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 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.
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 & 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 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 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.
You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.
A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.
The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.
It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)
If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.
PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.
Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)
Selected Bibliography
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Pollan, Michael "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence " 2018 Penguin Books
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Szasz, Thomas "Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers" 1974 Anchor Press/Doubleday
Whitaker, Robert "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America " 2010 Crown
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Zuboff , Shoshana "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2019 Public Affairs
Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.
