whose documentary about Chicago violence does not even mention the Drug War!!!
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 13, 2022
Lisa 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 1 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist.2"
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.
Forgotten Stakeholders in the drug debate
The depressed and anxious who are denied godsend medicines thanks to prohibition.
The academic community, which is censored by drug law and told they can only research substances of which their government approves.
Mexican children who lose their parents to the War on Drugs
Patients (including children in hospice) experiencing pain who cannot get adequate relief, thanks to America's demonization of pain medicine.
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.
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."
Author's Follow-up:
May 18, 2025
America is in complete denial about the downsides of drug prohibition, and Lisa Ling is the poster child for that denial. But she is not alone in ignoring the endless downsides to drug prohibition. Most of today's scientific articles on things like depression and human consciousness only make sense if you assume with the author that drugs do not exist. Take the claim that depression is hard to beat. That statement is true only if you assume that psychoactive substances do not exist, many of which could end depression in real-time, as for instance laughing gas 3 , phenethylamines, and even opium 4 , the drug that Americans love to hate.
But Americans have been brain-wiped when it comes to drug prohibition. They refuse to admit that drug prohibition exists. They refuse to even recognize the existence of the endless substances that we have outlawed in the name of fearmongering and racial and ethnic prejudices.
Even our history books ignore the Drug War. The progressive historian Howard Zinn never mentions the Drug War once in "A People's History of the United States of America"; neither does the conservative historian Paul Johnson in "Birth of the Modern."
How will the Drug War ever end when we refuse to recognize that it even exists? How will it end when we give it a giant "Mulligan" for all the harm that it causes, and instead cast about for other culprits, like global warming and job availability.
I try to be optimistic, but my comments on these topics are increasingly being blocked by algorithms, so confident are America's techies in their childish and disastrous view of "drugs." I am finding it very hard to believe that the truth will eventually be recognized as such, which is a belief that even the great pessimist Schopenhauer entertained, i.e., that the truth would eventually "out." I wonder rather if billionaires and their heavily censored media can ever be stopped from controlling the narrative and so deep-sixing any attempts at regaining religious and psychological liberty in America and hence in the world at large.
The New York Times gets it wrong again. Yes, kratom, like all drugs, has downsides. The problem is not kratom, it's drug prohibition which limits choice. Nor are young people the only stakeholders in the debate, as the Times always assumes.
This is the mentality for today's materialist researcher when it comes to "laughing gas." He does not care that it merely cheers folks up. He wants to see what is REALLY going on with the substance, using electrodes and brain scans.
@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?
Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.
Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."
SSRIs are created based on the materialist notion that cures should be found under a microscope. That's why science is so slow in acknowledging the benefit of plant medicines. Anyone who chooses SSRIs over drugs like San Pedro cactus is simply uninformed.
Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!
In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan says psychedelic legalization would endanger young people. What? Prohibition forces users to decide for themselves which mushrooms are toxic, or to risk buying contaminated product. And that's safe, Michael?
The best harm reduction strategy would be to re-legalize opium and cocaine. We would thereby end depression in America and free Americans from their abject reliance on the healthcare industry, meanwhile ending gang violence and restoring the rule of law in Latin America.
When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia:
OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!
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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