here's something morally pretentious about finding so much fault for a person who, like everyone, was a product of his time, as if the fault finder assumes that he or she will appear faultless 250 years from now when hopefully more enlightened societies than ours will look back upon us and our doings. These critics of past heroes would do well to remember that their own replacement heroes will be subject to the same jaundiced critique that they are now reserving for their enemies. If they dubiously equate Jefferson with Hitler, then it won't be long before their philosophical enemies will be making an equally plausible case against Malcolm X and Al Sharpton, in part by speculating how the diatribes of the latter pundit may have led to the torching of a Jewish business in New York City. But mainly I'm talking about the protestor in the mirror. When we condemn past wrongs, we should have a little humility, since we're surely perpetrating our own terrible wrongs that will only be clear to society 250 years from today.
Take the Drug War, for instance: it is a violation of the Natural Law upon which Jefferson founded America, and it is the establishment of the Christian Science religion. Yet no one who's ranting today about Jefferson seems to have any problem with the Drug War, this Drug War that is causing a civil war in Mexico, empowering a self-proclaimed Drug War Hitler in the Philippines, and militarizing local police forces so that they can kick down your door and punch your grandmother in the face with impunity, should you yourself be suspected of dealing in plant medicines of which botanically clueless politicians disapprove. And so the Monticello Foundation was happy to sell out the ex-president's Natural Law legacy in 1987 by allowing the DEA to stomp onto the president's estate and confiscate his poppy plants. Natural Law? Who cares? No one would speak up for Jefferson because we wanted to paint him entirely evil and so we renounced the Natural Law legacy that he gave us, a legacy that took hundreds of years to arise from a tortured body politic in England.
And so we "good guys" of the 21st century still dutifully urinate for billionaire LSD-using employers and see no problem with a Drug War that makes Christian Science the law of the land -- this Drug War that first taught police to treat suspects like scumbags, this unprecedented superstitious demonization of amoral substances, this Drug War that is just the modern version of Columbus telling the Taino people to give up psychoactive mushrooms in favor of the shabby Western drug called alcohol. Of course, Columbus rendered the whole matter moot by simply killing the tribes in question. So if Jefferson-haters want to see the bad guys of 250 years from now, the majority of us need only look in the mirror: for there they will see a Drug War collaborator who was failing to this very day to speak up for Jefferson's natural law, duped as they were by Drug War lies and censorship and focused as they were on "calling out" the dead, and so religious liberty and natural law have disappeared from the American republic while we pat ourselves on the back for being so much more moral than past generations.
If you doubt that religious liberty has disappeared, just try to start a stateside church that uses a plant like psychoactive mushrooms to achieve enlightenment in the same manner that the Vedic religion used soma, and you'll have the DEA breaking down your door before you can shout, "Natural Law!" But don't expect them to listen to you. After all, you've renounced the Natural Law legacy that alone could have forced the religious-banning Christian Science government to cease and desist.
June 7, 2022
Thomas Jefferson was not without his faults, and yet he was the sine qua non of black emancipation. It was his ideas about equality that made it impossible for the US to maintain slavery in the long run, since slavery so obviously clashed with the idea that "all men are created equal." He wanted to be much more explicit about this in his Declaration of Independence, but too many of his southern colleagues said no, for they rightly intuited that such language would spell the eventual end of slavery itself as an American institution. Unfortunately, Jefferson would go on to make the limits of his understanding all too clear in his Notes on Virginia, in which he blames the "Negroes" as a class for all the shortcomings that were so obviously a result of slavery itself. Americans and their colonial forebears had brought a people over from Africa against their will, made it criminal for them to read and to otherwise advance themselves in life, and then these same Americans had the hypocritical nerve to blame these Negroes for being unread and uncultivated? The reasoning is so obviously flawed that it's disappointing to think that Jefferson was ever persuaded by it. But God help us all when we ourselves are eventually judged by the standards of a future, more enlightened age -- one in which everyone will clearly see the utter folly of demonizing Mother Nature's bounty rather than using it for the benefit of humans and humankind. Then those who stayed silent about the Drug War and dutifully urinated for their employers (while yet anachronistically demonizing Thomas Jefferson on sites like Medium.com) will be found to be complicit in a minority-killing Drug War -- a war on plant medicine which resulted in the deaths of over 800 blacks in Chicago alone in 2021.
June 10, 2022
Yet even reform-friendly politicians want to end the Drug War gradually at best. One can't help but ask the following question then: If 800-plus well-to-do white Americans were killed every year in Chicago by violence provoked by prohibition, and there were similar death tolls in other big cities around the country, would politicians be pussyfooting about and hemming and hawing about making change? Au contraire, they would call a special session of Congress at once to end the Drug War right this very instant, thank you very much, so that America could begin pursuing a new rational substance policy, one that does not depend on violence-causing prohibition.
"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. For me the very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.
Prohibitionists are also responsible for the 100,000-plus killed in the US-inspired Mexican drug war
I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!
Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.
The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.
Properly speaking, MDMA has killed no one at all. Prohibitionists were delighted when Leah Betts died because they were sure it was BECAUSE of MDMA/Ecstasy. Whereas it was because of the fact that prohibitionists refuse to teach safe use.
Besides, why should I listen to the views of a microbe?
The drug war is being used as a wrecking ball to destroy democratic freedoms. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and freedom of religion and given the police the right to confiscate the property of peaceful and productive citizens.
I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.
First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.
3:51 PM ยท Jul 15, 2024
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, Jefferson Bashing on Medium.com published on May 4, 2021 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)
here's something morally pretentious about finding so much fault for a person who, like everyone, was a product of his time, as if the fault finder assumes that he or she will appear faultless 250 years from now when hopefully more enlightened societies than ours will look back upon us and our doings. These critics of past heroes would do well to remember that their own replacement heroes will be subject to the same jaundiced critique that they are now reserving for their enemies. If they dubiously equate Jefferson with Hitler, then it won't be long before their philosophical enemies will be making an equally plausible case against Malcolm X and Al Sharpton, in part by speculating how the diatribes of the latter pundit may have led to the torching of a Jewish business in New York City. But mainly I'm talking about the protestor in the mirror. When we condemn past wrongs, we should have a little humility, since we're surely perpetrating our own terrible wrongs that will only be clear to society 250 years from today.
You have been reading an article entitled, Jefferson Bashing on Medium.com published on May 4, 2021 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)