Live from the Second Church of the Eleusinian Mysteries -- at a location that the DEA has been torturing suspects to discover for the last ten years...
Let's all turn to hymn #355, "Plants Divine, All Plants Excelling." And a one, and a two, and a one, two, three, four...
Verse 1
Plants divine, all plants excelling
Not a gift for man to shun
Psychoactively restoring
Weary souls a sense of fun
But the prudish claim this bounty’s
From a source we should not tap
So they outlaw mother nature
What a pile of bovine crap
Verse 2
Age-ed souls in homes of sadness
Shorn of meaning and of hope
Find in psilocybin’s madness
Ways to prosper and to cope
Yet the narc with IQ zero
Seeks to keep the status quo
Forcing sick and dying patients
To encounter needless woe
Verse 3
Thank we now the forest shaman
Who dispenses sacred balm
Plants and fungi from the jungle
Sure to teach us as they calm
Yet the despots slander nature
Curse the plants that ease the brain
Check our urine at the job site
To ensure we all refrain
Verse 4
Bursting with ungrateful chutzpah
Tyrants outlaw healing plants
Drugs that when provided rightly
Make the suicidal dance
Yet, the heartless politician
Claims that “drugs” are just the pits
Yet they never give up liquor
What amazing hypocrites
Verse 5
Ayahuasca’s non-addictive
Grows new neurons in the brain
Makes the most besotted drinker
From his poison to refrain
Yet, the shrinks from here to Parma
Make it clearly understood
We must buy pills from Big Pharma
Till we’re hooked upon them good
Okay, you may all be seated. Thanks for that rousing performance of hymn #355, “Plants Divine, All Plants Excelling,” a paeon of praise to the therapeutic power of rain forest plants, both known and yet to be discovered. Let’s all take one complete silent minute to thank God for providing us with such. And… begin!
[one minute transpires]
Good thing that we don’t outlaw those plants and try to burn them almost any chance we get, right, folks? I mean, wouldn’t that be stupid? The work of a real jackass, in fact!
Oh, wait a minute, I forgot: that’s exactly what we “do do,” isn’t it, Ben, in this so-called scientific country of ours? We confiscate and burn those psychologically therapeutic plants. And then we monitor the country’s piss to make sure that no one dares apply to nature for psychological healing and perfection. Am I right or am I right?
Ben Stupidson, ladies and gentlemen, DEA agent, third pew from the back. Oh, sorry, apparently that’s STUARTSON.
I don’t wanna call Ben on the carpet, but he’s so seldom in church, I can’t pass up this opportunity to make him squirm.
No, just kidding, Ben. Just kidding. All do offend. I say all.
Mind you, we don’t all go out of our way to burn and confiscate plants that improve consciousness, give us an inkling of divinity, and even have the potential to cure Alzheimer’s by growing new neurons.
Where are you going, Ben? I repeat: we’re all sinners. It’s just that your sin of choice happens to align with the subject of today’s sermon.
OK, well, if you have to go. I trust we’re still going to see you at tonight’s pot luck.
Ben’s like: “Right. I’m gonna be there, if only to make sure that you’re not using actual pot!”
Just kidding, Ben, come back here.
Let’s pause for a moment and pray for Ben’s soul. That’s right: let’s forgive him for permitting over 40 years of needless suffering by outlawing plants, especially those non-addictive psychedelics that can pack the benefits of five years of psychotherapy into one afternoon.
God, we come before you today, saddened that Ben Stupidson – sorry, God, I mean STUARTSON – is determined to block mere research, let alone actual use, of your mind-improving natural plants. Please don’t be too harsh on him. Remember that he lives in a country that has scapegoated plants for many decades, thus giving dirty politics and lame social policies a free pass. Amen.
We’ve forgiven you, Ben, if that helps any. No, I think he’s gone now. Fiddlesticks. Well, I guess you can't save everybody, especially on MY salary.
No, seriously, folks.
And now my sermon, based on the hymn of the same name: “Plants Divine, All Plants Excelling.”
As always, if there are any penitent drug warriors in the room, feel free to come up during the sermon, kneel here at the altar, and receive forgiveness for your role in preventing the therapeutic use of mother nature’s godsend plants.
We’ve got a two-fer going on today, by the way, folks: I will forgive you not simply for blocking valuable drug research, but also for callously locking up millions of Americans for the mere possession of…. horror of horrors… NATURALLY GROWING PLANTS!!!
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
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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. (For proof of that latter charge, check out how the US and UK have criminalized the substances that William James himself told us to study in order to understand reality.) It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions (like the Vedic), Nazifies the English language (referring to folks who emulate drug-loving Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin as "scumbags") and militarizes police forces nationwide (resulting in gestapo SWAT teams breaking into houses of peaceable Americans and shouting "GO GO GO!").
(Speaking of Nazification, L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates thought that drug users should be shot. What a softie! The real hardliners are the William Bennetts of the world who want drug users to be beheaded instead. That will teach them to use time-honored plant medicine of which politicians disapprove! Mary Baker Eddy must be ecstatic in her drug-free heaven, as she looks down and sees this modern inquisition on behalf of the drug-hating principles that she herself maintained. I bet she never dared hope that her religion would become the viciously enforced religion of America, let alone of the entire freakin' world!)
In short, the drug war 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.
PPS Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
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
Bache, Christopher "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven" 2019 Park Street Press
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
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
Whitaker, Robert "Mad in America"2002 Perseus Publishing
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.
