Extra! Extra! Karolina Zieba just doesn't get it about drugs. Fails to realize that they are simply Mother Nature's godsends and that therefore the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia. Clear the drug-war mental fog by reading What Liberals ALWAYS get wrong about the Drug War!
Karolina wrote the article entitled "In case you choose not to say no to drugs, kids" published online in the Student Newspaper on September 10, 2018. The title alone shows you how bamboozled Karolina is by Drug Warrior hypocrisy, propaganda and outright lies.
Here is my latest letter to The Student Newspaper, protesting their publishing of Drug War lies and propaganda...
Ahem. Ahem.
Dear Editors of the Student Newspaper: Your article from 2018 about the Drug War misses the point entirely.
It is wrong to tell children to say no to drugs: that is Christian Science indoctrination. It's like telling them they should say no to aspirin and antihistamines. Certainly, they should not use such substances ill-advisedly, but it is a mere religious and political directive to tell them to say no to such substances. Besides, the whole Drug War is immensely hypocritical. It tells us to say "no" to godsend psychedelics that can save lives, emotionally speaking, all while it completely ignores the problem of drug addiction that Big Pharma has created, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma meds.
If we're going to start telling kids how to live their lives as adults, let's begin by telling them to say "no" to Big Pharma antidepressants. But, of course, Drug Warriors like Karolina don't mean "blessed medicines" like antidepressants when she uses the political term "drugs."
Someday, outlets like the Student Newspaper will stop printing this kind of Christian Science propaganda, designed to make us think of Mother Nature as a drug kingpin.
My elderly mother has suffered unnecessarily from depression for decades and been addicted to Big Pharma meds for anxiety -- all because the DEA tells us to say "no" to Mother Nature's godsends -- almost all of which are far less addictive than what pharma companies crank out -- and yet we think it's moral to tell children to say "no" to nature's godsends? To the contrary, it's immoral to do so.
Wake up, Student Newspaper: Articles like Karolina's are part of the problem. In fact, they ARE the problem: the problem of the Drug War and the illogical and superstitious way that it makes us think about psychoactive substances.
Please learn some inconvenient truths like the following before you "green light" any further articles of this kind that Karolina wrote back in 2018. Until you take the following facts "on board," your newspaper is only "muddying the waters" when it comes to giving America a clear understanding of the politically motivated Drug War:
There was no drug problem in Ancient Egypt. There was no drug problem in Ancient Mesopotamia. There was no drug problem in Ancient Greece. There was no drug problem in Ancient Rome. There was no drug problem in the Mongol Empire. There was no drug problem during the Viking era.
Why not? Because until 1914 and the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act, people were judged by how they actually behaved, not by what substances they had in their digestive systems.
More inconvenient truths for Drug Warriors:
Freud used cocaine and praised it to the skies for fighting depression and helping him achieve self-actualization in life. Benjamin Franklin used opium. Francis Crick discovered the DNA helix with help from liberal doses of psychedelics. The entire Vedic religion was founded to worship the insights provided by a psychedelic plant.
JFK and his wife used amphetamines in order to "stay fresh" -- at the same time that normal citizens could have been jailed for doing so, especially if there were aggravating circumstances, such as a suspect failing to be a white person.
Meanwhile, the DEA bans research on medical godsend plants that could help in the fight against Alzheimer's -- and KAROLINA DOES NOT EVEN MENTION THIS!!!
Please, un-bamboozle yourself and start publishing articles that speak the truth about the anti-scientific Drug War -- which is also a violation of natural law, in case your reporters are looking for a new angle that they've obviously never thought of.
Why not write a belated article protesting the DEA's seizure of Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987? Jefferson was rolling in his grave -- since that was not just robbery, it was a coup: a coup against the kind of republic that Jefferson had founded: one under natural law, according to which government could not take away basic rights -- including our right to the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet. (In case it's not self-evident to you that plants are ours by right, check out John Locke's Second Treatise of Government on this topic.)
Over 45% of traumatic brain injuries are caused by horseback riding (ABC News). Tell your representatives to outlaw horseback riding and make it a federal offence to teach a child how to ride! Brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
5% of proceeds from the sale of the above product will go toward getting Brian a decent haircut for once. Honestly. 9% will go toward shoes. 50% will go toward miscellaneous. 9% of the remainder will go toward relaxation, which could encompass anything from a spin around town to an outdoor barbecue at Brian's brother's house in Stanardsville (both gas and the ice-cream cake that Brian usually supplies).
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. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.
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
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.
ead all about it in What Liberals ALWAYS get wrong about the Drug War! 
