Finally, a drug war opponent who checks all my boxes

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Finally, a drug war opponent who checks all my boxes

an open letter to Julian Buchanan

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 28, 2024

The following correspondence is in response to Julian Buchanan's thoughtful message to me on Monday, February 26, 2024, on the Academia.edu website. Julian is a professor of social and culture studies at the Victoria University of Wellington. Our correspondence is in regard to Julian's 2018 post on WordPress entitled "Breaking Free From Prohibition: A Human Rights Approach to Successful Drug Reform."¹

Hi, Julian.

Thanks for that. I have just read (or rather re-read) your excellent post entitled "Breaking Free From Prohibition: A Human Rights Approach to Successful Drug Reform," and I agree that we are, indeed, on the same page. Frankly, I seldom read something that I find as both new and useful when it comes to the Drug War (there is so much unacknowledged "group think" out there, even from those who seem to be on the "right" side of these issues), but your warnings about problematic regulation seem to qualify. State regulation, as you write, is not a panacea, since we first have to recognize that denying psychoactive substances to human beings in the first place is the real problem.

This kind of prohibition is particularly worrisome in light of the ethnobotanical research of folks like Richard Schultes, who tell us that all tribal people have used psychoactive drugs for personal and religious reasons ². The outlawing of such substances takes on imperial overtones in light of this fact. It's as if the western world was not satisfied with simply dispossessing these cultures of their lands, but we now want to eradicate the very nature-friendly ideology upon which their societies have thrived.

Another thing that strikes me in reading your article, which is something I have said many times myself though in different ways, is that the Drug Warrior never does a true cost/benefit analysis of legalization proposals (or rather of re-legalization proposals). They focus exclusively on the potential downsides of legalization for young suburban Americans while ignoring the potential downsides of criminalization for all sorts of other demographics, like pain patients, the depressed, or the philosopher looking to follow up the study of altered states that was pioneered by William James ³ (not to mention the Blacks who will be killed in drive-by shootings and the Latin Americans who will become victims of civil wars, etc., and certainly not the poorly educated poor who will be lured into drug dealing, and thus into jail, with the financial incentives that prohibition creates for such illicit activities ⁴).

And so I appreciate your acknowledgement that there are other stakeholders in the drugs debate besides "impressionable young people," because this is something that even legalization ⁵ proponents generally fail to address in public, as if they too believed that the debate is all about keeping suburban white people safe.

I believe that the whole idea that "something must be done" (outside of merely decriminalizing private drug use and drug production for personal purposes) is a result of Drug Warrior fearmongering via agencies like the DEA and NIDA, as described by Philip Jenkins in "Synthetic Panics."⁶ Of course, as a practical matter, the long-term answer will no doubt require some sort of benign government oversight, but this fact, as you suggest, should not stop us from doing the right thing in the here and now: namely ending substance prohibition.

I think, instead, that what needs to change is the world's mindset toward drugs. The world needs to simply "grow up" when it comes to psychoactive substances. We need to start thinking of psychoactive drug use in the same way that everyone now thinks of other potentially dangerous activities like horseback riding or driving a car: yes, they can be dangerous and even fatal, but we never consider outlawing these activities based on horror stories in the tabloid press ⁷. Neither should a well-publicized drug overdose of a rock star lead us to outlaw drugs, let alone to deny the drug in question to anyone anywhere, at any dose, for any reason, ever. (This is the absurd logic of the Drug War: that a substance that has one bad use can never be used wisely anywhere ever.) This, I think, dovetails with your point that the problem is prohibition itself and that regulation schemes cannot help us if they are in denial about this fundamental fact.

We will also have to guard against a powerplay on the part of the healthcare industry to claim the right to decide for us if psychoactive substances are safe enough to be legal, since psychoactive drug use is all about attempts at personal improvement, self-transcendence and even religious experience, topics about which doctors qua doctors have no expertise whatsoever. All that they can tell us about psychoactive drugs is their potential physical actions at certain doses. So while they can define risks, they cannot themselves perform a risk/benefit analysis of psychoactive drug use given the highly personal psychological and sometimes spiritual nature of the benefits in question ⁸.

I could go on and on, of course: that's why I have made this topic the focus of my retirement years, which, I believe, is another thing that we have in common.

Best of luck in your ongoing efforts.

Brian Quass
Abolishthedea.com

PS I also appreciate your reference to the medical benefits that we are forgoing in the name of prohibition. This is something that is rarely pointed out. I myself have come to the conclusion that we are living in a new Dark Ages thanks to prohibition, because science is currently blinded to all potential beneficial uses of outlawed psychoactive substances. Perhaps you are familiar with "The Book of the Damned ⁹ " by Charles Hoyt ¹⁰. He wrote in the early 1900s about how certain facts are "damned" (i.e. ignored) by science whose goal is to organize the world according to certain preconceptions. I believe Hoyt "didn't know from damnation," however, because since his time, we have damned all reports about positive effects of "drugs," and so dogmatically gone without an untold number of potential godsends, both psychological and physical.

PPS Sorry, but I can't resist one plug: I have launched a new radio station called Drug War Radio to combat Drug War ideology. I'm trying to mix good music with a great message! If you can think of those who might be interested, feel free to share a link.¹¹

I'm still casting about for the best format, but I think it will be top-ranking alternative hits alternating with snippets of anti-drug-war chatter, quotes, parodies, etc. My real goal is to make prohibition literally laughable and to encourage others to do the same. We need plays and movies ¹² ¹³ and books that highlight the absurdities to which Drug War ideology has led us: including that self-imposed ignorance about potential medical breakthroughs.

Open Letters

People

Notes:

1: Breaking Free From Prohibition: A Human Rights Approach to Successful Drug Reform Buchanan CPA, DSW, MA, PhD, Julian, Drugs, Human Rights & Harm Reduction, 2018 (up)
2: Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers Schultes, Richard, 1979 (up)
3: William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas DWP (up)
4: The Invisible Mass Shootings DWP (up)
5: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
6: Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs Jenkins, Philip, New York University Press, New York, 1999 (up)
7: Horses Kill The Partnership for a Death Free America (up)
8: How Science News Reckons Without the Drug War DWP (up)
9: The Book of the Damned continued DWP (up)
10: The Book of the Damned Fort, Charles (up)
11: Drug War Radio DWP (up)
12: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
13: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)

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against the hateful war on US

Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.

The problem for alcoholics is that alcohol decreases rationality in proportion as it provides the desired self-transcendence. Outlawed drugs can provide self-transcendence with INCREASED rationality and be far more likely to keep the problem drinker off booze than abstinence.

Your drug war has caused the disappearance of over 60,000 Mexicans over the last 20 years. It has turned inner cities into shooting galleries. It has turned America into a penal colony. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and put bureaucrats in charge of deciding if our religions are "sincere."

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx

I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.

This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.

And where did politicians get the idea that irresponsible white American young people are the only stakeholders when it comes to the question of re-legalizing drugs??? There are hundreds of millions of other stakeholders: philosophers, pain patients, the depressed.

I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.

After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.

Now the folks who helped Matthew get Ketamine must be sacrificed on the altar of the Drug War, lest people start thinking that the Drug War itself was at fault.y

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