drug war finally ends.
Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
My approach to withdrawal: incrementally reduce daily doses over 6 months, or even a year, meanwhile using all the legal entheogens and psychedelics that you can find in a way likely to boost your endurance and "sense of purpose" to make withdrawal successful.
Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.
It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.
Hollywood presents cocaine as a drug of killers. In reality, strategic cocaine use by an educated person can lead to great mental power, especially as just one part of a pharmacologically balanced diet. That's why drug warriors want to outlaw free speech, to hide such facts.
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
The drug war follows me wherever I go. I was just researching "fun facts" about dogs, and http://petpedia.co told me that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as... searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?
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You have been reading an article entitled, Drugs: the great American scapegoat: for all social ills, published on March 26, 2021 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)