The DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in violation of the natural law upon which he founded America. As John Locke states in his Two Treatises on Government, the bounty of nature is the heritage of the human race. It does not belong to government to parcel out or withhold, let alone to make us urinate to prove that we have had nothing to do with mother nature. But racist fearmongers outlawed opium in 1914, which set the precedent for government to use drug laws to attack minorities. It's a huge billion-dollar scam that provides the DEA with jobs for life and makes the depressed and anxious go without godsends -- this in a nation in which 1 in 4 women are dependent on mind-numbing big pharma meds for life.
The Drug War has infantilized Americans about drugs, giving them teddy bears in grade school for dissing them, even though "drugs" like Soma have inspired entire religions, coca was divine to the Inca, and opium was loved by Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The government never had a right to outlaw nature -- and look at the whirlwind we have reaped by doing so. We have destroyed the rule of law in Latin America and created entire no-go zones in inner-city neighborhoods. Instead of talking about safe use, we have fomented fear and an unsafe drug supply, leading to the invention of drugs that are thousands of times more risky than opium. It's called the iron law of prohibition: crackdowns lead to more lethal drugs. 35,000 people die each year in car accidents, but we don't need a war on cars. A fraction of that amount die from "drugs," but we don't need a War on Drugs. To the contrary, almost all drug deaths are a result of prohibition and the fact that it corrupts drug supply and encourages fear and ignorance over knowledge about safe use.
The real den of iniquity was Congress in 1914.
Author's Follow-up: December 26, 2024
Americans WANT drugs like opium to be a problem. It provides easy answers to social problems and let's them lock up millions of minorities, thereby handing elections to fascist drug-war conservatives like themselves. But if Americans are prone to misuse a godsend like opium, that is a problem with America, not with opium. Americans do not want to make that link because it would mean they would have to spend money on real education -- and not just drug education classes that indoctrinate young people in the tenets of the drug-hating religion of Christian Science, but education about how to live wisely and fully and to pursue what philosophers call "the good life." To the extent that drug education was necessary, it would involve teaching young people how to avoid unwanted dependence, not by preaching, but by showing the life stories of those who have managed to use drugs wisely.
The problem is, hypocritical Americans do not WANT to call "dependency" a problem. Why not? Because Big Pharma is all about rendering users dependent -- and so a fair evaluation of drug dangers would end up in a renunciation of such drugs, insofar as dependency for them is a feature, not a bug.
Of course, the real potential problem with drug use is UNWANTED dependency.
But once all drugs are RE-legalized and we stop the fearmongering and speak honestly about drugs, then humanity will be able to find hundreds of creative ways to avoid unwanted dependency by fighting drugs with drugs1. This will come about when we jettison the hateful doctrine of behaviorism2, according to which mind and mood are thought to be the bailiwick of emotion-free scientist, and turn to pharmacologically savvy empaths instead for guidance. These new shamans, combining the best of the west and east, would then teach human beings to use substances wisely for the purpose of obtaining maximum emotional, mental and spiritual health3. The focus then would be on helping human beings to thrive in life, and not merely turning them into drug-free Christian Scientists.
If hand-wringing conservatives still want to sate their propensity to worry, they should wake up and smell the nuclear arsenals that their antipathy to peace, love and understanding have foisted upon us. Give me a world full of starry-eyed Flower Children any day over the type of uptight and intolerant conservatives who have hated their way into a world full of thermonuclear weapons: thousands of them, which are, even now, poised to fire on hair-trigger alert4. These are the same conservatives who demonize the kind of entheogenic drugs that inspire unprecedented peace, love and understanding, such as the drug Ecstasy, which inspired unprecedented multi-ethnic peace on British dance floors in the 1990s5.
As far as personal peace of mind, Jean de La Bruyère got it right:
Tout notre mal vient de ne pouvoir être seul.
All evil comes from our inability to be alone, i.e., to live with ourselves.
Well, the world is full of psychoactive drugs that make that possible when used wisely -- and thereby give humanity better things to do than to shoot up grade schools and to amass world-destroying nuclear arsenals.
But the simpleton haters whom we call Drug Warriors would rather that we all become fanatical Christian Scientists instead and superstitiously blame all social problems on the inanimate objects that they have chosen to call -- or rather to denigrate as -- drugs.
December 27, 2024
Marco's article promotes the Drug Warrior's belief that substances are evil. This is a superstitious way to look at the world. Thousands of young people are dying on the streets thanks to the Drug Warrior's refusal to teach safe use and to regulate drugs such that overdoses need not occur. But then I've always said that being a Drug Warrior means never having to say you're sorry: not for the drive-by shootings, not for the civil wars overseas, not for the destruction of American democracy or the censoring of academia.
