No drugs are bad in and of themselves

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No drugs are bad in and of themselves

an open letter to Steven Urquhart, founder of the Divine Assembly

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

October 24, 2024

Dear Steve:

I enjoyed your video on psilocybin and TDA (the Divine Assembly ¹).

You mentioned at one point that the Salt Lake City Police Chief indicated that he had a lot of other things to focus on than arresting mushroom users. This sounds very enlightened, except that he probably means that he is busy cracking heads over OTHER drugs like opiates and cocaine ² ³ . This is why I like to say that

the Drug War is a make-work program for law enforcement...

and the "mulligan" that is currently being given to psychedelic use does not change that fact, especially since the police are acting (or withholding action) for practical reasons, not constitutional or common sense reasons, not, that is, based on any pro-human principles. This "mulligan" can also be considered racist, as you yourself acknowledge, since such leniency as you receive would surely not be extended to minority communities who had not surrounded their drug use with noble allusions to human freedom and for whom the amassing of a cadre of stand-by lawyers was completely out of the question economically speaking.

So while it's great that the police are not going to go after YOU and your followers for using mushrooms, it should be remembered that this is only because they are going after thousands of other drug users, based on America's warped idea that bureaucrats and scientists can tell us if a psychoactive drug has positive effects. But this is wrong. It is what philosophers call a category error to put a materialist in charge of opining on the utility and importance of drugs that expand consciousness and increase spirituality. As James Fadiman believes, it is human experience ("citizen science") that determines efficacy of such substances, not the reductionist evaluation that a modern teetotaling and skeptical Dr. Spock of Star Trek might make by looking under a microscope ⁴.

So are we really going to sit back calmly as the FDA tells us that MDMA ⁵ is not worth the risks, a substance that could help us prevent school shootings by helping hotheads experience empathy? In so ruling, the FDA is not making a scientific judgement; they are deciding instead upon what we should value as free citizens of a democracy, namely 100% safety in preference to peace, love and understanding. But that's a bureaucratic conclusion based on the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. It shows how far out of touch the scientific community is when it comes to psychoactive medicines: they are, in fact, dogmatically blind to any and all absolutely obvious benefits of use. And needless to say, this obsession for 100% safety is extremely hypocritical, coming from an agency that believes in the power of brain-damaging shock therapy ⁶ and the psychedelic pill mill ⁷ upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life -- the same FDA that approves drugs whose side effects as advertised on prime-time TV include DEATH ITSELF!

If the police chief wanted to help, he would stop cracking down on ALL drug use and encourage education and regulated supply. We've tried punishment for 100+ years now, and where has it gotten us? We are no longer a free country thanks to drug law, which has destroyed the 4th amendment and is eating away at the first amendment. Before 1914, Americans used opium peaceably in their own homes; thanks to the Drug War, kids are now using opiates in the street. Where do we want them to go next? To Mars!? Nor are they dying because of opiates. Drug warriors are challenged when it comes to the idea of subtlety, but overdoses are being caused today by uncertain and contaminated drug supply, not by drug use per se. There was no national overdose crisis when one was allowed to use regulated product at home.

Indeed, the downsides of the Drug War are just too huge to be seen. It throws millions of minorities in jail, and it takes no pundit to tell us that this would have a major effect on our national elections where presidents win by a handful of votes.

Moreover, as Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014:

"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence ⁸ that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist.⁹"

Today, we have no-go zones in every major (and some minor) American cities -- and everyone knows that there are major cities in every Latin American country that are impassable thanks to the Drug War. Why do we continue with the Drug War, then? Easy. By willful blindness to the facts. The mass media no longer even connects the Drug War with inner city violence and Mexican civil wars. Just read most any story about inner-city violence from a media conglomerate and you'll see all sorts of quotes from puzzled people asking: "Why are these places so damn violent?" ¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹²

But it's important to the powers that be that we never associate this dystopia with the Drug War, even though we know that liquor prohibition created the Mafia as we know it today, and so the hydra-headed downsides of prohibition should be perfectly understandable to everybody. (Of course, the Drug War is the epitome of "denial" -- and so Drug Warriors are always eager to blame all the downsides of prohibition on drugs themselves -- creating a vicious circle that keeps our prisons packed with minorities.)

And what about Mexico's stance on that Drug War? Is it not hateful in the EXTREME? When President Obrador was asked about a woman who was seeking to learn the fate of the 60,000 "disappeared" in Mexico because of the Drug War, he claimed the woman was a necrophiliac ¹³.

In other words, I submit the following, Steve:

The Drug War is wrong root and branch. It is guided by hate. It is always wrong to decide in advance that there are no positive uses for a drug -- especially when one reaches that conclusion by ignoring all historical benefits of drug use, as for instance the war on opiates is based on a very biased view of the Opium Wars, based on an American missionary's lie that the drug was killing millions in China ¹⁴. Lies, lies, lies. Just like the 1980s lie that "drugs" fry the brain ¹⁵ (as if that statement even makes sense when one fails to specify the drug in question!) Not only is that false, but opium had positive uses. The Chinese were not beating up their wives, as were the well-heeled drunks who supported the Anti-Opium movement in 19th-century England.

I am not disagreeing with you Steve, however; I am merely suggesting that you might have been even more right than you yourself believed when you stated that you were in a privileged position to advocate for change. I think it's worth remembering that the cops may be cutting the psychedelic movement slack for the wrong reasons: i.e., because they are using drugs that seemingly intelligent white mainstream males are now favoring.

Open Letters

Notes for essay entitled No drugs are bad in and of themselves: an open letter to Steven Urquhart, founder of the Divine Assembly:

1: The Divine Assembly Urquhart, Steven, 2024 (up)
2: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
3: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
4: Microdosing 101 Fadiman, James, Microdosing Institute (up)
5: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
6: The FDA on ECT: Supporting a Vital Treatment Charles, Kellner MD, 2019 (up)
7: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
8: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
9: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
10: Twenty-four hours of terror as cartel violence engulfs Mexican city The Guardian, 2023 (up)
11: Scribd.com: The Fire Next Door: Mexico's Drug Violence and the Danger to America Carpenter, Ted Galen, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, 2012 (up)
12: No ‘clear way out’: How Ecuador descended into gang violence Alexander, Inigo, Al Jazeera, 2024 (up)
13: Mexico’s president accuses press and volunteer searchers for missing people of ‘necrophilia’ AP News, 2024 (up)
14: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
15: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

If fearmongering drug warriors were right about the weakness of humankind, there would be no social drinkers, only drunkards.

The healthcare industry turns all the emotional downsides of drug prohibition into "illnesses."

A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Performers can lose their livelihood if they become too self-conscious. We only call such use "recreational" because we are oblivious to the common-sense psychology.

We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.

Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.

Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.

"Chemical means of peering into the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine exordia in man’s quest for the beyond... before the coarseness of utilitarian minds reduced them to the status of 'dope'." -- Eric Hendrickson

I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing "Howl!" while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like "Howl!"

I have nothing against science, BTW (altho' I might feel differently after a nuclear war!) I just want scientists to "stay in their lane" and stop pretending to be experts on my own personal mood and consciousness.

Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.

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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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No drugs are bad in and of themselves

an open letter to Steven Urquhart, founder of the Divine Assembly

Open Letters

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend