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Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War

open letter to computer scientist George Mohler

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 10, 2021



George Mohler is the computer geek behind event prediction software that is currently 'helping' Santa Clara police (but minorities not so much). I sent the following email to George today in an attempt to persuade him to find a more worthy client for his software than police forces in the age of the Drug War.


Hi, George.



I just watched the documentary 'Eye on You' and I wanted to share with you my concern about your 'event prediction' program. Such an algorithm-based police tactic might make sense in a world where laws were fair, but we live in the age of a Christian Science Drug War, in which it is illegal to even study certain medicines of which politicians disapprove. Sigmund Freud considered cocaine to be a godsend for his depression, but your program helps police track down cocaine 1 2 users like dogs and treat them like scumbags before tossing them in overcrowded prisons. Opium enthusiasts have included Marco Polo, Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin, and yet your program helps police track down such people like dogs as well -- especially those who dare SELL plant medicine. Do you realize that Founding Father Thomas Jefferson grew the opium poppy at Monticello ? But now those who deal in opium are treated like Adolf Hitler -- this despite the fact that entire religions have been inspired by psychoactive plant medicine. The entire Vedic religion was founded to worship the cosmic insights of the Soma plant. The psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries3 gave cosmic insights for 2,000 consecutive years to a who's who of western luminaries, including Plato, Plutarch and Cicero. The Mesoamericans had plant-based religious rituals until Columbus and the Conquistadores showed up and demanded that they become Christians and drink liquor instead -- those that they did not kill, that is.




Your algorithms may stop the occasional old lady from being mugged, but if shows like 'Cops' mean anything, you can bet that what you're really doing is helping police to harass and crack down on minorities, throwing them into overcrowded prisons and removing them from the voting rolls by charging them with felonies -- thereby stealing American elections for racist conservatives.

?374?

If you study the Drug War, you will find that it causes all of the problems that it claims to be solving and then some. My mother suffers from dementia because the Drug War has outlawed all the drugs that show such great promise in treating it -- like ayahuasca that grows new neural pathways in the brain. Meanwhile, 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma meds because the Drug War outlaws all the less addictive plant medicine that could help the depressed immeasurably. Cocaine, opium , and even heroin 4 are less addictive than Big Pharma meds, because the latter change brain chemistry, which takes a long time (if ever) to revert to the normal baseline once Big Pharma 5 6 'meds' are withdrawn.



In short, the Drug War is hypocritical, anti-science, anti-nature, anti-minority, anti-patient, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, and a violation of Natural Law. Just ask the ghost of Thomas Jefferson that was spinning in its grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 7 in 1987 and confiscated the Founding Father's poppy plants.



In light of these facts, I urge you to consider withdrawing your product from use by police forces, at least until such time as America decides to start learning about plant medicine rather than demonizing it.



The Drug War represents a wrong way of thinking about the world, one that causes a civil war in Mexico and impowers a self-proclaimed Drug War Hitler in the Philippines.



Please don't be a party to this ongoing injustice. Find a more worthy client for your algorithms than law enforcement in the Age of the Drug War.





Abolishthedea.com



PS The 'Eye on You' documentary showed the Santa Clara Police following up on one of your algorithm 'leads.' Of course, the evildoer they encountered wasn't robbing a store or mugging an orphan or getting ready to take hostages -- No, they were, AS PER USUAL, merely possessing substances of which beer-swilling Christian Drug Warrior politicians disapprove. But then the Drug War is just a make-work program for law enforcement. Imagine what police would do without a Drug War: they would just have to sit back and wait for people to actually do something wrong. Hmm. Then there would be no Cops and Detective shows for folks to watch after they got home from a nice day of being drug tested, no movies about the US marching into Latin American countries to shoot Latinos because they use or sell plant medicine that has been used responsibly for millennia by non-western countries, no movies 8 9 about the DEA running roughshod over the US Constitution, torturing suspects and then shooting them at point-blank range in the age of our unprecedented war on substances.

Author's Follow-up: August 19, 2022



Looking back almost a year later, I ask myself if I wasn't a bit rough on George. After all, you catch more flies with honey, right? Of course, the irony is that I would be a much more patient fellow were I free to occasionally avail myself of opium 10 , coca, psilocybin and especially the empathogenic Ecstasy -- the very drugs that George's algorithms will help get me arrested for using. So if I'm the monster here, then George is the Dr. Frankenstein who made me.


Author's Follow-up: March 6, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


I wish we had some computer code that would predict when racist politicians are going to create new laws designed to target minorities.


if ($suspect=='black' AND $location=='inner_city' AND $time_of_day=='night')
{
run $harassment_routine;
}
elseif ($suspect=='rich' AND $location=='suburbs' AND $average_salary>$100,000)
{
run $public_service_routine;
}












Notes for essay entitled Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War: open letter to computer scientist George Mohler:

1: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
2: “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)
3: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
4: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
5: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
6: 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)
7: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
8: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
9: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
10: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Assisted suicide cannot be discussed meaningfully without discussing the drug prohibition that renders it necessary in the first place.

It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.

I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!

The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.

To say that psilocybin has not been proven to work is like saying that a hammer has not yet been proven to smash glass. Why not? Because the process has not yet been studied under a microscope.

We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.

Doc to Franklin: "I'm sorry, Ben, but I see no benefits of opium use under my microscope. The idea that you are living a fulfilled life is clearly a mistake on your part. If you want to be scientific, stop using opium and be scientifically depressed like the rest of us."

@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?

Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.

That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.


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






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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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