Five Ways that the drug war causes the problems that it claims to solve
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
July 20, 2020
The Drug War creates an enormous interest in "drugs" (aka Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines) by constantly harping on them as the root of all evil, in a way that no other society has ever done since the beginning of time.
The Drug War creates drug cartels in the same way that liquor prohibition created the mob.
The Drug War outlaws thousands of godsend psychoactive plant medicines that are far less addictive than Big Pharma meds, while incentivizing unscrupulous black marketeers to sell the most addictive synthetic substances possible.
The Drug War creates violence: including the Mexican Drug War that killed 85 Mexican civilians per day in 2018.
The Drug War guarantees impurity of drug supplies, and not just because unscrupulous dealers "cut" their product with toxic substances either: the DEA itself deliberately poisoned marijuana crops in the 1980s by spraying them with paraquat, a weed killer that has since been shown to cause Parkinson's Disease.
Conclusion: "drugs" are the modern boogeyman and scapegoat: it is what we talk about when we want to demonize bad behavior without having to discuss the social problems that created it, such as lack of education, not simply about drugs but about common sense and personal responsibility. It is also what we talk about when we want to remove a population from the voting rolls by tossing them in jail and removing their voting rights. The Drug War is thus simply a political ploy which helps the hypocritical beer-swilling Drug Warrior steal elections in order to keep the mendacious and anti-scientific Drug War mentality in full force. Why? In order to benefit the special interests who profit from it: including Big Pharma 12 , the American Psychiatric Association, Big Liquor, Law Enforcement, and the Corrections Industry.
Author's Follow-up: October 14, 2022
And these five points only scratch the surface. The Drug War's ideology of substance demonization has forced children in hospice to experience unnecessary pain because some hospitals refuse to administer morphine 3 , for the unscientific reason that they think the drug is evil in and of itself. Yes, the Drug Warrior would rather have children suffer than to re-legalize plant medicine. And then there are the depressed who have to undergo shock therapy because we have outlawed all the godsend medicines that might have helped them. In fact, the truth is exactly opposite from the lies of the Partnership for a Drug Free America 4. It is the Drug War that literally fries brains thanks to the ECT that it makes necessary by outlawing medical godsends. The Drug Warrior would rather have school shootings and nuclear war 567 than to legalize godsend medicine. MDMA 8 could turn the world peaceful, but the Drug Warrior does not want peace. Ecstasy brought peace and love to the multi-ethnic dance floor in 1990s Britain, but Drug Warriors cracked down on the safe drug "E," all because of a handful of deaths which were caused by the Drug Warriors refusal to develop safe use guidelines. The result? The dance floor devolved into liquor-fueled violence and rave safety had to be enforced by special forces troops!
When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!
To treat opioid use disorder, we should re-normalize the peaceable smoking of opium at home as an alternative to drinking alcohol.
To say that taking SSRIs daily is better than using opium daily is a value judgement, not a scientific one.
It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.
Capitalism naturally results in disease-mongering by a self-interested medically establishment -- and disease-mongering requires the suppression of medicines that work holistically.
"The Oprah Winfrey Fallacy": the idea that a statistically insignificant number of cases constitutes a crisis, provided ONLY that the villain of the piece is something that racist politicians have demonized as a "drug."
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks. People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!
Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.
In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.
Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.
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.
And these five points only scratch the surface. The Drug War's ideology of substance demonization has forced children in hospice to experience unnecessary pain because some hospitals refuse to administer morphine 3 , for the unscientific reason that they think the drug is evil in and of itself. Yes, the Drug Warrior would rather have children suffer than to re-legalize plant medicine. And then there are the depressed who have to undergo shock therapy because we have outlawed all the godsend medicines that might have helped them. In fact, the truth is exactly opposite from the lies of the Partnership for a Drug Free America 4. It is the Drug War that literally fries brains thanks to the ECT that it makes necessary by outlawing medical godsends. The Drug Warrior would rather have school shootings and nuclear war 5 6 7 than to legalize godsend medicine. MDMA 8 could turn the world peaceful, but the Drug Warrior does not want peace. Ecstasy brought peace and love to the multi-ethnic dance floor in 1990s Britain, but Drug Warriors cracked down on the safe drug "E," all because of a handful of deaths which were caused by the Drug Warriors refusal to develop safe use guidelines. The result? The dance floor devolved into liquor-fueled violence and rave safety had to be enforced by special forces troops!
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