his Blog is part of my ongoing attempt to wake the world from the violent man-made nightmare called the Drug War. It is different from all other anti-Drug War blogs and websites in that it does not appeal to statistics to make its points. Rather, it appeals to first principles, or, in other words, it approaches the matter philosophically. This is important, because inductive arguments and statistics can always be gainsaid by racist politicians seeking to maintain a corrupt status quo. In fact, that's why we've been saddled with this corrupt policy of childish substance demonization for over 100 years now. Even the best thinkers are merely using statistics to point out that the Drug War is a "failure," when the reality is that the Drug War had no right to succeed in the first place in a free country, being as it is a violation of Natural Law and the adoption of Christian Science as a state -- and indeed a world -- religion. But when we confront these same scheming politicians by revealing the false, bigoted and colonialist assumptions upon which the Drug War is based, they can't hide their malignant idiocy behind misleading statistics and lies. The only way they can save face is to ignore such arguments completely, and with your help, they won't be able to do that.
What are the philosophical truths with which we fight the Drug War? The truly philosophical thinker is spoiled for choice in compiling such a list. But some of the biggies include...
1) The Drug War is the enforcement of the metaphysical principles of Christian Science (the idea that humans have some moral obligation to go without "drugs") and it therefore represents the unconstitutional establishment of a religion.
2) The Drug War is a violation of the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America, since as John Locke himself wrote, human beings have a natural right to "the use of the land and all that lies therein." Indeed, God himself looked at the plants and fungi that he had created on Earth and said (in the book of Genesis, no less) that it was good.
3) The Drug War represents a warped way of viewing the world, one in which we ascribe substance misuse not to social forces (such as poverty, a lack of education and to prohibition itself) but rather to the substances themselves, ridiculously claiming, in fact, that some substances are so evil that they cannot even be studied by scientists in a supposedly free democratic country.
4) The Drug War is anti-scientific, therefore, since it forbids scientists from studying many of the psychoactive plant medicines of which politicians disapprove. This is the moral equivalent of the Church limiting the scientific freedom of Galileo. The only difference is that Galileo knew that his researches were being limited by an anti-scientific oppressor, whereas scholars today completely ignore the way that the Drug War limits their inquiries (into things like the tractability of depression and the best ways for treating addiction -- or even into studies of consciousness). This failure to acknowledge the Drug War's emasculating impact on scientific research helps keep the Drug War alive by rendering its pernicious influence invisible to all but the most perceptive minds.
5) The Drug War is anti-patient, since it criminalizes, a priori, a vast array of potentially godsend medicines which, when used responsibly and empathically, show great promise for fighting depression and giving the mentally challenged a brand-new way of looking at the world, something that one might have thought of as the holy grail of psychiatry. Moreover, this criminalization is undertaken by politicians who have no expertise in pharmacology and seemingly zero knowledge of our species' time-honored interest in expanding the mind with psychoactive medicine for both religious and practical purposes.
6) The Drug War is anti-minority, since it creates a violent black market that thrives in poor and poorly educated regions. Even the decriminalization of marijuana has racist overtones in a Drug Warrior society, since by failing to decriminalize cocaine as well (derived from a natural substance that Freud himself considered a godsend) we continue to cage Black Americans for dealing in substances of which politicians disapprove, while meanwhile ensuring that the increasingly "White person's drug," marijuana, is legalized. This double-standard is not surprising, however, since all the original Drug War laws were designed to marginalize minorities -- and not the supposedly good and upstanding White Americans who were in charge of creating these racially motivated drug laws in the first place.
If you can sign off on these basic truths -- if you realize that the term "drugs" is a modern invention by racists and Christian Scientists to unscientifically demonize substances -- then join us. If you realize that the Drug War thrives on dogmatically ignoring the cosmic and creative insights that psychoactive substances can provide the artist and the humanitarian, then join us. If you realize that a human being should be judged by the contents of their character, not by the contents of their digestive system, then join us.
What are the goals of this blog? To...
1) Rally philosophers (credentialed or otherwise) against the Drug War
2) Encourage ACTIONS such as...
a. Writing letters to Drug War-influenced authors and playwrights
b. Writing comments on IMDB etc. condemning implicit Drug War propaganda in movies
c. Writing letters to any congressperson who seems to have been bamboozled by Drug War lies, which, in practice (alas), means every single congressperson
3) Plan other peaceful on-site actions that will help speed the demise of America's unprecedented Christian Science war on plant medicine, aka the Drug War -- like how about a protest outside of DEA headquarters where we hand out books and pamphlets revealing the idiocy of America's Christian Science War on Plant Medicine -- a crucial protest, indeed, considering that America has now turned its jaundiced views of psychoactive medicine into the law of the entire world, to the extent that we even send armies abroad to burn plants, in an act of superstitious colonialist tyranny reminiscent of the book burners in Fahrenheit 451. (How about a protest outside of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime? Or at Monticello, to protest how the Monticello Foundation betrayed Thomas Jefferson's Natural Law legacy in 1987 by allowing the DEA on his estate to confiscate the ex-president's poppy plants!)
