How the Drug War Turns Kids' Lives into a Living Hell
by 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.
In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.
Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.
This is why "rock stars" use drugs: not just for performance anxiety (which, BTW, is a completely UNDERSTANDABLE reason for drug use), but because they want to fully experience the music, even tho' they may be currently short on money and being hassled by creditors, etc.
It's just plain totalitarian nonsense to outlaw mother nature and to outlaw moods and mental states thru drug law. These truths can't be said enough by us "little people" because the people in power are simply not saying them.
Most substance withdrawal would be EASY if drugs were re-legalized and we could use any substance we wanted to mitigate negative psychological effects.
I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.
Imagine if we held sports to the same safety standard as drugs. There would be no sports at all. And yet even free climbing is legal. Why? Because with sports, we recognize the benefits and not just the downsides.
Getting off antidepressants can make things worse for only one reason: because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help with the transition. Right now, getting off any drug basically means becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist. No wonder withdrawal is hard.
America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
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