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

Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.

The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.

There are endless creative ways to ward off addictions if all psychoactive medicines were at our disposal. The use of the drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin could combat the psychological downsides of withdrawal by providing strategic "as-needed" relief.

"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.

Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.

ECT is like euthanasia. Neither make sense in the age of prohibition.

If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"

Why does no one talk about empathogens for preventing atrocities? Because they'd rather hate drugs than use them for the benefit of humanity. They don't want to solve problems, they prefer hatred.

Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.

If I have no right to mother nature's bounty, then I surely have no right to manmade guns. If hysterical fearmongering justifies the eradication of the Fourth Amendment, then the Second Amendment should go as well.

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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