Essay date: May 13, 2022

Open Letter to Lisa Ling

whose documentary about Chicago violence does not even mention the Drug War!!!




Lisa Ling created a documentary about Chicago gun violence in which she never once mentioned the drug war, the policy that caused the violence just as surely as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.

isa Ling never once mentioned the Drug War during her documentary about violence in Chicago. Not once. Surely she knows that it is the Drug War that creates HUGE incentives for drug dealing, thereby facilitating the creation of armed gangs and the violence that comes with it in the form of turf wars. This violence (which killed almost 800 blacks in Chicago in 2021 alone) will never end if we fail to identify the obvious cause.


By failing to identify the true cause of the violence -- namely, substance prohibition -- Lisa is empowering fascists like Trump to start executing black Chicagoans in the name of the hateful Drug War.


Please, Lisa: as liquor prohibition created the Mafia, so substance prohibition has created the modern inner-city gangs. Please say so in your future reportage! As Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014: "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."


Lisa missed a real opportunity to get to the truth about the hate-filled drug-war, which gives police carte blanche to treat suspects like scum. That's why the cop who killed George Floyd told the crowd to "just say no to drugs," because it was the Drug War which first gave racist cops like himself the green light to treat suspects like dirt.

The Links Police


Do you know why I pulled you over? That's right, because the Drug War gives me carte blanche to be a noxious busybody. No, seriously, I thought you might be interested in the following related links that show that media types "just don't get it" when it comes to the war on drugs.



Author's Follow-up: March 18, 2023



Lisa has the same problem that Michael Pollan has -- and Bill Clinton and Joe Biden and all modern prohibitionists. They completely fail to recognize all the stakeholders in the drug criminalization process. The only stakeholder they recognize are white American young people. Of course, even if these were the only stakeholders, the obvious answer to such fears would be to educate young people, not to outlaw mother nature in violation of natural law itself. But young people are NOT the only stakeholders when it comes to prohibition. The other stakeholders include


Forgotten Stakeholders in the drug debate




  1. The depressed and anxious who are denied godsend medicines thanks to prohibition.

  2. The academic community, which is censored by drug law and told they can only research substances of which their government approves.

  3. Mexican children who lose their parents to the war on drugs

  4. Patients (including children in hospice) experiencing pain who cannot get adequate relief, thanks to America's demonization of pain medicine.

  5. Residents of inner cities who live in violent "no-go" zones like Southeast Washington, D.C., where bullets fly thanks to the fact that substance prohibition armed these communities to the teeth.

  6. Formerly free Americans who now live in a semi-police state thanks to the militarization of local police forces in the name of "fighting drugs."



The list goes on and on and yet Lisa Ling and company are determined to screw the entire world up if only they can do something to help poor little uneducated American white kids.

Of course, Lisa & co. are not really racist. They just know at some level that to fret for the kids helps them keep this unjust system in place that makes the world safe for capitalism by reducing all social problems to one cause: the superstitious boogieman and scapegoat that modern racist politicians call "drugs."

Why CBS 19 should stop supporting the Drug War
Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide
COPS: TV Show for Racist Drug Warriors
Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman

Next essay: The Ketamine Mirage
Previous essay: Open Letter to Nathan at TheDEA.org

More Essays Here


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Unscientific American
How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War Part II
There is a Specter Haunting Science
The Problem with Following the Science
Why Americans Can't Handle the Truth about Drugs
Another Academic Toes the Drug Warrior Line
Self-Censorship in the Age of the Drug War

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Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser
Open letter to Kenneth Sewell
Open Letter to Nathan at TheDEA.org
Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University
Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature
Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
Open Letter to Vincent Rado
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Critique of the Philosophy of Happiness
Heroin versus Alcohol
End the Drug War Now
How the Drug War Screws the Depressed
How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987
How to Unite Drug War Opponents of all Ethnicities
Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
Majoring in Drug War Philosophy
MDMA for Psychotherapy
Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
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The Mother of all Western Biases
Top 10 Problems with the Drug War
Why CBS 19 should stop supporting the Drug War
Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
Why the Drug War is Worse than you can Imagine
Why the Holocaust Museum must denounce the Drug War
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essays about
RECKONING WITHOUT THE DRUG WAR

All these Sons
The End Times by Bryan Walsh
How Science News Reckons Without the Drug War
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Obama's Unscientific BRAIN Initiative
Richard Feynman and the Drug War
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Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama
Taking the Drug War for Granted
How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine
Unscientific American
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A Misguided Tour of Monticello

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THE MEDIA AND THE DRUG WAR

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COPS: TV Show for Racist Drug Warriors
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America's Obsession with Fascist Drug War Movies
Glenn Close but no cigar
How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War
How Variety and its film critics support drug war fascism
Karolina Zieba just doesn't get it
All these Sons
Colorado plane crash caused by milk!
Drug War Quotes in TV and Movies
Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide
Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide
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Enough Drug War Propaganda Movies Already




old time radio playing Drug War comedy sketches














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.

Brian Quass
The Drug War Philosopher
abolishthedea.com

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

  • Bandow, Doug "From Fighting The Drug War To Protecting The Right To Use Drugs"2018
  • Barrett, Damon "Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Polices on Young People"2011 IDEBATE Press
  • Bilton, Anton "DMT Entity Encounters: Dialogues on the Spirit Molecule"2021 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Boullosa , Carmen "A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the 'Mexican Drug War'"2016 OR Books
  • Brereton, William "The Truth about Opium / Being a Refutation of the Fallacies of the Anti-Opium Society and a Defence of the Indo-China Opium Trade"2017 Anna Ruggieri
  • Burns, Eric "1920: The year that made the decade roar"2015 Pegasus Books
  • Carpenter, Ted Galen "The Fire Next Door: Mexico's Drug Violence and the Danger to America"2012 Cato Institute
  • Chesterton, GK "Saint Thomas Acquinas"2014 BookBaby
  • Filan, Kenaz "The Power of the Poppy: Harnessing Nature's Most Dangerous Plant Ally"2011 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Griffiths, William "Psilocybin: A Trip into the World of Magic Mushrooms"2021 William Griffiths
  • Hofmann, Albert "The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications"2005 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Irwin-Rogers, Keir "Illicit Drug Markets, Consumer Capitalism and the Rise of Social Media: A Toxic Trap for Young People"2019
  • James, William "The Varieties of Religious Experience"1902 Philosophical Library
  • Mariani, Angelo "Coca and its Therapeutic Application, Third Edition"1896 Gutenberg.org
  • Mortimer MD, W. Golden "Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas"2017 Ronin Publishing
  • Partridge, Chiristopher "Alistair Crowley on Drugs"2021 uploaded by Misael Hernandez
  • Rudgley, Richard "The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances"2014 Macmillan Publishers
  • Shulgin, Alexander "PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story"1991 Transform Press
  • Shulgin, Alexander "The Nature of Drugs Vol. 1: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact"2021 Transform Press
  • Smith, Wolfgang "Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief"0
  • Smith, Wolfgang "Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology"2022
  • St John, Graham "Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT"2021
  • Szasz, Thomas "Interview With Thomas Szasz: by Randall C. Wyatt"0
  • Wedel, Janine "Unaccountable: How the Establishment Corrupted Our Finances, Freedom and Politics and Created an Outsider Class"2014 Pegasus Books
  • Weil, Andrew "From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs"2004 Open Road Integrated Media
  • 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.