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.
Science knows nothing of the human spirit and of the hopes and dreams of humankind. Science cannot tell us whether a given drug risk is worthwhile given the human need for creativity and passion in their life. Science has no expertise in making such philosophical judgements.
Pro-psychedelic websites tell me to check with my "doctor" before using Mother Nature. But WHY? I'm the expert on my own psychology, damn it. These "doctors" are the ones who got me hooked on synthetic drugs, because they honor microscopic evidence, not time-honored usage.
Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."
My local community store here in the sticks sells Trump "dollar bills" at the checkout counter. I don't know what's worse: a president encouraging insurrection or an electorate that does not see that as a problem.
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
This is why America is creeping toward authoritarianism -- because of the prohibitionists' ability to get away with everything by blaming "drugs." The fact that Americans still fall for this crap represents a kind of collective pathology.
William James knew that there were substances that could elate. However, it never occurred to him that we should use such substances to prevent suicide. It seems James was blinded to this possibility by his puritanical assumptions.
I wish someone would tell Getty Images to start earning an honest living. I bought AI credits only to find that words like "mushrooms" and "drugs" could not be used. Nor "blood," nor "violence." And they refuse to refund my $14,99. Who is their service for, Ozzie Harriet?
Today's Washington Post reports that "opioid pills shipped" DROPPED 45% between 2011 and 2019..... while fatal overdoses ROSE TO RECORD LEVELS! Prohibition is PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.
Listen to the Drug War Philosopher as he tells you how you can support his work to end the hateful drug war -- and, ideally, put the DEA on trial for willfully lying about godsend medicines! (How? By advertising on this page right c'here!)
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)