watched Moonfall last night. Or rather I watched most of it. I cut the film off in disgust when the know-it-all clone of astronaut Brian Harper's six-year-old kid Sonny started a pedantic and self-congratulatory discourse about how his own society had transcended war. Yeah, it seems that the alien's "peeps" were living together in perfect harmony, thank you very much, unlike certain other societies that the little ET could mention. (Hint: the hate-filled creatures in question live on a planet that starts with the letter E!)
"Not bloody likely," I said to myself, as I indignantly closed the PC window upon which I was watching the film on Vudu. If the humanoids of which the tweenager speaks are anything like we Homo sapiens from planet Earth, they would destroy themselves 20 times over rather than condescend to use psychoactive medicine to bring about world harmony, and let's face it, that's the only way such a utopia is ever going to come about for any species even remotely resembling spite-filled and self-interested Homo sapiens and their penchant for blind nationalism and the eternal demonization of "the other."
Now, if the self-satisfied clone had told me how his alien world had abolished the Drug War and learned how to use substances wisely to promote world peace, then I would have gladly watched the film to the end. I could easily believe that a society could transcend violence in that way. We have proof that it works. Look at the Ecstasy-fueled British rave scene of the 1990s, where there was multiethnic peace on the dance floor, an El Dorado of lovey-dovey diversity completely unprecedented in human history -- until Drug Warriors in Parliament cracked down on MDMA, that is, based on one single raver death, which was itself the fault of the Drug War for suppressing the research and education that would have resulted in safe-use guidelines for the drug. Turns out ravers have to remain hydrated while using the substance! Who knew? (Answer: no one, thanks to the Drug Warriors, who ask us to fear and demonize psychoactive medicines rather than to understand them.)
So Earth to the alien know-it-all: Don't tell me that a species resembling drug-hating humans has transcended war -- unless maybe you've got the population so doped up on highly addictive Big Pharma meds that no one has the gumption to fight anymore.
Oh sure, humanoids will tell you that they want peace, but if they're anything like us purebred human beings, peace comes in a distance second to their real priority, a priority before which every other goal must give way (including everything from curing Alzheimer's to saving humanity from extinction): namely, the goal of demonizing godsend psychoactive medicines in a racist and unscientific war on the politically created boogieman called "drugs."
May 28, 2022
"Moonfall" was not one of those Drug War movies in which Drug Warriors give medicine users the Nazi treatment. Nevertheless, like so many movies today (and books, and TV shows) its plot reads problematically when considered in the light of America's unscientific war on mind medicine. In this case, it begs the question, how did a human-like species learn to live with itself without the aid of empathogenic psychoactive medicine, given the fact that we "purebred" human beings are busy shooting up schoolyards and preparing for Armageddon thanks to our criminalization of the same? The only plausible answer is that the humanoids "did drugs" (as the demonizing Drug Warrior would put it). But if that's the case, then that self-righteous six-year-old clone should have said so, rather than observing the usual politically correct silence on the topic of mood medicine.
Incidentally, look at that favorite Drug Warrior phrase: "did drugs." Anyone who uses that trope without irony has been brainwashed by drug-war propaganda. For "did drugs" is to "used mind medicine" as "did the nasty" is to "made love." The purpose of the phrase is to disparage the activity that it describes. It is a political way to talk, as well. When John F. Kennedy and his wife used doctor-prescribed methamphetamine, we feel like they used mind medicine. When a bum on the street uses the same stuff, we say they "did drugs."
Author's Follow-up: August 28, 2022
It's worth reminding the reader here that there are no such things as "drugs," as that word is defined by the Drug Warrior. To them, the word "drugs" means, "substances that have no valid use: not here, not there, not anywhere; not now, not ever."
In fact, there are no such substances on planet earth. No substance is bad in and of itself. Even the highly toxic Botox can be used safely if we put our minds to it.
But so-called scientific America starts with the premise that certain substances are evil incarnate and makes it illegal to actually study them, thereby blocking possible cures for Alzheimer's and autism, not to mention society's one and only realistic hope for world peace: namely, the widespread use of entheogenic substances that literally teach the user how to feel compassion for their fellow human beings.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
THE MEDIA AND THE DRUG WAR
I guess the motto for their owner, Hubbard Broadcasting, is PANEM ET CIRCENSES, i.e., bread and circuses.
Breaking news : "McDonald's will stay open after petition gathered enough signatures!" If only WTOP would give such front-page coverage to petitions to end the drug war.
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.
Sana Collective Group committed to making psychedelic therapy available to all regardless of income.
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.
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
Andrew, Christopher "The Secret World: A History of Intelligence" 2019 Yale University Press
Aurelius, Marcus "Meditations" 2021 East India Publishing Company
Bache, Christopher "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven" 2019 Park Street Press
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
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
Whitaker, Robert "Mad in America"2002 Perseus Publishing
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.
watched Moonfall last night. Or rather I watched most of it. I cut the film off in disgust when the know-it-all clone of astronaut Brian Harper's six-year-old kid Sonny started a pedantic and self-congratulatory discourse about how his own society had transcended war. Yeah, it seems that the alien's "peeps" were living together in perfect harmony, thank you very much, unlike certain other societies that the little ET could mention. (Hint: the hate-filled creatures in question live on a planet that starts with the letter E!)
