Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA

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Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 2, 2020

Please tell the DEA to stop criminalizing research into godsend medicines. My mother has symptoms of dementia, and so many psychoactive plants show great promise in treating and even reversing it. Yet the CRIMINAL DEA criminalizes research on almost all such psychoactive substances. This is the same agency that poisoned Americans in the 1980s with Paraquat sprayed on marijuana. Paraquat has since been shown to cause Parkinson's Disease. So the DEA not only lies about substances that could possibly cure Alzheimer's ¹ disease, but they purposefully poison their own people (Americans) with CHEMICAL WEAPONS. ABOLISH the hateful DEA -- the anti-minority DEA -- the anti-nature DEA -- the anti-RESEARCH DEA -- and let my mother have peace in her final years. AND PUT FORMER DEA CHIEF JOHN C LAWN ON TRIAL for crimes against humanity ² for using chemical weapons against his own people.

May 9, 2022
The DEA has been lying about plant medicine in its so-called "scheduling" system since its creation in 1973, and yet to my knowledge, Brian is the only one who has ever called for the DEA to be criminally charged for this deceit -- the only one -- and yet it is a deceit which has caused endless anguish to billions around the world. American soldiers have had to go without a godsend treatment for PTSD for almost 40 years now after the DEA went against the advice of its own counsel to criminalize MDMA ³ in 1985. This deceit has also condemned Brian himself to a lifetime dependency on Big Pharma ⁴ ⁵ meds. The fact that only one American, Brian, has ever asked for this crime to be punished demonstrates how bamboozled Americans have become about the politically created boogieman called "drugs," and it's no surprise -- given that we are all indoctrinated from childhood (in special classes organized by the teddy bear-toting local police force) to fear and loathe naturally occurring psychoactive substances, rather than to learn everything we can about them. Merely to start learning about prohibited substances is heresy these days because we're asked to hate substances that have been politically labeled as "drugs," not to understand them.

Politicians created the whole category of "drugs" insomuch as that term means "substances which are to be hated, feared and criminalized rather than studied and understood." In doing so, politicians created the drug problem. By constantly screaming "DRUGS!" they sent the following message to kids: "Hey, kids! Whatever you do, don't use these particular substances that we are screaming bloody hell about!" Well, of course, the rebellious kids pricked up their ears: "What? There are cool substances out there that our parents don't want us to use. Where can I find some of THOSE!?"

Then the politicians point to this obsession with drugs that they themselves have created and say, "See, we need a Drug War!" And don't hold your breath waiting to hear about responsible use of hated substances, like the fact that HG Wells and Jules Verne used coca wine when writing their famous stories, or that Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin enjoyed opium ⁶ , etc. The drug-war narrative is all about typically clueless white kids misusing the substances about which the Drug War enforces ignorance by law, literally censoring scientists from learning about the godsend medicines of which pharmacologically clueless politicians disapprove.

While the Drug Warrior "protects" white American kids with lies and half-truths about "drugs," they travel overseas to fight the drug cartels that America has created out of whole cloth with its unconstitutional war on godsend plant medicine.

They think that if they can save one Caucasian child from drug abuse, then the Drug War will be worth it, failing to realize that their Drug War is responsible for thousands of inner-city deaths every year in America due to gun violence ⁷ -- the violence that naturally follows prohibition. Over 800 blacks were killed this way in 2021 in Chicago alone and yet the Drug Warrior prides themselves for scaring white kids away from making a bad decision -- which is the only kind of decision that they can make about drugs in a Drug War society in which we prioritize fear over facts and incarceration ⁸ over education.

Open Letters

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Notes:

1: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
2: Drug Prohibition is a crime against humantiy DWP (up)
3: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
4: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
5: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
6: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
7: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
8: 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)

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A law proposed in Colorado in February 2024 would have criminalized positive talk about drugs online. What? The world is on the brink of nuclear war because of hate-driven politics, and I can be arrested for singing the praises of empathogens?

Drug warriors have taught us that honesty about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.

Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!

Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?

It's no wonder that folks blame drugs. Carl Hart is the first American scientist to openly say in a published book that even the so-called "hard" drugs can be used wisely. That's info that the drug warriors have always tried to keep from us.

I wonder if Nixon knew what a favor he was doing medical capitalism when he outlawed psychedelics. Those drugs can actually cure things, and there's no money in that.

America arrests people whose only crime is that they are trying to be all that they can be in life... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.

"The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.

Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.

It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.

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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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