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Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 4, 2020



With all due respect, the UNODC is part of the problem. The Drug War creates an absurd focus on 'drugs' as the modern boogeyman. Drugs are not the problem: the Drug War is the problem: The Drug War brings 'drugs' front and center in the public mind, giving kids wild ideas about making the wrong decisions. The Drug War is also Christian Science because it tells us that we cannot use plant medicine to improve our mental outlook. Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin used opium 1 . HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories "on" coca wine. Plato himself used psychedelics at the Eleusinian Mysteries2. The Vedic religion was founded to worship a psychedelic plant. What gives you the right to jail me if I choose to do likewise? We don't need a War on Drugs. We need to legalize Mother Nature's plant medicines and to educate everyone about the effects (both good and bad) of all psychoactive substances, including wine, tobacco, and modern antidepressants 3 to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted. But we don't care about THAT drug problem, of course, since 'drugs', in the Drug Warrior mind, only refers to those substances that politicians have decided to demonize.



June 1, 2022



Oh, yeah: tell the truth and shame the devil, say I. That's the thing about the Internet: it lets you write directly to agencies that shouldn't even exist. It's all one can do to remain polite. One wants to write: "Dear UNODC, please disappear from the face of the earth. Thanks."

It's interesting that it wasn't enough for America to criminalize plants, it had to have the whole world follow suit. And now we have bureaucrats at the UN working 9 to 5 to make sure that no one on earth has access to the plant medicine that grows at their very feet, medicines that in the past have inspired entire religions. No, we all must be good little consumers and get our drugs (sorry, our "meds") from psychiatrists and Big Pharma . That's the thing about the War on Drugs: it's not designed to stop people from using drugs -- it's designed to get people using the RIGHT drugs, as that term is defined by Wall Street.

So, what has the Drug War accomplished in its 100+ years of life? America is now the most drug-using country in history, with depression rates higher than ever. America is also now home to the greatest mass chemical dependency in human history, as 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma antidepressants for life. And America has the most prisoners per capita of any country on earth, thanks to this spectacularly failing Drug War. As for harm reduction, 100,000 still die each year from alcohol, half a million from tobacco. And we have an opioid epidemic caused directly by the fact that the Drug War incentivizes dealers to sell the most readily available and addictive stuff out there. Meanwhile, gun violence 4 is rampant in inner cities, with almost 800 deaths in Chicago alone in 2021, all of which are a direct result of the Drug War and its incentivization of spectacularly lucrative drug dealing.

Earth to UNODC, we need education, not incarceration 5 ; we need facts, not fear.



Author's Follow-up: September 21, 2022



Depression could be cured overnight if we legalized the coca leaf. But Wall Street, Law Enforcement and Big Pharma hate the idea. So they demonize coca based on its alkaloid called cocaine , failing to notice that coca and cocaine are two very different things. Outlawing coca because of cocaine 6 7 8 is like outlawing peaches because of prussic acid. The Drug War is all about politics and money, not about public health. In fact, it's anti-health since it outlaws godsends that could end the depression crisis in America -- which is taking place despite the fact that 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent on Big Pharma 9 10 meds for life!

Conclusion: The Drug War is not about getting the world off of drugs: it's about getting the world ON the right drugs, as far as business and law enforcement are concerned.











Notes:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
2: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
3: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
4: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
5: 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)
6: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
7: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
8: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
9: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
10: 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)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




If we cared about the elderly in 'homes', we would be bringing in shamanic empaths and curanderos from Latin America to help cheer them up and expand their mental abilities. We would also immediately decriminalize the many drugs that could help safely when used wisely.

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.

So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.

Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."

Alcohol makes me sleepy. But NOT coca wine. The wine gives you an upbeat feeling of controlled energy, without the jitters of coffee and without the fury of steroids. It increases rather than dulls mental focus.

Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing.

The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.

We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.

Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."

Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.


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