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How the Drug War gave the 2016 election to Donald Trump

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

October 21, 2021



In 2016, more than six million Americans were disenfranchised according to the Sentencing Project, most of them minorities and most of them for "drug offenses." That's six million Americans who were purged from the voting rolls. Six million. That's why Donald Trump won the presidency, not because of Russian interference, gerrymandering or vote buying, but because of a Drug War that was instituted for the very purpose of disenfranchising minorities. And yet our best and brightest minds don't get it.

Take George R. Tyler, author of "Billionaire Democracy." Tyler's 2018 book is all about the marginalizing of minority voting power in the age of the Roberts court, and yet he says not one single word about the Drug War! Not one! What could be more pertinent to his topic than the fact that six million Americans were removed from the voting rolls?

This is why the Drug War lingers, because authors like Tyler completely ignore its long list of negative effects on the body politic and on the world at large.

What negative effects?

The Drug War ideology of substance demonization has:

1) caused a civil war in Mexico
2) empowered a self-styled "Drug War Hitler" in the Philippines
3) created armed cartels overseas
4) created armed gangs in American ghettos
5) militarized police forces
6) popularized movies 1 2 in which the good guys are DEA agents who torture and murder at will
7) stopped scientists from pursuing legitimate research that could treat or even cure Alzheimer's, Autism and cancer

and 8) led to the election of a racist populist as President of the United States.


Yes, Tyler is right: pay-to-play politics is a problem and so is outrageous republican gerrymandering and Russian interference in American elections. But it is the Drug War that has turned America into a prison camp for minorities and a breeding ground for racist populists.

And now Trump wants to leverage the Drug War to do even more damage to American democracy: he is proposing a "final solution" to the politician-created drug problem, namely executing those minorities whom the Drug Warrior used to be satisfied with merely locking up.


AFTERTHOUGHT (February 22, 22):

For more on this and related topics, please visit me on Deviant Art.









Notes for essay entitled How the Drug War gave the 2016 election to Donald Trump:

1: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
2: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.

It is far better to "treat the symptoms" than to irreversibly modify brain chemistry in one particular way based on the theories of a financially-motivated biochemical determinist working for a pharmaceutical company.

America arrests people whose only crime is that they are trying to be all that they can be in life... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.

Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing.

Westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight.

People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.

It's "convenient" for scientists that their "REAL" cures happen to be the ones that racist politicians will allow. Scientists thus normalize prohibition by pretending that outlawed substances have no therapeutic value. It's materialism collaborating with the drug war.

I knew democracy was in trouble when most Americans in the '80s saw no problem with allowing drug testers to go on a fishing expedition in their bodily fluids for substances of which politicians disapprove.

We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.

Amphetamines are "meds" when they help kids think more clearly but they are "drugs" when they help adults think more clearly. That shows you just how bewildered Americans are when it comes to drugs.


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






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Book Cover

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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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