he media continues to beat up on marijuana. The Washington Post tells us today that, "Sorry, weed does not increase your creativity."
What the Post really means is that weed does not increase your creativity in a materialist fashion. You can't simply smoke weed and, hey presto, become more creative, as one might take an aspirin to combat a headache. But this is a commonplace, not a bombshell.
With psychoactive drugs, however, you participate in the drug-taking experience. The materialist model does not apply. If you bring creativity to the experience, weed can then leverage that creativity for artistic purposes. For those who disagree, I have but one word for you: jazz. Of course, you first have to believe that a psychoactive drug can help you -- and this is a qualification that materialists abhor: they can only understand one-size-fits-all drugs that work regardless of whether anyone believes in them or not.
It's funny: when the media run out of scare facts to turn us away from Mother Nature's medicines, they resort to articles like this one which make the feeble point that a given botanical may not be as useful as we think it is.
Well, so what? It's a plant, for God's sake. Shut the hell up and re-legalize it already.
This is the problem with go-slow drug legalization. Marijuana becomes the poster child and straw man for the reform movement. That's a sideshow that distracts us from the main point: that God said his creation was good and that we thereby demand our right to mother nature. Those who disagree with us have their own nature-hating religion (according to which God is said to have created "junk" and "dope"). Let them go practice it in private without imposing their views on the world at large with a prohibition that has been demonstrably shown to kill and disenfranchise minorities by the hundreds of thousands.
This is not a matter of science or politics: it's a matter of natural law -- the natural law that Reagan's DEA violated when it stomped onto Monticello and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants. I repeat: confiscated his POPPY PLANTS. The fact that such an action seems "normal" to Americans shows how crazed America has become after 100 years of daily prohibition propaganda, mostly in the form of the censorship of all good news about psychoactive medicines.
Instead of telling us that weed won't increase our creativity, the Post should be warning us that anti-depressants will DECREASE it, a statement for which there is plenty of anecdotal evidence. But then who's going to fund the necessary studies on such an allegation? Certainly not the advertisers who support the Post's fearmongering campaigns against re-legalizing Mother Nature.
For truth in advertising, the Post article mentioned above should have been titled "Why Blacks must keep dying in inner cities and why the rule of law must not be re-established in Mexico," for that's what happens when we outlaw natural substances based on the Chicken Little sniping of America's puritan and materialist prohibition movement.
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
Miller, Richard Louis "Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle " 2017 Park Street Press
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.
he media continues to beat up on marijuana. The Washington Post tells us today that, "Sorry, weed does not increase your creativity." 
