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.
No Drug War Keychains The key to ending the Drug War is to spread the word about the fact that it is Anti-American, unscientific and anti-minority (for starters)
Monticello Betrayed Thomas Jefferson By demonizing plant medicine, the Drug War overthrew the Natural Law upon which Jefferson founded America -- and brazenly confiscated the Founding Father's poppy plants in 1987, in a symbolic coup against Jeffersonian freedoms.
The Drug War Censors Science Scientists: It's time to wake up to the fact that you are censored by the drug war. Drive the point home with these bumper stickers.
You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.
A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.
The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.
It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)
If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.
PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley.
Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)
Selected Bibliography
Andrew, Christopher "The Secret World: A History of Intelligence" 2019 Yale University Press
Aurelius, Marcus "Meditations" 2021 East India Publishing Company
Mate, Gabriel "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" 2009 Vintage Canada
Maupassant, Guy de "Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques - Guy de Maupassant: Les classiques du fantastique " 2019
McKenna, Terence "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution " 1992 Bantam
Miller, Richard Louis "Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle " 2017 Park Street Press
Pinchbeck, Daniel "When Plants Dream" 2019 Watkins Publishing
Poe, Edgar Allan "The Essential Poe" 2020 Warbler Classics
Pollan, Michael "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence " 2018 Penguin Books
Reynolds, David S. "Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville " 1988 Oxford University Press
Richards, William "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences Hardcover" 2015 Columbia University Press
Rosenfeld, Harvey "Diary of a Dirty Little War: The Spanish-American War of 1898 " 2000 Praeger
Straussman, Rick "DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences " 2001 Park Street Press
Streatfield, Dominic "Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography" 2003 Picador USA
Swartzwelder, Scott "Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy" 1998 W.W. Norton
Szasz, Thomas "Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers" 1974 Anchor Press/Doubleday
Whitaker, Robert "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America " 2010 Crown
Zinn, Howard "A People's History of the United States: 1492 - present" 2009
Zuboff , Shoshana "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2019 Public Affairs
Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.
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.
