his morning I searched the vast image catalog of Shutterstock for some photographs that illustrated the general concept of abolishing the Drug War. I was sure I'd find something since the site has over a billion images submitted by well over half a million contributors.
To my dismay, there were very few if any images that suggested, even obliquely, that the Drug War was folly. Instead, the site was full of propaganda images that associated cocaine in particular with all manner of vice. First we see an image of a white tabletop littered with bloody bullet casings and a credit card half covered with cocaine. Next we see a handgun lying in front of a half-dozen plastic bags full of white powder. One row down, there are the trademark lines of cocaine starkly displayed on a black tabletop, just waiting for some hedonist hit man to snort, no doubt before taking a scantily clad mistress in his arms and lavishing her with a highly salacious kiss. (Needless to say there are no images of Sherlock Holmes, using related substances to hone his observational skills, nor of Freud, using such substances to ensure the prolific output whereby he achieved self-actualization in life.)
Coca was a god to the Incas, and a godsend to authors like Jules Verne and HG Wells, and yet drug-war propaganda has convinced Shutterstock (and no doubt most of its contributors) to depict the plant as if it were the drug from hell. Moreover, the dystopia thus depicted is a result of the Drug War itself, which refuses to educate users about safe drug use, preferring to arrest them instead. As for the guns and violence that we associate with cocaine, that's a direct result of prohibition, not of the coca plant. Just as Prohibition created the Mafia, so the Drug War has created cartels and gangs, thus turning inner cities into shooting galleries, thanks to which thousands of minorities were killed in 2021 alone.
The answer is obvious: decriminalize drugs, cocaine first and foremost, since it seems to be the natural substance of choice for marketing illegally.
Meanwhile, take all the billions that is currently going into the fascist militarization of our police forces and give that money to clinics that will treat drug addiction rationally, rather than throwing a million people a year into jail merely for possessing natural substances. Such treatment will be far effective than the current status quo when we allow clinicians to use any psychoactive substance in the world, rather than tyrannically limiting them to a handful of addictive medicines supplied by Big Pharma. The current criminal approach is just a make-work program for law enforcement, after all, and turns America into a police state, as our record-breaking prison population testifies loudly and clearly to the dismayed champions of freedom around the world. Besides, all the problems that we associate with so-called drug use are actually caused by the Drug War itself, starting with the fact that the Drug War demonizes illicit substances, thereby denying would-be users with the objective knowledge they could use to partake wisely.
Meanwhile those who fret about the addictive potential of substances like cocaine should drop their hypocritical hand-wringing, since almost all of them are ignoring the big addiction of our time: namely the fact that 1 in 8 American men and 1 in 4 American women are hooked on Big Pharma antidepressants, many of them harder to quit than heroin. But the Drug Warrior doesn't even notice this problem, let alone wring their hands about it. What Drug War hypocrisy. What a clear sign that the Drug War is not about the health of Americans' bodies, but rather about the health of Americans' wallets -- or rather the wallets of the so-called 1% who are getting filthy rich on drug profits from addicting America to legal antidepressants.
Not only is the fascist Drug War unfair to minorities who constitute the predominant arrestees, but it results in a perversion of our electoral system, since it all but guarantees the election and re-election of fascist Drug War advocates. Why? Because those who would vote them out of office are in jail, many having lost their right to vote thanks to their possession of proscribed natural substances.
America is seeing the ascendancy of anti-democratic forces, and the evidence is not just on Shutterstock.
Hollywood releases more movies every year whose plots seek to justify torture and premeditated murder as reasonable means of fighting so-called drug trafficking. In the 2019 movie 'Running with the Devil,' the self-righteous DEA 'hero' cold-bloodedly murders a man who had the temerity to sell naturally occurring substances. What's more, she murdered the 'drug dealer' while she herself was smoking a cigarette containing tobacco, one of the most harmful drugs in the world.
Hypocrite, America! Wake up! We're knowingly heading down the path of fascism, dimming the beacon of freedom that we had once hoped to be to the world.
PS How can we look Chinese President Xi Jinping in the eye and criticize his anti-democratic measures when we are arresting Americans for merely possessing the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet?!
Nor is it just the minorities that take a hit stateside. The Drug War has inexcusably blocked research on therapeutic drugs, all because of the fascist tendency to place law enforcement above every other consideration, and patients be damned.
