Marci Hamilton Equates Drug Use with Child Abuse

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Marci Hamilton Equates Drug Use with Child Abuse

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 27, 2019

UPDATE

In response to No, American Religious Liberty Is Not in Peril by Marci Hamilton in the Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2019

Dear Marci:

I think it is amazing that you equate the use of Mother Nature's psychedelic plants with child abuse. It shows how far the Drug War has gone in superstitiously turning mere physical substances into demons, into the very incarnation of evil, something to be feared and reviled rather than to be analyzed dispassionately with an eye toward their potential benefits for humankind.

If you are keeping up on world events, you surely know that psychedelics are now being shown to grow new neurons in the brains of the depressed and, when properly administered, to give new hope and mental resilience to cases that had hitherto been impervious to all other treatments. Moreover, you're surely aware that Nixon rendered psychedelics illegal, not to protect America's health, but to punish his political enemies by making them felons and thus removing them from the voting rolls - and that, at the time Nixon did this, psychedelics were showing unprecedented benefit in actually curing alcoholics. You're surely also aware that many legal antidepressant drugs are so addictive that they have to be taken for life - whereas the naturally-occurring psychedelics that you demonize are non-addictive and can sometimes facilitate mental cures in just one session!

As for the old Drug War canard that drugs "fry your brain," psychedelics have been shown to actually grow new neurons. If any drugs fry the brain ¹, it is modern antidepressants ², which are increasingly implicated in causing anhedonia in long-term users.

In other words, there is no evidence that legalized psychedelics would destroy America, least of all when those substances are used in a religious setting. No doubt you could cobble together a few statistics to the contrary, but any damage you may document would be minuscule compared to that done by alcohol, cigarettes, and the legal drug therapy on which more than 1 in 10 Americans are now chemically dependent, destined to be drug users for a lifetime thanks to the "rights" of Big Pharma ³ ⁴ (business rights which, as a conservative, you no doubt think are just and proper despite their catastrophic effect on actual human lives!)

It's funny that you should bring up the Christian Science attitude toward "childhood vaccination" in arguing against excessive religious rights - because the Drug War is nothing but Christian Science as applied to mental health: that is, the Drug War is based on the metaphysical premise that we should not use Mother Nature's psychedelic medicines to improve our mental health. That is a religious belief itself that cannot even in theory be proven: it is a faith, one that many Americans do not share. So you show your religious intolerance in deciding that everyone must respect your jaundiced view of Mother Nature's plants and fungi by eschewing the therapeutic use of those God-given substances. In short, if the anti-vaccination movement is ignorant, then so is the Drug War: for both argue against the use of demonstrably therapeutic substances.

You claim that the young people known as "nones" are on your side, philosophically speaking. I doubt that, but if you're right, this won't last for long. Research from the new psychedelic renaissance is proving that the guided use of Mother Nature's psychedelic bounty can increase mental resilience and clarity and help one think outside the box - which is the very definition of a psychotherapeutic godsend. The "nones" are going to be smart enough to realize that the Drug War is all about keeping them from these naturally-occurring therapies - at which point these "nones" will take the lead in denouncing the folly of criminalizing Mother Nature's therapeutic bounty.

It is my sincere hope that this pushback against the Drug War will result in new churches, in which Americans will seek transcendence together through the ritual use of Mother Nature's psychedelic plants.

This would not represent the claiming of some new exotic right as you seem to think: it would be the re-claiming of a God-given right to the therapeutic bounty that grows at our very feet, a right guaranteed by natural law until it was first unconstitutionally usurped by common law in 1914 with the Harrison Narcotics Act.

Author's Follow-up: January 1, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

The above was written five years ago when I was still quite young -- scarcely 60 years old. Today, I might have tried to be just a tad more diplomatic -- but I still agree with every word I said -- and even more so than before, having studied the Drug War in depth from a philosophical angle in the intervening years.

Marci's viewpoint is so repellant to me and based on so many anti-democratic, anti-scientific and anti-philosophical premises, that I hardly know where to begin in responding to it.

If kids are growing up to hate drugs these days as Marci assures us, then it is only because of Drug War propaganda which has expunged all positive news about drugs from the media, ⁵ meanwhile brainwashing grade schoolers in the drug-hating principles of Mary Baker-Eddy ⁶ ⁷. It has censored academia and wasted billions of dollars on police and military, meanwhile causing the senseless deaths of tens of thousands of American young people by refusing to teach safe use and refusing to regulate drug supply -- thereby leading to completely unnecessary drug overdoses ⁸.

