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How the Drug War Turns Kids' Lives into a Living Hell

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 13, 2022



I just ran across a 2011 publication called "Children of the Drug War," which tells how many countries outlaw morphine 1 for pain relief and palliative care, thus causing thousands of young children with fatal diseases to suffer unnecessary pain.

This is the kind of fact that the modern media studiously keeps from the public, because they see their job as enforcing the drug-war narrative that we must demonize substances rather than learn about them and use them wisely for humanity. Another such fact is that the military anti-drug operations we carry out overseas leave behind thousands of Drug War orphans -- but American politicians are so hellbent on demonizing inanimate and amoral medicines that they can sleep at night.

I have not yet read the work in question, partly because I have not yet had time and partly because reading such works for me is like listening to a school marm drag her nails across a chalkboard.

But I will do my best to "man up" and read the multi-author document as soon as possible, so that I can begin speaking truth to power over the outrages that I find revealed therein.

This is why I say that investigating the details of the Drug War is like peeling back a rotten onion. Just when you think you have discovered the worst possible effect of the Drug War, you find yet more: in this case, the fact that dogmatically heartless American politicians are advancing a policy that willfully denies godsend pain medicine to dying children.


Children of the Drug War









Notes for essay entitled How the Drug War Turns Kids' Lives into a Living Hell:

1: 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




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.

"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.

Someday, the First Lady or Man will tell kids to "just say no to prohibition." Kids who refuse will be required to watch hours' worth of films depicting gun violence, banned religions, civil wars, and adults committing suicide for want of medicine that grows at their very feet.

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!

The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.

Even prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. We should not drugs "up or down" any more than we should judge penicillin or aspirin in that way.

Many people take antidepressants believing their depression has a biochemical cause. Research does not support this belief. --Dr. Noam Shpancer, Psychology Today

Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.

Mayo Clinic is peddling junk. They are still promoting Venlafaxine, a drug that is harder to kick than heroin.

If I should die of some unusual concatenation of circumstances, I want my survivors to pass "Brian's Law," a law stating that we will no longer pass laws based on hard cases and so needlessly fill our prisons by taking common-sense discretion out of the hands of judges.


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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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