We have no more reason to outlaw drug use than we have to outlaw rock climbing or driving a car. Prohibition represents a modern superstition. It would have us believe that inanimate substances called "drugs" are evil. It tells us that if a drug can be misused by a white American young person, even in theory, then it should not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason, ever. Imagine all the unnecessary emotional suffering and stifled creativity that results from that brainless dictum, all of it off the radar of the Drug Warrior, who has no concern for those suffering in silence behind closed doors.
The Drug Warrior outlaws godsends for billions and keeps us from even thinking of a host of positive drug uses that make perfect psychological sense and are limited only by our imaginations. They censor history, refusing to even let us know that Ben Franklin loved opium or that the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the poppy plants of Thomas Jefferson himself. They stifle religiosity and academic freedom, with their only concern being to triumph in the next election -- and that's while we still have elections, since the Drug War is all of a piece with mob-empowered fascism: it is, after all, the ultimate example of strategic fearmongering by self-interested politicians.
And those of them who are sincere are loaded to the gills with false assumptions about drugs that have been instilled in them since grade school, failing to realize that we are propagandized 24/7 with TV scripts checked by the White House for conformity to drug-war doctrine, which values fear over education. We are never allowed to see or read about positive uses for drugs. It is an anti-scientific cultish scam that conservatives have used to destroy American democracy.
Author's Follow-up:
April 29, 2025
Breaking News: Opiates have fantastic positive uses!
In Lectures 4 and 5 of "The Varieties of Religious Experience,6" William James quotes Dr. Bucke, a disciple of Walt Whitman, as follows:
"His favorite occupation seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds. It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond what they give to ordinary people."
Before we get carried away with the doctor about the supposed uniqueness of Whitman's character, let us reconsider the quote that I posted above by Edgar Allan Poe about a morphine experience that evoked a similar love for nature in the inebriate.
"In the meantime the morphine had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf- in the hue of a blade of grass- in the shape of a trefoil- in the humming of a bee- in the gleaming of a dew-drop- in the breathing of the wind- in the faint odors that came from the forest- there came a whole universe of suggestion- a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought.7"
One is tempted to ask an heretical question here: Did Walt Whitman, perhaps, use opiates wisely to attain just such a susceptibility to natural influences? Had he -- or anyone else -- done so, the pragmatism of James gives us no grounds to despise them for this or to consider that their love of nature is somehow not "really" a love of nature. The pragmatist looks for fruits. If the fruits are good, that is all we can ask.
Of course, here we run up to the propaganda-inspired idea that "safe use" is not possible -- but that is a lie and makes no more sense than saying "safe driving" is not possible, nor "safe drinking." Let us remind the statistically challenged Drug Warrior, moreover, that if Opiates kill, then Alcohol massacres!
Opium
Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal in the United States. It took drug laws to accomplish that. By outlawing opium and refusing to teach safe use, the drug warrior has subjected users to contaminated product of uncertain dosage, thereby causing thousands of unnecessary overdoses.
Currently, I myself am chemically dependent on a Big Pharma drug for depression, that I have to take every day of my life. There is no rational reason why I should not be able to smoke opium daily instead. It is only drug-war fearmongering that has demonized that choice -- for obvious racist, economic and political reasons.
You have been lied to your entire life about opium. In fact, the drug war has done its best to excise the very word "opium" from the English vocabulary. That's why the Thomas Jefferson Foundation refuses to talk about the 1987 raid on Monticello in which Reagan's DEA confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. It's just plain impolite to bring up that subject these days.
It's hard to learn the truth about opium because the few books on the subject demonize it rather than discuss it dispassionately. Take the book by John Halpern: "Opium: How an ancient flower shaped and poisoned our world." It's a typical Drug Warrior title. A flower did not poison our world, John: our world was poisoned by bad laws: laws that were inspired first and foremost by racism, followed closely by commercial interests, politics, misinformation and lies.
To learn something approaching to "the truth about Opium," read the book of that name by William Brereton, written to defend the time-honored panacea from the uninformed and libelous attacks of Christian missionaries.
Mad in America publishes stories of folks who are disillusioned with antidepressants, but they won't publish mine, because I find mushrooms useful. They only want stories about cold turkey and jogging, or nutrition, or meditation.
Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.
This massive concern for safety is downright bizarre in a country that will not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.
Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" are horrible because they encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.
Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).
This is why I call the drug war 'fanatical Christian Science.' People would rather have grandpa die than to let him use laughing gas or coca or opium or MDMA, etc. etc.
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
The FDA is not qualified to tell us whether holistic medicines work. They hold such drugs to materialist standards and that's pharmacological colonialism.
A law proposed in Colorado in February 2024 would have criminalized positive talk about drugs online. What? The world is on the brink of nuclear war because of hate-driven politics, and I can be arrested for singing the praises of empathogens?
Let's pass a constitutional amendment to remove Kansas from the Union, and any other state where the racist politicians leverage the drug war to crack down on minorities.
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, In Defense of Opium: Open letter to Marco Margaritoff, published on July 12, 2023 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, In Defense of Opium: Open letter to Marco Margaritoff, published on July 12, 2023 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)
