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Jim Beam and Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 21, 2024



Perhaps you've seen those Jim Beam commercials on TV and streaming media: a crowd of lively young people are seen responsibly lugging around bottles of Jim Beam bourbon while living a joyous life.

I have two very different reactions to that ad.

I am struck at first by the hypocrisy of selling Jim Beam like it was apple pie while living in an age in which drugs like opium 1 and coca and peyote (etc.) are demonized as the devil incarnate. Nor do I believe that drugs, alcohol included, should be advertised in this way, by appealing to the emotions of young people. But at the same time, this ad depicts the way that I believe we should be taught to feel about ALL mind-affecting drugs that are used for relaxation and for having a good time: they can be used responsibly -- and those who do not do so are the oddballs, the ones who are irresponsible and/or who lack the necessary education -- the education that we should provide rather than arresting them.











Notes for essay entitled Jim Beam and Drugs:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




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And we should not insist it's a problem if someone decides to use opium, for instance, daily. We certainly don't blame "patients" for using antidepressants daily. And getting off opium is easier than getting off many antidepressants -- see Julia Holland.

Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.

We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!

Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing.

DEA Stormtroopers should be held responsible for destroying American Democracy. Abolish the American Gestapo.

"Chemical means of peering into the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine exordia in man’s quest for the beyond... before the coarseness of utilitarian minds reduced them to the status of 'dope'." -- Eric Hendrickson

Drug prohibition began as a racist attempt to prevent so-called "miscegenation." The racist's fear was not that a white woman would use opium or marijuana or cocaine, but that she might actually fall in love with a Chinese, Hispanic or Black person respectively.

In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed. Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.

The drug war is is a multi-billion-dollar campaign to enforce the attitude of the Francisco Pizarro's of the world when it comes to non-western medicine. It is the apotheosis of the colonialism that most Americans claim to hate.

My consciousness, my choice.


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Book Cover

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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