4) Encourage the use of comment forms to push back against the endless instances of muddled reasoning that the Drug Warrior displays online in zine articles, academic papers, movie and TV show reviews, and everyday musings.
5) Remind the world that there is no problem with substances, nor has there ever been -- but rather there's a huge problem with how modern societies think about and deal with substances. If plant medicine causes problems in a capitalist society, then there is a problem with capitalism, not "drugs."
My goal, in short, is to hasten not simply the end of the Drug War, but the end of the childish and tyrannical way of thinking about the world that the Drug War represents. For there are no such things as "drugs" in the way that Drug Warriors use the term. There are no substances that are somehow bad in and of themselves and that must be banned from even the science lab. Instead, every substance in the world can be used for good or ill, and a smart and free country studies those substances to enlighten their people about best practices for use, rather than ahistorically declaring -- through censorship and blatant lies about "brain-frying drugs" -- that substances can only be used for evil purposes once they have been demonized by pharmacologically clueless politicians.
Incidentally, if any substances fry the brain, they are the SSRIs to which 1 in four American women are addicted even as I type. Such drugs tamp down the emotions and have been shown to conduce to anhedonia in long-term users. I know this from 60 years of hard-earned, expensive, and demoralizing experience as just one cog in the psychiatric pill mill. Of course, to the Drug Warrior mind, this is somehow not a problem -- indeed it is actually a good thing according to the Drug Warrior, who patronizingly reminds folks like myself to keep taking our nice-sounding "meds" (which is the Drug Warrior antonym for "drugs," of course)... a fact that reveals the fathomless politically and financially motivated hypocrisy of the war on plant medicine, aka the war on drugs. None of this is about public safety, of course: otherwise the Drug Warrior would not tolerate the pill mill -- nor would they support politically motivated prohibition policies that are causing a civil war in Mexico even as we speak while empowering a self-proclaimed Drug War Hitler in the Philippines.
Join today: contact quass@quass.com to join this site and add to the discussion -- and action!
Related tweet: November 10, 2022
I wonder if the editors address the fact that our government has outlawed precisely those psychoactive medicines whose use suggests that consciousness is all around us, like in the Mayan symbols I saw on a peyote "trip." So many academics reckon without the Drug War.
Author's Follow-up: November 10, 2022
I wrote the above in response to a tweet from Wiley Philosophy (@philosophersEye) that publicized a collection of essays on 'Consciousness.' This is just my first salvo in a new campaign I'm launching to call out the many academics who reckon without the Drug War, who pretend that they are living in a free country and therefore fail to properly note the way that their researches have been hamstrung by government propaganda.
It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.
If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"
It's no wonder that folks blame drugs. Carl Hart is the first American scientist to openly say in a published book that even the so-called "hard" drugs can be used wisely. That's info that the drug warriors have always tried to keep from us.
The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.
Musk vies with his fellow materialists in his attempt to diss humans as insignificant. But we are not insignificant. The very term "insignificant" is a human creation. Consciousness rules. Indeed, consciousness makes the rules. Without us, there would only be inchoate particles.
There are endless drugs that could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for drug warriors to understand).
We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate percentage from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).
The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."
Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.
We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.
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, Join Philosophers Against the Drug War published on May 12, 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)
his Blog is part of my ongoing attempt to wake the world from the violent man-made nightmare called the Drug War. It is different from all other anti-Drug War blogs and websites in that it does not appeal to statistics to make its points. Rather, it appeals to first principles, or, in other words, it approaches the matter philosophically. This is important, because inductive arguments and statistics can always be gainsaid by racist politicians seeking to maintain a corrupt status quo. In fact, that's why we've been saddled with this corrupt policy of childish substance demonization for over 100 years now. Even the best thinkers are merely using statistics to point out that the Drug War is a "failure," when the reality is that the Drug War had no right to succeed in the first place in a free country, being as it is a violation of Natural Law and the adoption of Christian Science as a state -- and indeed a world -- religion. But when we confront these same scheming politicians by revealing the false, bigoted and colonialist assumptions upon which the Drug War is based, they can't hide their malignant idiocy behind misleading statistics and lies. The only way they can save face is to ignore such arguments completely, and with your help, they won't be able to do that.
You have been reading an article entitled, Join Philosophers Against the Drug War published on May 12, 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)