Just a reminder that opium has been used for millennia and that it's a violation of natural law to outlaw a plant. In fact, if you want a good idea for a story, you might want to cover the fact that Jefferson's estate at Monticello was raided by the DEA in 1987 so that agents could confiscate his poppy plants. That's an old story, of course, but the REAL story is that the Foundation refuses (to this day) to tell its visitors about the raid. Meanwhile, the Foundation is also playing ball with the DEA by removing hemp from Monticello. This is in violation of everything that the opium- and garden-loving Thomas Jefferson stood for: namely, natural law and the idea that some things were so basic -- like our right to Mother Nature -- that the government could not take them from us.
The only den of iniquity in 1914 was Congress, where they betrayed the founding principles of democracy by asserting government's right to give or withhold Mother Nature's bounty as it saw fit. Congress tried to cover its fears of the Asian menace with talk about public health -- but they created the health problems with prohibition. Now, instead of folks being able to freely choose a regulated product, we have kids dying every day from substances that are not regulated and about which kids know nothing thanks to America's strategy of fear over education.
Instead of writing stories that prop up this violation of natural law, why not write a story about BEER HALLS, and the drunk guys who leave them in cars to cause fatal accidents -- while they're on their way home to beat their wives?
Meanwhile, if you want to learn "the truth about opium," read the book of that name by William Brereton. You'll see how the opium panic was created by a religious organization that was the British Equivalent of the Anti-Saloon League -- based on lies and misperceptions of elite Brits who had never been to China -- and based on the interests of protestant missionaries, who preferred that the Chinese use the shabby western drug called alcohol.
Sincerely Yours,
Brian
PS I've done a little snooping myself. I wrote to David Blumenstock, Manager of Visitor Services at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. I complained that Monticello was "covering up" the DEA raid of 1987. He told me that he was sorry that I did not think the Foundation was covering the matter satisfactorily. I responded that, as far as I knew, they were not covering it at ALL and I asked him to correct me if I was wrong about that. That was two weeks ago now and I have yet to hear back.
This silence on the part of the Foundation was pointed out in the 2011 book "Opium for the Masses" by Jim Hogshire, a book that Michael Pollan has recently referenced in his work.
Author's Follow-up: July 13, 2023
The opium den did not launch the Drug War: Xenophobia launched the Drug War -- fear of minorities who did not "get off" on alcohol. These strange ways had to be suppressed in Christian America.
5% of proceeds from the sale of the above product will go toward getting Brian a decent haircut for once. Honestly. 9% will go toward shoes. 50% will go toward miscellaneous. 9% of the remainder will go toward relaxation, which could encompass anything from a spin around town to an outdoor barbecue at Brian's brother's house in Stanardsville (both gas and the ice-cream cake that Brian usually supplies).
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
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.
The opium den did not launch the Drug War: Xenophobia launched the Drug War -- fear of minorities who did not "get off" on alcohol. These strange ways had to be suppressed in Christian America. 