Americans used opium ⁹ peaceably at home before 1914. But anti-Chinese Drug Warriors imposed their Christian Science intolerance on America and those users became criminals overnight. Now those who want to use opiates are dying in the streets. Being a Drug Warrior, though, means never having to say you're sorry. It is the ultimate case of denial. But then the Drug War is based on two enormous lies: 1) that drugs have no positive uses and 2) that prohibition has no downsides.

If Marci is worried about our kids, it's a wonder that she's not sounding the alarm about alcohol which kills 178,000 a year ¹⁰ or guns that kill 50,000 a year in America alone ¹¹. Surely, those who sell alcohol and those who sell guns are wicked in her book. But then consistency has never been the strong point of the Drug Warrior.

No, it's democracy that Drug Warriors hate. They hate freedom of religion ¹² and the whole concept of probable cause. Above all, they covet power, which they know they can receive by crafting laws that arrest millions of minorities thanks to the crime-incentivizing program called prohibition. Had Marci's viewpoint reigned in the Indus Valley 3,500 years ago, there would be no Hindu religion today, as its Vedic forerunner was inspired by the use of a psychedelic plant medicine known as Soma ¹³.

In Marci's view, moreover, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were just so many druggie criminals. She was no doubt applauding when the DEA stomped onto Monticello ¹⁴ in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And now the Thomas Jefferson Foundation refuses to even mention that raid to its visitors, knowing that it would show that the foundation had betrayed Jefferson's legacy in lockstep with Drug War ideology ¹⁵.

Finally, we live in a world that is on the brink of nuclear annihilation because of haters like Drug Warriors ¹⁶ -- and yet these same haters want to outlaw drugs that inspire compassion. The big threat for them is peace, love and understanding. They don't mind that we're surrounded by nuclear weapons that could go off at any moment now, on purpose or accidentally, and leave humanity to die out slowly in a nuclear winter.

The Drug War is a slow-motion coup against democracy.

It has crafted laws that lock up millions of minorities and in so doing facilitated the election of America's first dictator. Thanks for nothing, Marci.

Marci's stance on drugs is an illustration of my statement that the Drug War represents a complete inversion of common sense and humanistic values. It is the triumph of stupidity. It is brainless fearmongering on a scale that the witch hunters of New England could never have imagined.

Author's Follow-up: January 2, 2025

And because the Drug War is the ultimate example of fearmongering, it should be studied and exposed as such by modern researchers in the field of witchcraft. But Drug War propaganda has gotten to them as well. And so the leaders in that field pretend that ostensibly magical "herbs" are not "drugs" -- in the same way that the rest of us pretend that "meds" are not "drugs." It has nothing to do with the drugs themselves -- drugs are drugs, after all -- but merely with how we have been taught to FEEL about them.

For more, see my essay entitled .

Fearmongering

Notes:

1: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)
2: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
3: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
4: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
5: How the Media Puts Drugs on Show Trials: an open letter to Bennett Haeberle of NBC 5 Chicago DWP (up)
6: Common Nonsense from Common Sense Media DWP (up)
7: The Drug War = Christian Science DWP (up)
8: 'Synthetic Panics' by Philip Jenkins DWP (up)
9: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
10: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
11: Gun Deaths Per Year: Trends In The U.S. (2025) Consumer Shield (up)
12: Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
13: One Thousand Names of Soma: Elements of Religious and Divine Ecstasy Kalomiris, James, Balboa Press, 2019 (up)
14: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
15: How the DEA Scrubbed Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Poppy Garden from Public Memory alternet.org, 2010 (up)
16: An interview with Annie Jacobsen, author of ‘Nuclear War: A Scenario’ Jackobsen, Annie, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2024 (up)

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The International Observer says the "core issues" causing Mexican drug violence are: "corruption, inequality, and the demand for narcotics in the U.S." Wrong, wrong, wrong. The core issue is DRUG PROHIBITION.

We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.

America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.

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.

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?!

All drugs have potential positive uses for somebody, at some dose, in some circumstance, alone or in combination. To decide in advance that a drug is completely useless is an offense to reason and to human liberty.

We should place prohibitionists on trial for destroying inner cities.

The so-called "herbs" that witches used were drugs, in the same way that "meds" are drugs. If academics made that connection, the study of witchcraft would shed a lot of light on the fearmongering of modern prohibitionists.

"Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?

Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.

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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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(up)

Marci Hamilton Equates Drug Use with Child Abuse

Author's Follow-up: January 1, 2025

Author's Follow-up: January 2, 2025

Fearmongering

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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