"There is no argument which so touches the feeble reason of the madman as the argumentum ad absurdum." --'The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether' by Edgar Allan Poe.
Welcome from the Partnership for a Death Free America!
Here in America, we've managed to successfully criminalize almost all naturally occurring godsend medicines and thus save our dearest and whitest children from the consequences of their own folly. But our work is not yet done. The world is full of many OTHER dangers that call for prompt and drastic legal action as well. Young white children are dying every day from entirely preventable causes! And why? Because our lax laws continue to allow American citizens to flirt lasciviously with danger -- on the highways, in the kitchen, at the playground -- even in the grocery store. So while the Drug War may have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of our Chicken Little ancestors, placing virtually the entire world under a kind of Christian Science Sharia (taking children away from heretics while confiscating their houses and denying them employment anywhere in America) there are hundreds of other threats that we must attack with equal ferocity if we're to achieve the Partnership's goal of a Death Free America by the year 2030.
Remember, if we can save just one young stateside suburban Caucasian from their own idiocy, then all of the drive-by shootings and the civil wars that our Draconian laws cause will be well worth it! (True, there may be a few hundred million people like the depressed who go without godsend medicines, but in Congress, no one can hear them scream!)
Peanuts kill over 100 children a year, many of them white. Let's stop the madness. Tell the DEA to classify peanuts as Schedule I. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
An average of 48 Americans are killed every year when they fall from a tree that they are climbing for so called "fun" (source: OSHA). Many of these victims are white suburban children, just like your own dear little angels. And yet tree climbing is still unregulated in most states. Don't let your children take the fall for America's lax tree climbing laws. Tell Congress to pass the Anti-Ascension bill, limiting tree climbing to licensed professionals. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
1,800 people die each year in car accidents caused by ice. Many of them are young white teenagers. Tell Congress to vote no on the latest Climate Change bill. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
24,000 people are injured by shopping carts every year. 85% of the victims are white kids. Call your representatives today and tell them that enough is enough. It's time to ban shopping carts in all grocery stores. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America. [Editor's note: read "shopping trolley" in UK]
Think skateboarding is fun? Tell that to the parents of the 40 kids who are killed every year by this deadly pastime. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Champagne corks kill at least 20 people every year, many of them white American teenagers. Tell Congress to pass the Safe Carbonation Act of 2023. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
People ask me, "How can you advocate the mass killing of sharks?" I look at my children and say, "How could I NOT?" Sharks kill at least 10 people every year, many of them innocent widdle white children. This message courtesy of the Partnership for a Death Free America.
More teens die from taking selfies than from shark attacks. Tell your congressman that it's time to outlaw mobile phones. (For 87 kids this year, it's already too late.) This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
People ask how can I be in favor of the eradication of hippopotamuses? I look at my children and ask, "How can I NOT????" Hippos kill thousands of people every year, many of them children. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
An average of two people die every year attempting to scale Longs Peak in Colorado. Just say no to mountain climbing. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
NOTE: In the 1990s, the Partnership for a Drug Free America ran the most mendacious ad in the history of public service announcements, the one in which they claimed that drugs fry the brain the moment that they're outlawed by botanically clueless politicians. (You remember the ad: the one featuring the sizzling egg with the ominous voiceover: "This is your brain on drugs.") Not only was that false, but it was almost the opposite of the truth. Most psychoactive drugs focus and expand the mind when taken under the right conditions. If any drugs "fry" the brain, they are the Big Pharma meds which 1 in 4 American women take every day of their lives.
I guess the Partnership finally figured out that a "drug free America" is too obviously a Christian Scientist goal and that most Americans do not want to give up on drugs entirely. So they've retrenched to target kids only by rebranding themselves as Partnership for Drug Free Kids. Of course, it's still not clear why even children should say no to psychoactive medicines that could help them. We certainly do not think that's true when it comes to Big Pharma "meds," more's the pity. No, we're happy to tranquilize our kids with supposedly scientifically created synthetics, but we're determined not to let them have any naturally occurring godsends that might sharpen their minds and let them rise above the psychological boundaries imposed by tyrannical parents, for instance.
Nor should we withhold morphine from children in hospice, unless we truly value a Drug War more than our children -- which, alas, seems to be the case in at least 150 countries around the world, in which morphine is not available for kids, thanks to the Christian Science sensibilities of our puritanical Drug Warriors. (For more on this hidden travesty of the Drug War, see the work of Damon Barrett.)
In short, the Partnership still doesn't get it: We should say "no" to unnecessary substance use, of course, but that doesn't make a good slogan. Besides, the Partnership wants to encourage fear, not understanding, otherwise they would never encourage kids to refrain from drugs per se. It's like telling kids that they should refrain from accepting anesthetics for any childhood surgery that they should undergo -- or that they should refrain from taking aspirin? Really? Why?
