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How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War Part II

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 1, 2019



2025 update



Author's Follow-up: May 21, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up
If I had this to write over again, I would replace the term "liberal" below with "neo-liberal." I do not believe in bashing liberal norms -- I am just trying to unearth the erroneous assumptions held by seemingly good people on the subject of drugs.


Dear Editors of the Atlantic:

If you are in any way sympathetic with correspondent Graeme Wood's misleading musings on the Drug War (in his July 2019 homage to Mark Kleiman), then I plead with you to read the following, and read it with an open mind. I write this because I'm an enemy of America's Drug War, and I'm convinced that its "staying power" is due far more to liberal confusion on this topic than to conservative recalcitrance. As you must know, the Drug War was commenced by Richard Nixon as a means of silencing his critics by turning them into felons and removing them from the voting rolls. It was not set up with America's health in mind. Yet Nixon's Drug War remains entrenched in the American zeitgeist today. Why? Because even those who oppose it put forward weak and contingent arguments that unnecessarily yield ground to the Drug Warrior's bogus concerns and justifications.

To make my points as clearly as possible, I will proceed by citing a variety of well-meaning liberal assumptions about the Drug War, followed by my explanation of why they are misleading. Let me assure you in advance that this is not an exercise in liberal bashing, since I consider myself a liberal as well, albeit one in the stamp of GK Chesterton.

1) Liberals generally share the conservative viewpoint that human beings should not use Mother Nature's bounty in order to improve their mental health. Such a viewpoint, however, is nothing less than the theology of Christian Science as applied to mental health. As such, it is a religious tenet, not a view based on scientific facts.

2) Liberals tend to talk about the misuse of drugs in isolation. Thus, if they see teenagers misusing drug A, they write movingly of the problem, considering that they are advancing an implicit knock-down argument for the criminalization of drug A. This kind of argument completely ignores the needs of millions (perhaps even billions) of human beings who could benefit from the responsible use of drug A. Furthermore, it ignores the millions of innocents who will be made homeless or killed on behalf of making drug A illegal, victims on both the domestic and foreign front, caught up in violence so prevalent that it has spawned an entire new genre of movies 1 2 : the Drug War genre. This genre includes films like Clockers, American Gangster, Empire, cocaine 3 4 Cowboys, L.A. Wars, etc., films in which self-righteous Americans gleefully violate the U.S. Constitution to "take down" Russian and South American "scumbags" (our custom-made bad guys created by the Drug War out of whole cloth).

3) Liberals tend to take the criminalization of Mother Nature's bounty as common sense. What they fail to realize is that this criminalization is a modern invention, established by corrupt and bigoted politicians, politicians who don't so much object to drugs as to the folks who use them. Many, including myself, would make the argument that government had no right to outlaw the God-given medicinal bounty of Mother Nature that grows at our very feet - especially in a country where we're granted the right to pursue happiness. America is a country built on natural law, and natural law has always supposed an Earthling's right to the plants and fungi that grow at his or her very feet. In the Jefferson America envisioned in the Declaration of Independence, there is no legitimate way for government to infringe upon our access and use of the plants of Mother Nature, a viewpoint clearly stated by John Locke, Jefferson's political inspiration, in Two Treatises on Government.

4) Liberals have rolled over and played dead when it comes to drug testing 5 , to which no one seems to object today. In short, it is a total victory for Nixon's know-nothing Drug War. For what is drug-testing? It is the extrajudicial enforcement of Christian Science as applied to mental health. It is the punishment of a misdemeanor offense* with starvation, because anyone who dares use the medical bounty of Mother Nature is deprived of a job - in the absence of proof that said drug use would have impeded their job performance.

*Actually, it's the punishment of a non-offense, since the law does not generally punish the mere presence of illegal substances in the bloodstream.



5) Liberals tend to associate psychedelic plant medicines with hippies. They are thereby ignoring almost 2,000 years of western history, in which a who's who of Ancient Greeks and Romans (Plato, Cicero, Plutarch, Aristophanes...) attended the yearly Eleusian mysteries, where they "communed with the goddess" with the help of a psychedelic substance, a secretive ritual which many participants later described as the most important event of their life. The ceremony was held yearly until it was tellingly shut down by a Christian emperor as a threat to religion. Just so we banish psychedelics today as a threat to the modern state religion of Christian Science as applied to mental health.

6) Liberals like Kleiman believe that we should legalize only SOME plants, and then do so "ever so carefully." It's as if the freedom of speech6 had been taken away from us by corrupt politicians and now liberals are advocating that we restore those rights "ever so carefully." Why "ever so carefully"? Does Kleiman not realize that this is a matter of principle, a wrong that is demanding immediate redress? Kleiman can only draw such meek conclusions because he holds many of the false ideas outlined above. For starters, he bases drug policy on the potential and theoretical ills that it might bring, totally ignoring the enormous ills that the Drug War is already bringing each and every day by ruining lives, overcrowding our prisons, killing inner-city residents, and justifying U.S. intervention in foreign countries.

There is much more to say, but I stop here because, quite frankly, I do not believe that you are going to read this, much less give it an objective hearing. These ideas of mine might have rung a bell with liberals 40 years ago, but it really seems like the drug-war mentality has triumphed in America. That said, I'll assume the best and end by telling you why I feel so strongly on this matter.

