computer screen with words DRUG WAR BLOG


Hating on Drugs?



by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher




May 25, 2024

hat do you guys make of the tweet that I read this morning by one "American Muskrat"?

"I am under the impression the Philosopher is speaking of improving the mind directly with drugs, consciousness expansion, that sort of thing. I don't buy into that anymore.

Insomnia sucks, it's why I'm drinking beer in a hotel bathroom at 4:40am."


I don't know about you, but I took this as a prohibitionist broadside. In other words, I thought that the Muskrat was dissing godsend medicines.

Based on that assumption, I took that tweet as a challenge and responded rapidly with the following indignant barrage.

Read folks like Alexander Shulgin1, James Fadiman2, and Stanislav Grof3 for documented evidence of how drugs can improve the mind and even grow new neurons. For the latest evidence, see Psychedelic Medicine by Richard Louis Miller4.


And this is before we even start talking about the obvious fact that almost ANY "pick me up" drug can be used to fight depression -- except that racist politicians have convinced us with non-stop indoctrination that humans are too infantile to ever use them wisely5.


I don't know how anybody can say that psychoactive drugs cannot help when there are thousands we have never studied and even the known drugs are studied through a lens of Christian Science biashttps://www.abolishthedea.com/citations.php.


They must not be aware of the way that drugs like MDMA are being used, even now, to revitalize old relationships and marriages and to make talk therapy really work. See "Listening to Ecstasy" by Charles Wininger6.


Author's Follow-up: May 25, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


Update: The guy means it. Weird. It's always hard for me to believe that there are people out there who have swallowed America's drug-war propaganda hook, line and sinker. They actually tell us that they know that there is no benefit in drugs -- not realizing that they use drugs every day of their life: coffee, nicotine, alcohol, antidepressants, MONSTER energy drinks7. They mean there's no benefit in the drugs they don't like.

Typical American know-it-all-ism.

But then he's obviously a troll, since only a troll would tell a 65-year-old that he's "going through a phase."



Notes:

1 Shulgin, Alexander, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story , Transform Press, (up)
2 Fadiman, James, The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys , Park Street Press, New York, 2011 (up)
3 Grof, Stanislav, The transpersonal vision: the healing potential of nonordinary states of consciousness, Sounds True, Boulder, Co., 1998 (up)
4 Miller, Richard Lawrence, Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State, Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 1966 (up)
5 Quass, Brian, The real reason for depression in America, 2019 (up)
6 Wininger, Charles, Listening to Ecstasy, 2021 (up)
7 Quass, Brian, There are no such things as drugs, 2020 (up)



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Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
We need to push back against the very idea that the FDA is qualified to tell us what works when it comes to psychoactive medicines. Users know these things work. That's what counts. The rest is academic foot dragging.
We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.
America is insane: it makes liquor officially legal and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.
The drug war encourages us to judge people based on what they use and in what context. Even if the couch potato had no conscious health goals, their use of MJ is very possibly shielding them from health problems, like headaches, sleeplessness, and overreliance on alcohol.
And so, by ignoring all "up" sides to drugs, the DEA points to potential addiction as a knock-down argument for their prohibition. This is the logic of children (and uneducated children at that). It is a cost-benefit analysis that ignores all benefits.
America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
Drug warriors are too selfish and short-sighted to fight real problems, so they blame everything on drugs.
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.
More Tweets






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You have been reading an article entitled, Hating on Drugs? published on May 25, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)