Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
lease 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 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 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 in 1985. This deceit has also condemned Brian himself to a lifetime dependency on Big Pharma 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, 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 -- 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 over education.
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.
lease 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 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 for using chemical weapons against his own people. 