As a depressed American, I have spent the last 45 years on the receiving end of psychiatry's addictive nostrums. Like more than 1 in 10 Americans, I have to take an SSRI/SNRI for life, not because I want to but because I have grown to be chemically dependent on the substance. But why did I start on these addictive pills in the first place? Because Nixon's Drug War outlawed the non-addictive psychotherapies that had shown such promise in treating depression in the 1950s. And so I'm forced to remain on these mind-fogging meds for a lifetime thanks to the Drug War. Moreover, I am banned from enjoying the therapeutic benefits of the psychedelic renaissance since most psychedelics are contraindicated for patients taking modern antidepressants 7.

Psychiatry has thus addicted me (first with Valium, later with antidepressants) BECAUSE of the Drug War. Where is the liberal concern for myself and the millions like me, the casualties of Kleiman's "slow and cautious" approach on legalizing psychedelics? And yet liberals like Graeme feel free to flippantly dismiss the value of psychedelics and wholeheartedly accept the fascist notion that plants and fungi can justifiably be criminalized.

Plants and fungi: criminalized! It sounds like a Ray Bradbury science-fiction story to me: a future tyrannical government outlaws plants! And yet this is the "enlightened" public policy that America is following in the 21st century? Unfortunately, humans tend to have myopic vision when it comes to recognizing the blatant injustices of their own time. So I'm not sure you catch the irony here.

But here's hoping that you do! Here's hoping that the Atlantic will think twice in the future before running stories that only serve to philosophically strengthen the Drug War zeitgeist.

If I've convinced you that the default liberal position is blind to certain truths, feel free to forward me an advance copy of your next article in which one of your authors speculates on drug legalization 8 .

I'll be happy to highlight any mistaken philosophical assumptions on which the author is unwittingly basing his or her argument. Because, to repeat, the Drug War remains in place, not because of conservative arguments in favor of it but because of the liberal critic's inability to rebut those arguments clearly and with philosophical rigor.

Author's Follow-up: November 10, 2022



My depression would end overnight and there would be peace in Mexico if we re-legalized Mother Nature's medicines, especially the coca leaf, which has been chewed by the long-lived Peruvian Indians for hundreds of years. But Drug Warriors would prefer that millions, perhaps billions, like myself should live lives of silent despair rather than letting us use the plant medicine that grows at our very feet. This will be someday be unmasked as the anti-scientific barbarity that is it, and the Atlantic's reputation will suffer accordingly.



Author's Follow-up: February 2, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




The very fact that Drug Warriors criticize hippies is telling. What did hippies believe in back in the sixties, after all? Answer: The power of peace, love and understanding. And what did their opponents believe in back in the sixties? Answer: the power of thermonuclear weapons.

The fact is that Drug Warriors hate peace, love and understanding. They cannot deal with such a world. It would give them no chance to use guns and police forces and the military -- in their fight against minorities. They cannot just simply deny rights to minorities: they have to come up with a plausible reason to lock them up by the millions. Their answer: incentivize ridiculously lucrative drug dealing by the poor and disenfranchised by outlawing strongly desired substances.

The Drug Warriors in the UK hated peace, love and understanding in the 1990s when they cracked down on the use of Ecstasy on the dance floor, a drug which had brought unprecedented peace, love and understanding to rave concerts. After the crackdown, dancers switched from E to alcohol, and the dance floors became so violent that concert organizers had to bring in special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces. Yet another "victory" for the Neanderthal Drug Warriors.

The crackdown was ostensibly "justified" by the death of one single dancer by the name of Leah Betts who had died while using Ecstasy9. But that death was clearly a result of prohibition, which refused to regulate product and refused to teach safe use. Had the government valued education over arrest, then dancers would have known to keep hydrated when combining Ecstasy with vigorous activity such as rave dancing, especially when one weighs only 100 pounds, as in Leah's case. Instead, they ghoulishly used Leah's death as a cause célèbre in favor of Ecstasy prohibition. Needless to say, they would have cracked down infinitely harder on drinking had they applied the same "safety standard" to the use of alcohol.

Hypocrisy and lies all down the line!

Let me end this update by restating my crucial apothegm for understanding the evil of substance prohibition, namely:

The Drug War is based on two enormous lies: 1) that there are no upsides to drug use, and 2) that there are no downsides to prohibition.












Notes for essay entitled How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War Part II:

1: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
2: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
3: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
4: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
5: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition DWP (up)
6: Speak now or forever hold your peace about drug prohibition DWP (up)
7: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
8: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
9: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.

Guess who's in charge of protecting us from AI? Chuck Schumer! The same guy who protected us from drugs -- by turning America into a prison camp full of minorities and so handing two presidential elections to Donald Trump.

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

Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."

Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.

All of our problems with opioids and opiates could have been avoided had the busybody Chicken Littles in America left well enough alone and let folks continue to smoke regulated opium peaceably in their own homes.

Why don't those politicians understand what hateful colonialism they are practicing? Psychedelics have been used for millennia by the tribes that the west has conquered -- now we won't even let folks talk honestly about such indigenous medicines.

I personally hate beets and I could make a health argument against their legality. Beets can kill for those allergic to them. Sure, it's a rare condition, but since when has that stopped a prohibitionist from screaming bloody murder?

Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."

Capitalism naturally results in disease-mongering by a self-interested medically establishment -- and disease-mongering requires the suppression of medicines that work holistically.


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






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