Essay date: July 27, 2019





Marci Hamilton Equates Drug Use with Child Abuse




n 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, it is modern antidepressants, 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 (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.

CHRISTIANSCIENCE


Buy the Drug War Comic Book by Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans


DRUG WARRIORS REBUTTED

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.
Next essay: Seven Ways that Liberals are Confused by the Drug War
Previous essay: There's nothing complicated about it -- legalize Mother Nature's plants now!

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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. (For proof of that latter charge, check out how the US and UK have criminalized the substances that William James himself told us to study in order to understand reality.) It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions (like the Vedic), Nazifies the English language (referring to folks who emulate drug-loving Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin as "scumbags") and militarizes police forces nationwide (resulting in gestapo SWAT teams breaking into houses of peaceable Americans and shouting "GO GO GO!").

(Speaking of Nazification, L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates thought that drug users should be shot. What a softie! The real hardliners are the William Bennetts of the world who want drug users to be beheaded instead. That will teach them to use time-honored plant medicine of which politicians disapprove! Mary Baker Eddy must be ecstatic in her drug-free heaven, as she looks down and sees this modern inquisition on behalf of the drug-hating principles that she herself maintained. I bet she never dared hope that her religion would become the viciously enforced religion of America, let alone of the entire freakin' world!)

In short, the drug war 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.

Brian Quass
The Drug War Philosopher
abolishthedea.com

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.

PPS Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."

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

  • Bandow, Doug "From Fighting The Drug War To Protecting The Right To Use Drugs"2018
  • Barrett, Damon "Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Polices on Young People"2011 IDEBATE Press
  • Bernays, Edward "Propaganda"1928 Public Domain
  • Bilton, Anton "DMT Entity Encounters: Dialogues on the Spirit Molecule"2021 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Boullosa , Carmen "A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the 'Mexican Drug War'"2016 OR Books
  • Brereton, William "The Truth about Opium / Being a Refutation of the Fallacies of the Anti-Opium Society and a Defence of the Indo-China Opium Trade"2017 Anna Ruggieri
  • Burns, Eric "1920: The year that made the decade roar"2015 Pegasus Books
  • Carpenter, Ted Galen "The Fire Next Door: Mexico's Drug Violence and the Danger to America"2012 Cato Institute
  • Chesterton, GK "Saint Thomas Acquinas"2014 BookBaby
  • Filan, Kenaz "The Power of the Poppy: Harnessing Nature's Most Dangerous Plant Ally"2011 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Gianluca, Toro "Drugs of the Dreaming: Oneirogens"2007 Simon and Schuster
  • Griffiths, William "Psilocybin: A Trip into the World of Magic Mushrooms"2021 William Griffiths
  • Grof, Stanislav "The transpersonal vision: the healing potential of nonordinary states of consciousness"1998 Sounds True
  • Head, Simon "Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans"2012 Basic Books
  • Hofmann, Albert "The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications"2005 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Illich, Ivan "Medical nemesis : the expropriation of health"1975 Calder & Boyars
  • Irwin-Rogers, Keir "Illicit Drug Markets, Consumer Capitalism and the Rise of Social Media: A Toxic Trap for Young People"2019
  • James, William "The Varieties of Religious Experience"1902 Philosophical Library
  • Lindstrom, Martin "Brandwashed: tricks companies use to manipulate our minds and persuade us to buy"2011 Crown Business
  • Mariani, Angelo "Coca and its Therapeutic Application, Third Edition"1896 Gutenberg.org
  • Miller, Richard Lawrence "Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State"1966 Bloomsbury Academic
  • Mortimer MD, W. Golden "Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas"2017 Ronin Publishing
  • Nagel, Thomas "Mind and Cosmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false"2012 Oxford University press
  • Newcombe, Russell "Intoxiphobia: discrimination toward people who use drugs"2014 academia.edu
  • Partridge, Chiristopher "Alistair Crowley on Drugs"2021 uploaded by Misael Hernandez
  • Rosenblum, Bruce "Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness"2006 Oxford University Press
  • Rudgley, Richard "The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances"2014 Macmillan Publishers
  • Shulgin, Alexander "PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story"1991 Transform Press
  • Shulgin, Alexander "The Nature of Drugs Vol. 1: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact"2021 Transform Press
  • Smith, Wolfgang "Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief"0
  • Smith, Wolfgang "Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology"2022
  • St John, Graham "Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT"2021
  • Szasz, Thomas "Interview With Thomas Szasz: by Randall C. Wyatt"0
  • Wedel, Janine "Unaccountable: How the Establishment Corrupted Our Finances, Freedom and Politics and Created an Outsider Class"2014 Pegasus Books
  • Weil, Andrew "From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs"2004 Open Road Integrated Media
  • Whitaker, Robert "Mad in America"2002 Perseus Publishing
  • 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.