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Let's hear it for Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx
Let's hear it for Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx
and everyone else who stands up to the drug war at the risk of losing their own freedom
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 16, 2024
Here is my response to an article entitled "FREE DULF. NO MORE DYING. NO MORE DRUG WAR 2024," published by the Drug User Solidarity Committee on the Drug War Decoded-Canada website.1
Thanks and best wishes to Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx... and to everyone else who stands up to the hateful Drug War at the risk of their own freedom.
The Drug War is anti-democratic. The proof is extant.
It has destroyed the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution (which used to bar unreasonable search). It outlaws religions that rely on entheogenic ritual. It is a makework program for law enforcement that throws millions of minorities in jail every year, thereby handing elections to tyrants. And Drug Warriors are not done yet with their assault on democratic freedoms. In early 2024, Oregon politicians floated a plan to outlaw free speech when it comes to drugs.
Drug warriors would prefer that drug users die than to provide them with regulated product. They would prefer nuclear armageddon 2345 to a world in which people use entheogens to promote world peace.
America's Food & Drug Administration embraces the same warped priorities.
It disapproves of drugs that could prevent suicide 6 and school shootings. Meanwhile it approves of Big Pharma 78 "meds" whose side effects include death itself 9 . This is the same FDA which approves of brain-damaging shock therapy, the same FDA which endorses the psychiatric pill mill and the same FDA which has no problem with the fact that 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent on antidepressants 10 for life.
But the media and politicians keep running a full-court press against common sense and simple humanity.
Thank God for folks like Jeremy and Eris who dare to push back!
Author's Follow-up: October 16, 2024
Drug prohibition is a very strange puppy. First America decided to end liquor prohibition once and for all with the 21st amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But then those same Americans began outlawing every even potentially popular psychoactive alternative to liquor, many of them time-honored, some of them long considered panaceas, and none of them as dangerous as alcohol itself.
So Americans love prohibition -- they just want to make one big fat exception for liquor when it comes to prohibition enforcement.
Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.
One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise come from user reports.
It's a category error to say that scientists can tell us if psychoactive drugs "really work." It's like asking Dr. Spock of Star Trek if hugging "really works." ("Hugging is highly illogical, Captain.")
What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.
Typical materialist protocol. Take all the "wonder" out of the drug and sell it as a one-size-fits all "reductionist" cure for anxiety. Notice that they refer to hallucinations and euphoria as "adverse effects." What next? Communion wine with the religion taken out of it?
It is folly to put bureaucrats in charge of second-guessing drug prescriptions: what such bureaucrats are really doing is second-guessing the various philosophies of life which are presupposed by the way we use psychoactive drugs.
"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. The very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.
The reasons that people use drugs are psychologically obvious. Academics gaslight us on this topic and invent new diseases to explain away our desire to live large.
The DEA is gaslighting Americans, telling them that drugs with obvious benefits have no benefits whatsoever. Scientists collude in this lie thanks to their adherence to the emotion-scorning principles of behaviorism.
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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