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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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.

Drug testing should flag impairment only. Any other use is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.

We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.

I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing "Howl!" while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like "Howl!"

Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.

Using the billions now spent on caging users, we could end the whole phenomena of both physical and psychological addiction by using "drugs to fight drugs." But drug warriors do not want to end addiction, they want to keep using it as an excuse to ban drugs.

Ketamine is like any other drug. It has good uses for certain people in certain situations. Nowadays, people insist that a drug be okay in every situation for everybody (especially American teens) before they will say that it's okay. That's crazy and anti-scientific.

Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.

The depressed Canadian Claire Brosseau wants the state to kill her. This is the same state that refuses to let her use drugs that could make her want to live. https://abolishthedea.com/drug_use_is_not_worse_than_death

The massive use of plea deals lets prosecutors threaten drug suspects into giving up their rights to a fair trial.

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

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