June 21, 2022
You rock, Brian. Except don't give that money to clinics -- give it to pharmacologically savvy empaths, who will use nature's medicines as needed to treat everything for which those medicines are suited -- yes, including addictions! Right now, if an addict walks into a clinic, the doc says, 'Now I will do all in my power to help you -- except, of course, for using the thousands of psychoactive plant medicines that are off-limits due to the Drug War.' Docs need to learn that drugs are not the problem, they are often the solution -- and we should not employ them on a niggardly and stinting basis just because the Drug War is bribing our children with teddy bears to get them to stupidly say no to mother nature's godsends!
Author's Follow-up: November 17, 2022
The above article dates from almost three years ago, before I had boned up on the coca plant courtesy of 'Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas' by W. Golden Mortimer. Turns out that cocaine is just a coca alkaloid introduced to the west as a potential anesthetic for eye surgery. Cocaine is a very different drug from the coca leaf that the Peruvian Indians chewed for millennia, and indeed a very different drug from the famous Coca Wine, about which 19th-century authors like HG Wells and Jules Verne were so keen. If all plant medicine were legal again (imagine that), the chewing of the coca leaf would provide so many of the benefits of cocaine while being less addictive.
But we have to learn to stop demonizing nature and start teaching about its psychoactive offerings, a common-sense and scientific approach that Drug Warriors like Kevin Sabet reject, preferring to 'fight substances' rather than the social policies that lead to poor choices and misuse. Kevin is heartless, by the way, because his cost-benefit analysis regarding drug legalization completely ignores the enormous death toll that is racked up thanks to the prohibition that he champions. He wants to focus on saving little Johnny from making a bad choice-- meanwhile completely ignoring the 100,000 Mexicans that have been killed by HIS DRUG WAR in Mexico over the last 15 years -- not to mention the thousands of blacks who die yearly in inner cities thanks to the proliferation of guns and dealing that KEVIN SABET'S DRUG WAR PROMULGATED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Author's Follow-up: March 11, 2025
AUDIOC
These are not abstract considerations. How many of us know of suicidal friends and loved ones. Well, guess what? Drug warriors would prefer that these unhappy people die rather than use drugs -- otherwise we would make uplifting drugs available to the suicidal. We show by our actions -- our drug prohibition -- that we are Christian Science fanatics. We actually prefer suicide to the use of the many godsend medicines that we have outlawed wholesale.
America has a sick way of looking at the world of mind and mood medicine, based as it is on racism combined with the demonstrably false idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood. As Whitehead pointed out, the proof that a philosophy is wrong resides in the fact that it leads to absurd consequences. And what do we get when we put materialists in charge of mind and mood in fealty to the philosophy of materialism? We find that we have experts who are dogmatically blind to common sense. They are dogmatically blind to all reports of positive drug use. They are deaf to anecdote and history and even to psychological common sense, which tells us that feeling good -- and looking FORWARD to feeling good -- actually help. Instead, they tell us that drug efficacy is to be found under a microscope, which in the practical world means that they sign off on the DEA lie that time-honored panaceas have no positive uses whatsoever.
Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths
In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.
This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.
How do I know this?
Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.
More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?
This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."
The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that tells us that "shock therapy" is safe.
His answer to political opposition is: "Lock them up!" That's Nazi speak, not American democracy.
What attracts me about "drug dealers" is that they are NOT interested in prying into my private life. What a relief! With psychiatry, you are probed for pathological behavior on every office visit. You are a child. To the "drug dealer," I am an adult at least.
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.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
The book "Plants of the Gods" is full of plants and fungi that could help addicts and alcoholics, sometimes in the plant's existing form, sometimes in combinations, sometimes via extracting alkaloids, etc. But drug warriors need addiction to sell their prohibition ideology.
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
Drug Warriors rail against drugs as if they were one specific thing. They may as well rail against penicillin because cyanide can kill.
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?
ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism: a warning to any remaining friends of freedom, published on January 2, 2020 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
his morning I searched the vast image catalog of Shutterstock for some photographs that illustrated the general concept of abolishing the Drug War. I was sure I'd find something since the site has over a billion images submitted by well over half a million contributors.
You have been reading an article entitled, Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism: a warning to any remaining friends of freedom, published on January 2, 2020 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
