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Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer

at Maquarie University, Department of Security Studies and Criminology

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 25, 2023



Dear Mr. Hurley:

With regard to your quotation in the news story by Annika Blau... Right Under Our Nose, about cocaine entering Australia, I would suggest to you that cocaine is not the "cancer," as you call it: prohibition is the cancer. 

Prohibition has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America and killed over 100,000 Mexicans as part of a needless war against plant medicine that the Peruvian Indians considered to be divine.

HG Wells loved Coca Wine1. So did Jules Verne. So did Alexandre Dumas.

Please reconsider your support for prohibition and the Drug War, which has led to the election of fascists like Donald Trump by creating laws that have removed hundreds of thousands of Trump's minority opponents from the voting rolls.

Drugs are not and have never been the problem. The problem has always been ignorance and prohibition -- and the desire of conservatives to dictate which drugs Americans should use: like alcohol, coffee and the antidepressants 2 upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life.

35,000 Americans are killed every year by cars.  But we do not need a war against cars, we need driver education.

The drugs that we outlaw have inspired entire religions. We do not need a war against drugs, we need substance education.

Until then, the Drug War is just a makework program for law enforcement and a way to enrich militarists and fascists.

Drug warriors typically want to save a white suburban teenager from making mistakes, but in so doing, they bring about the deaths of a hundred thousand Mexicans and render teenagers in Mexico homeless. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions who desperately need medicines for depression and anxiety are thrown under the bus, not able to access godsend medicines because of racist fretting on the part of scheming suburban politicians.

Please reconsider your assumptions about the Drug War.
Sincerely Yours,

Brian Quass
abolishthedea.com

Author's Follow-up: January 24, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up
Cocaine can be used safely. Half the politicians in Britain have shamefacedly admitted to using it as young people. Indeed, crack cocaine 3 4 can be used safely, as Carl Hart reports in "Drug Use for Grownups." But the Drug War is all about terrifying us about drugs in order to justify a Nazi crackdown on minorities -- and a reason to overfund law enforcement and that American Stasi that we call the DEA. It's a war on citizens by conservatives who want to make the world safe for billionaires, box stores and extractive capitalism 5 .











Notes for essay entitled Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer: at Maquarie University, Department of Security Studies and Criminology:

1: Rossen, Jake. 2021. “Vin Mariani: The Cocaine-Infused Wine Beloved by Popes and Presidents.” Mental Floss. March 26, 2021. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/644226/vin-mariani-cocaine-wine-history. (up)
2: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
3: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
4: “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)
5: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).

Drug testing should flag impairment only. Any other use is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Many articles in science mags need this disclaimer: "Author has declined to consider the insights gained from drug-induced states on this topic out of fealty to Christian Science orthodoxy." They don't do this because they know readers already assume that drugs will be ignored.

The FDA will be accepting comments through September 20th on the subject of ways to fight PTSD. PTSD@reaganudall.org Ask them why they support brain-damaging shock therapy but won't approve drugs like MDMA that could make ECT unnecessary.

American businesses judge people, not by the color of their skin but by the contents of their digestive systems.

As great as it is, "Synthetic Panics" by Philip Jenkins was only tolerated by academia because it did not mention drugs in the title and it contains no explicit opinions about drugs. As a result, many drug law reformers still don't know the book exists.

SWAT raids have increased by 15,000 percent from the late 1970s to today, resulting in 50,000 to 80,000 SWAT raids annually in the US alone. --War On Us

Heroin versus Antidepressants https://abolishthedea.com/heroin_versus_antidepressants.php

If MAPS wants to make progress with MDMA they should start "calling out" the FDA for judging holistic medicines by materialist standards, which means ignoring all glaringly obvious benefits.

Over 45% of traumatic brain injuries are caused by horseback riding (ABC News). Tell your representatives to outlaw horseback riding and make it a federal offence to teach a child how to ride! Brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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Book Cover

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

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Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

This is the only full-cast recording of Aleister Crowley's 1922 classic paeon to common sense. It is the first book -- and so far almost the only book -- to stake out a philosophy of drug use that is compatible with human freedom, one in which we learn to use drugs as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. This recording was produced by the Drug War Philosopher and your purchases help support his effort to push back against the tragically counterproductive policy of drug prohibition, in the name of human freedom and of humanity's right to heal.

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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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