Eight Reasons to End Drug Testing

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Eight Reasons to End Drug Testing

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 20, 2019

1) Drugs were made illegal in the United States, not for health reasons, but to punish political enemies - by turning them into felons and thus removing them from the voting rolls

2) Drug tests are not based on any known correlation between the use of any particular drug and an inability to perform any particular job

3) Drug testing seeks to establish Christian Science as a state religion by denying Americans the right to use medications to improve their mental condition

4) Drug tests are an extrajudicial form of law enforcement, which punishes misdemeanor cases of drug use with expulsion from the job market, thereby constituting cruel and unusual punishment

5) Many of the drugs that we test for have been shown to decrease depression, fight PTSD and even cure alcoholism -- and yet we reward those who dare to use them with unemployment?

6) Drug testing allows corporations to hire only docile employees who aren't too finicky about their perceived "rights" as human beings and as workers

7) Drug testing is just another way for the billionaire 1% to lord it over the rest of us by forcing us to undergo humiliating and invasive searches while our CEOs freely use LSD and marijuana with rock stars on their multi-million-dollar yachts

8) Drug testing is based on the patently false assumptions of the Drug War, which has turned the U.S. into a penal colony and fomented violence and bloodshed overseas, justifying U.S. intervention to attack the bad guys that our own drug laws have created out of whole cloth

Did I say 8? I meant 9: The use of Mother Nature's plants is the birthright of every Earthling. It is a right guaranteed by natural law, for as John Locke asserts, we human beings have a natural right to "the earth and all that lies therein." Natural laws cannot justifiably be infringed by common law in a free country -- least of all the United States, the first country in the world to be explicitly founded on the notion of a natural law that trumps common law in order to keep despotism at bay.

Don't think that access to plants is guaranteed by natural law? God even granted that access in Genesis, where he claimed that everything he created in nature was for us -- not for our government. If access to plants is not guaranteed under natural law then natural law is meaningless and human beings have only those rights that their governmental overlords deem fit to grant them. Yet confused preachers rant against Mother Nature's plant medicines from the pulpit, meanwhile remaining hypocritically quiet about the death toll racked up by alcohol and cigarettes -- or the death toll racked up by America's war on plants, whose despotic goals the politicians attempt to disguise by calling it a "War on Drugs" instead.

FOR PHILOSOPHERS: Note that the urine tests presuppose the unproven proposition that having a given substance in your system makes you incapable of performing a specific job, that, for instance, you are unable to greet customers at Walmart because you smoked a joint three days ago. This, of course, is mere folly, an obvious lie. The truth is probably the opposite, that in many cases the toker might prove a most affable host. But since this drug-testing justification fails so obviously, what is the true purpose of employee drug-testing? Answer: to enforce unpopular laws through extrajudicial means, to turn a non-crime or misdemeanor into a death sentence that bars one from gaining active employment in America. Thus drug testing not only is extrajudicial punishment, but it comes with penalties far beyond anything that a court would ever impose, even for a suspected murderer: namely, eviction from the job market, where the Christian Science deprecation of natural substances is taken as scripture, as American Sharia, often enforced by liquor-swilling CEOs.

{^You've got to love Drug War morality: you can prove you're a good person merely by pissing. And your reward? Well, you may not do much with your life, but at least you can have a headstone that reads: "Passed every single drug test he ever took!" Well done, good and faithful! And if you want to be even MORE moral, you can always turn in your parents for smoking marijuana, maybe even get a photo opportunity with the appropriately titled Drug Czar. Ah! Isn't democracy swell?!}{

The Positive Idiocy of 'Testing Positive'

Afterthought: May 11, 2022

Just watched a documentary in which a pilot "tested positive for marijuana use" and of course lost his job. The problem is that, in a Drug War society, such draconian punishment is not based on science but rather on politics. "Tested positive" simply means that marijuana was found in some quantity, even the slightest trace. The employer has no proof that small traces of previous marijuana use amount to impairment: rather they rely on Drug Warrior assumptions and prejudices to establish that claim. "We know this drug is evil and therefore any amount is too much when it comes to safety!" That's a safety standard that has far more to do with superstition than with science.

By the same logic, we should be able to fire pilots who tested positive for using alcohol, in any amount, even if that use had occurred two weeks prior to the test in question.

In a world in which we are TOTALLY honest about drugs -- without regard for either self-interested marketplace hype OR drug-warrior superstition -- we would perform drug testing ¹ ONLY to uncover scientifically established levels of true impairment. Instead, when it comes to demonized medicines, we superstitiously declare as a society that "one swallow makes a summer" and we consider that the slightest use (at any time, in any dose) constitutes a diminution of public safety. Yet another way in which the Drug War ideology of substance demonization fries the American brain.

editor note from abolishthedea.com

July 8, 2022

As usual the Drug War is the exact opposite of the truth. Rather than firing folks for using psychoactive medicine, we should REQUIRE THEM to use drugs like MDMA ² & psilocybin, at least if the person in question is a hothead. That's the only real answer to school shootings, but sadly that solution is such anathema to the drug-war ideology of substance demonization that God knows how many grade-schoolers will have to die before the penny drops. As for the geopolitical realm, the only way that the world can plausibly avoid nuclear armageddon ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ is to REQUIRE the use of empathogens by world leaders who have their fingers on the nuclear trigger. This is why the Drug War has done so much more than simply fail: it has blinded America to all sorts of answers to modern problems: not only geopolitically, but therapeutically and pedagogically as well, as the substances that we love to hate have the potential to help us fight Alzheimer's ⁷ Disease and to increase our appreciation for music and Mother Nature, etc. etc.

Why am I short on specifics here? Because the Drug War has so fried the American brain that researchers do not even allow themselves to think of such potential cures, let alone to risk arrest and ridicule for pursuing them in the age of our anti-scientific Drug War.

?167?

Drug Testing

Notes for essay entitled Eight Reasons to End Drug Testing:

1: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition DWP (up)
2: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
3: 8 Nuclear Close Calls that Nearly Spelled Disaster Davidson, Lucy, History Hit, 2022 (up)
4: 35 Facts About Goldsboro Accident Hartwell, Therese, Facts.Net, 2025 (up)
5: A Darkening Horizon: Nuclear Dangers Around the World with Matthew Bunn Bunn, Matthew, Harvard Kennedy School, 2023 (up)
6: “Google Books.” 2019. Google.com. 2019. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Command_and_Control/H0-CJckES44C?hl=en. (up)
7: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.

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.

A law proposed in Colorado in February 2024 would have criminalized positive talk about drugs online. What? The world is on the brink of nuclear war because of hate-driven politics, and I can be arrested for singing the praises of empathogens?

Democratic societies need to outlaw prohibition for many reasons, the first being the fact that prohibition removes millions of minorities from the voting rolls, thereby handing elections to fascists and insurrectionists.

Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy. It is based on the following crazy idea: that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.

All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.

This is the mentality for today's materialist researcher when it comes to "laughing gas." He does not care that it merely cheers folks up. He wants to see what is REALLY going on with the substance, using electrodes and brain scans.

What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!

The Drug War is based on a huge number of misconceptions and prejudices. Obviously it's about power and racism too. It's all of the above. But every time I don't mention one specifically, someone makes out that I'm a moron. Gotta love Twitter.

I have nothing against science, BTW (altho' I might feel differently after a nuclear war!) I just want scientists to "stay in their lane" and stop pretending to be experts on my own personal mood and consciousness.

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

No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).

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.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

(up)

Eight Reasons to End Drug Testing

The Positive Idiocy of 'Testing Positive'

Drug Testing

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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

Diary of a Drug Fiend