Hence, the Partnership for a Death Free America, to satirize the original Partnership's muddleheaded desire to protect our kids with fearmongering rather than common sense.
Earth to Partnership: Drugs aren't good or bad. If you think they're bad, then rebrand yourself as the Partnership for the Advancement of Christian Science. For it was the founder of that religion, Mary Baker Eddy, who first told us that drugs were bad. That is, it's a religious position, not a scientific or logical one.
As GK Chesterton points out in his book on Thomas Aquinas, God said that his creation was good, which means, according to the Catholic Church itself, that no "thing" is good or bad in itself, but rather the use of things is good or bad. The Partnership people should re-read the Book of Genesis.
In light of this latter consideration, it is a violation of religious liberty to hold DARE classes and other anti-drug programs for grade schoolers. Parents should be demanding a halt to such indoctrination of their offspring on behalf of Drug War sensibilities.
Author's Follow-up: April 19, 2023
It's informative to search the Web for "rare causes of death." In most cases, the site authors not only cite the "odd" statistics themselves, but they then go on to assure the reader that, statistically speaking, the death toll in question is very low indeed. For instance, one site about Mt. Everest tells us that 300 people have died so far in their effort to scale the historic peak. But the authors are then quick to point out that this represents only 1% of all climbers and that your chances of dying during the ascent are, in fact, "slim" -- as long as "you are properly prepared and climbing with a professional guide."
Wouldn't it be great if the reporters for the mainstream media provided the same context when writing about drug deaths? Instead of trying to make prohibitionist "hay" out of the fact that Leah Betts died using Ecstasy (only because we tried to scare her about drugs rather than educating her about them), reporters should be pointing out the inconvenient truth that the chances of dying from ecstasy use are extremely slim -- in fact, many times SLIMMER than the chances of dying from the aforementioned ascent, or even from aspirin for that matter. But the ghoulish mainstream always tries to parlay such "drug-related deaths" into scare stories about the modern boogieman called "drugs." Thus they confound the whole drug debate, meanwhile making the fat cats smile on their way to the bank to cash their dividend checks from one or more of the many drug-war beneficiaries: like Big Pharma, Law Enforcement, the Corrections Industry, Psychiatry, and the bribed politicians who shape the national narratives desired by today's agenda-setting plutocrats.
Of course, one death rate is alarming outside of all context, and that is the growing death rate by opioid use of young Americans. But these are deaths brought about by the Drug War itself which makes it impossible to know the quantity or quality of the substance that one is using. For while the media likes to associate opioids with overdose, the two are only connected because of prohibition -- but don't hold your breath waiting for the conglomerate media to point that out -- even in your "local" newspaper, which is probably owned by Gannett Corporation, Sinclair or Hearst. The fact is, we would have an overdose problem with any medicine that is outlawed and whose quality and quantity therefore cannot be accurately known by the user.
Related tweet: May 30, 2023
I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.
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
Miller, Richard Louis "Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle " 2017 Park Street Press
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.
Peanuts kill over 100 children a year, many of them white. Let's stop the madness. Tell the DEA to classify peanuts as Schedule I. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
An average of 48 Americans are killed every year when they fall from a tree that they are climbing for so called "fun" (source: OSHA). Many of these victims are white suburban children, just like your own dear little angels. And yet tree climbing is still unregulated in most states. Don't let your children take the fall for America's lax tree climbing laws. Tell Congress to pass the Anti-Ascension bill, limiting tree climbing to licensed professionals. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America. 
1,800 people die each year in car accidents caused by ice. Many of them are young white teenagers. Tell Congress to vote no on the latest Climate Change bill. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
24,000 people are injured by shopping carts every year. 85% of the victims are white kids. Call your representatives today and tell them that enough is enough. It's time to ban shopping carts in all grocery stores. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America. [Editor's note: read "shopping trolley" in UK]
Think skateboarding is fun? Tell that to the parents of the 40 kids who are killed every year by this deadly pastime. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Champagne corks kill at least 20 people every year, many of them white American teenagers. Tell Congress to pass the Safe Carbonation Act of 2023. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
People ask me, "How can you advocate the mass killing of sharks?" I look at my children and say, "How could I NOT?" Sharks kill at least 10 people every year, many of them innocent widdle white children. This message courtesy of the Partnership for a Death Free America.
More teens die from taking selfies than from shark attacks. Tell your congressman that it's time to outlaw mobile phones. (For 87 kids this year, it's already too late.) This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
People ask how can I be in favor of the eradication of hippopotamuses? I look at my children and ask, "How can I NOT????" Hippos kill thousands of people every year, many of them children. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America. 
An average of two people die every year attempting to scale Longs Peak in Colorado. Just say no to mountain climbing. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America. 
