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How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 9, 2022



America turns the fate of all supposed 'drug abusers' into a morality tale about the evil of 'drugs' and, by implication, the moral weakness of those who use them. But instead of asking psychologically naive questions like, 'Why did Amy think she needed drugs?' (hint: it's the self-transcendence, stupid), we should be looking in the mirror, asking: 'Why did WE not bother to teach her how to use drugs wisely?' For the villain of this piece is the Drug War itself, a Drug War which 1) limits Amy's available pharmacopeia to the problematic and addictive substances whose sale is incentivized by Drug War prohibition, and 2) discourages the substance-related research that could lead to safe use guidelines for all psychoactive medicines.

Of course, Amy's fate was especially easy for Christian Science America to spin into a Drug War morality tale in which 'drugs' were the bad guy. One of the last songs that Amy sang contained the heretical lyrics: 'He's tried to make me go to rehab, but I won't go, go, go.' And at the Oscars, she was quoted as telling her friend Juliette that, 'This is so boring without drugs.'

When these facts were shown to contestants on Gogglebox in 2014, there was plenty of backhanded sympathy for Amy from the reality-show couch potatoes, with the general consensus being that she had unfortunately caved before the evil temptress known as 'drugs.'

No one ever asked the apparently heretical question: 'What if we had researched all drugs that provided personal transcendence and educated Amy about how to choose among them and use them wisely?'

But Drug Warriors do not think this way because they completely ignore the motivation for drug use, which is self-transcendence. Even if they do recognize the impulse, they insist that self-transcendence must come only from supposedly 'natural' sources, such as church, yoga, meditation, jogging, and the like. (The Drug Warrior might even suggest stoicism as an alternative to drugs, failing to realize that the paragon of that discipline, Marcus Aurelius, was himself a big fan of opium .) But this notion about 'drugs' being unnatural or a 'copout' is a mere Christian Science prejudice and not an ineluctable truth to which all intelligent humans are led upon rational reflection. It's certainly not a 'truth' that would naturally occur to someone who grew up in a botanically rich rainforest.

In point of fact, the mind truly boggles at the plethora of treatment possibilities that would have been open to Amy had she been able to meet with a pharmacologically savvy empath 1 who had unrestricted access to every psychoactive plant in the entire world. Amy might have been led through an emotionally restorative journey on psylocibin to see the world in a new way, been given something to look forward to in the form of weekly cocaine 2 3 or opium 4 use, or provided with morphine 5 on special mental 'holidays,' whereby she could see the natural world in exquisite detail a la August Bedloe in 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains' by Edgar Allan Poe. She could have had her head screwed back on straight with the strategic use of the drugs which Americans have been taught to scorn.

But such cures run counter to the Christian Science notion that 'drugs' are evil. And so Drug War society could only sit back impotently and watch Amy's decline, as one watches a slow-motion car crash, unable to offer her anything more enticing than pious suggestions that she renounce her desire for self-transcendence and join a 12-step program instead.















Notes for essay entitled How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse:

1: pharmacologically-savvy empath: this is an empathic individual with an ethnobotanical knowledge of safe and beneficial drug use worldwide, someone who recognizes psychological common sense and can advise on protocols that meet user needs while avoiding unwanted dependency. (up)
2: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
3: “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)
4: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
5: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?

A pharmacologically savvy drug dealer would have no problem getting someone off one drug because they would use the common sense practice of fighting drugs with drugs. But materialist doctors would rather that the patient suffer than to use such psychologically obvious methods.

We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.

When we place the FDA in charge of deciding whether a psychoactive drug should be re-legalized or not, we are asking them to decide on things like the relative importance of appreciating a sunset, a task for which the FDA has no expertise whatsoever.

The International Observer says the "core issues" causing Mexican drug violence are: "corruption, inequality, and the demand for narcotics in the U.S." Wrong, wrong, wrong. The core issue is DRUG PROHIBITION.

Our government treats drugs like uranium and spends hundreds of billions of dollars trying to scare us about them.

I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.

In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.

Prohibitionists will me that we're all children when it comes to drugs, and can never -- but never -- use them wisely. That's like saying that we could never ride horses wisely. Or mountain climb. Or skateboard.

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.


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