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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




The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.

Countless millions suffer needlessly in silence because of America's fearmongering about drugs.

There are neither "drugs" nor "meds" as those terms are used today. All substances have potential good uses and bad uses. The terms as used today carry value judgements, as in meds good, drugs bad.

In the 19th century, author Richard Middleton wrote how poets would get together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses."

We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.

Antidepressants might be fine in a world where drugs were legal. Then it would actually be possible to get off them by using drugs that have inspired entire religions. In the age of prohibition, however, an antidepressant prescription is usually a life sentence.

People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.

The MindMed company (makers of LSD Lite) tell us that euphoria and visions are "adverse effects": that's not science, that's an arid materialist philosophy that does not believe in spiritual transcendence.

Any self-respecting mycologist should denounce the criminalization of mushrooms.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987.


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.

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Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

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