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Have you been brainwashed by the drug war?

Take this test to find out

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 15, 2022



Is the following statement true or false:

Drug use is bad, but criminalization has failed.

If you answered "true," you have been brainwashed by Drug War propaganda, which seeks to make us fear substances rather than to understand them.

The fact is that no substance is bad in and of itself. When we think in this superstitious way, we blind ourselves to all sorts of positive uses for the substances that we demonize. Did you know that neuron-growing psychedelics could be used to fight Alzheimer's 1 disease and autism? Of course you didn't, because the Drug War ideology of substance demonization prevents us from thinking this way. The Drug War tells us to stop thinking about substances and start fearing them instead. Scientists are actually prevented from doing research that could prove the usefulness of the substances that we demonize today.

But the idea that drug use is bad, in and of itself, without regard to context, is the BIG LIE of the Drug War -- a lie that is enforced by Joe Biden 2 3's Office of National Drug Control Policy, whose members are actually forbidden from considering any positive uses for "drugs" once they have been criminalized. It's that big lie that has forced a chronic depressive like myself to go a lifetime now without accessing the godsend medicine that grows at my very feet, foisting me off instead onto dependence-forming Big Pharma meds that I have to take every day of my life for my entire life, and which, far from providing inspiration, brings me lethargy and foggy thinking. It's ironic that the drugs that truly DO fry the brain turn out to be Big Pharma antidepressants 4 5.

But if you answered "true" to the above question, don't feel too bad. The above statement is partly true, after all: the Drug War has failed. In fact, it's done far worse than fail. It's spread bloodshed around the world by provoking civil wars and inner-city shootings. In 2021, the Drug War caused almost 800 deaths in Chicago alone because substance prohibition created well-armed street gangs in the same way that liquor prohibition created the Mafia. Meanwhile, the Drug War has disfranchised millions of minorities, thereby facilitating the election of the Drug War fascists who wish to ramp up this failed war by executing those who dare traffic in the medical godsends that we have chosen to demonize. So, yes, criminalization has failed spectacularly, bringing fascism in its wake by empowering tyrants to use it as an excuse to crack heads.

But the fact is that criminalization never had the right to succeed, because it is premised on the false idea that drugs must be judged politically, without regard for their true potential. That's why demagogue politicians can demonize and criminalize a drug by citing just a few instances of misuse -- meanwhile completely ignoring the rights and needs of depressed folks like myself. And so with a blatant disregard for logic and statistics, we outlaw godsends that could help hundreds of millions, all so that we can crack down on a few young people whom we have failed to educate about substances. And why did we not educate them? Because drug-war ideology insists that we demonize psychoactive medicines rather than understand them and find ways to use them as safely as possible for the good of human beings and humanity itself.



June 15, 2022



Here's some more inconvenient truths that the know-nothing Drug Warrior does not want you to know: Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin enjoyed poppy-inspired dreams. HG Wells and Jules Verne enjoyed coca wine while writing their stories. Francis Crick imagined the DNA helix while taking generous helpings of psychedelics. Plato got his ideas about the afterlife from the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries6. The Vedic-Hindu religion was inspired by psychoactive botanicals. The Incans considered coca to be a God. Mesoamerican religions used so-called magic mushrooms, until Columbus arrived and forced the few surviving worshipers to achieve a much shabbier self-transcendence with violence-causing liquor.

So, are drugs "bad"? It's a meaningless question. Goodness or badness only apply to how they are used. What a loss to the world when botanically clueless politicians tell us that the medicines that inspired entire religions have no reasonable use whatsoever for humankind worldwide. What an insidious stealth tyranny, one whose very victims have been taught to support it, as for instance when black politicians continue to this day to support the War on Drugs, utterly failing to hold the Drug War responsible for the inner city violence that prohibition has created out of whole cloth.

This willful ignorance of the facts of the case is nowhere better exemplified than in the fact that Lisa Ling recently produced an hour-long documentary on Chicago violence in which she NEVER EVEN MENTIONED THE DRUG WAR!!!



Facts not fear, Lisa! Education not incarceration 7 .


June 23, 2022

It's small wonder that Americans are bamboozled by Drug War lies. All of us have been taught since childhood to say no to Mother Nature's godsend meds, a lesson enforced by television and films, which show only bad uses for drugs -- a lesson further enforced by academia, which publishes papers only about negative drug use, never about beneficial use (like helping folks enjoy music and love their fellow human beings). Many of us even received teddy bears from the State Police and DARE after pledging to fear and demonize psychoactive medicine for the rest of our drug-free life! (Ooh, I mean, drug-free from nasty drugs hated by politicians -- not alcohol, tobacco or Big Pharma 8 9 meds, of course, nor from coffee, Monster Energy Drinks, etc. etc.)









Notes for essay entitled Have you been brainwashed by the drug war?: Take this test to find out:

1: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
2: Joe Biden (up)
3: Joe Biden’s Drug War Record Is So Much Worse Than You Think Bienenstock, David, Leafly, 2019 (up)
4: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
5: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)
6: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
7: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
8: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
9: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




No drug causes addiction after one use. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis.

National Geo published an article entitled "Coca: a Blessing and a Curse." Coca was never a curse. Most people used it wisely, just as most people drink wisely. Doctors demonized it because it really worked and it could put them out of business. https://abolishthedea.com/sigmund_freuds_real_breakthrough_was_not_psychoanalysis.php

Psychiatrists never acknowledge the biggest downside to modern antidepressants: the fact that they turn you into a patient for life. That's demoralizing, especially since the best drugs for depression are outlawed by the government.

Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.

Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!

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

If politicians wanted to outlaw coffee, a bunch of Kevin Sabets would come forward and start writing books designed to scare us off the drink by cherry-picking negative facts from scientific studies.

The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.

My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.

Had the FDA been around in the Indus Valley 3,500 years ago, there would be no Hindu religion today, because they would have found some potential problem with the use of soma.


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






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Book Cover

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

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Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

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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.

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