Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass
blog icon orange rss icon with stylized radio waves bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter substack icon


back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow


President Calls for Executing Drug Dealers

Herding minorities into overcrowded prisons no longer enough for booze-swilling Drug Warriors

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 12, 2020



Donald Trump has now called for the execution of drug dealers, which should come as no surprise from a president who has openly collaborated with authoritarian Russia to destroy basic democratic institutions in America.

UPDATE 2025

But if one's fearing for the lives of cigarette and alcohol producers (whose products kill tens of thousands a year), you can relax. Nor need we lose sleep over the wellbeing of our local psychiatrists, who, even as I type, are running socially-sanctioned pill mill 1 s across the country (by means of which 1 in 10 Americans are addicted to the daily use of Big Pharma 'meds'). No, as usual, the Drug Warrior animus is not directed at the substances that cause the most harm to Americans, but merely those substances that the Drug Warriors have decided to criminalize for political and religious reasons, though many of these 'drugs' are found to be growing unbidden across the planet. Thus they override the hitherto unalienable natural law which gives Americans the right to the use of what John Locke calls 'the earth and all therein,' replacing it with a capricious common law interdiction based on the propaganda-induced fears of 21st-century Americans, in this case a kind of Christian Science 'Sharia,' every bit as intolerant as any legislation that was ever enacted in that name.

This Constitution-based objection to Trump's authoritarian gambit cannot be overstressed, because the mainstream media these days is dangerously missing the point. The left and libertarian response to such totalitarian proposals as Trump's is to point out that such a draconian strategy would not work to reduce 'drug' use, typically by adducing the failure of similar approaches in other countries. But to argue in this way is to yield crucial ground to the enemy of freedom, since this 'argument from efficacy' implies that executing drug dealers would be just fine if it only served to decrease the use of naturally occurring substances in America. And to argue thus is to demonstrate one's limited grasp of the subject at hand, by implicitly granting that government has a right, in the first place, to prevent Americans from reaching out and using the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet, a proposition which Jefferson would have found absurd and even conducive to tyranny if not rejected at once on constitutional grounds.

And that tyranny that Jefferson would have predicted has come to pass. It started in 1914, when bigoted politicians decided that too many undesirables were using the opium plant. Their answer: make a natural substance illegal, thus setting the precedent that some plants were no longer the birthright of a free citizenry to use as they saw fit. In a rush to penalize the lower class and the ethnic Chinese, few American politicians of that era noticed the contravention of natural law that was implicit in this government intrusion into personal decisions about health and happiness. If they had really cared about the health of these minority populations, they would have educated them about the wise use of psychoactive substances rather than criminalizing a plant.

?374?

Fast-forward 50-plus years, when President Richard Nixon takes advantage of that anti-Constitutional precedent to punish his enemies, with so-called anti-drug laws that were designed, not to protect the health of Americans, but to land his political prisoners in jail and, if possible, remove them from the voting rolls by charging them with felonies.

Fast-forward another half a century, and Traitor Trump is now ready to pick up where Nixon left off, harnessing America's unconstitutional drug law for the purposes of becoming a dictator with the power of life and death over his vassals. It is not enough for Trump's power lust to merely incarcerate millions of mainly minority 'drug dealers,' (those who dare sell the plants and fungi for which drug law itself has created the black market), he wants to get rid of them entirely, which I suppose is useful, since it allows him to limit the number of minority offspring which might otherwise grow up to eliminate the Drug War entirely, along with totally amoral politicians like Trump himself who strategically parlay those laws into populist victories.

So let me get this straight: {^a doctor can legally addict my anxious 92-year-old mother to the benzodiazepine of his choice, but should I arrange for her to get miraculous, non-addictive relief from a mere plant, the source of that godsend can be strung up at high noon?}{


When policies such as the Drug War yield such absurd results, they must be fundamentally wrong, at least for a freedom-loving people. But we can't stand up to Drug War tyrants on the basis of statistical charts that 'prove' that tyranny doesn't work. We must deny those tyrants the right to outlaw Mother Nature in the first place - and the power for that pushback is waiting there in the US Constitution, whose very genius lies in its elevation of natural law over common law, and if natural law tells us anything, it tells us that human beings have the right to the use of 'the earth and all therein,' and that no law can justifiably supplant that right - ever.

Indeed, natural law was devised to derail just such hysterical bandwagons as the anti-scientific rush to make a scapegoat out of Mother Nature's bounty.






See also

Connecticut Drug Warriors want to charge drug dealers with murder. You know, tyrants want to milk this Drug War for all the violence they can get out of it. Trump was even talking about bombing Mexico. As for Rodrigo Duterte, the self-proclaimed 'Drug War Hitler' of the Philippines, he thinks that drug users are as bad as drug dealers and should be killed (bombed, hanged, you name it) as well. If Duterte had been around 5 millennia ago, there would be no Vedic religion today since he would have bombed and hanged all the fans of the psychedelic Soma brew that inspired it.

Author's Follow-up: October 27, 2022



Of course, it's not just the far right that champions the Drug War: it is the mainstream media, led by drug 'experts' like Kevin Sabet, who -- along with Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter -- just can't get it into their heads that prohibition and ignorance are causing all the problems that they keep attributing to the politically created category of substances called 'drugs.' Moreover, Obama's idea of 'following the science' is flawed for numerous reasons: first because science is not free in a Drug War Society. If you don't believe me, just search academia.edu for papers about the BENEFICIAL uses of opium 2 (in, say, increasing the creativity of Benajamin Franklin) or coca (to help authors like HG Wells write books) or shrooms (in helping Paul Stamets3 stop his childhood stuttering in just one afternoon).

Besides, scientists are no more entitled to outlaw Mother Nature's bounty than anyone else. Nor should psychoactive substances be judged solely for their safety. Mind medicines are used in order for depressed folks like myself to live a self-fulfilled life. Science cannot come along and tell me to renounce that quest because it's unsafe. Safety is not the primary goal in life (at least according to most of us) otherwise there would be no sports like free climbing and motor racing. Safety is important, of course, and I invite scientists to give me all the safety tips they can think of -- but at the end of the day, my number one goal is to succeed at life, not to be safe. To put it another way, longevity is not my 'summum bonum,' as philosophers would call it, but rather self-actualization. To use the modern vernacular, I want to 'live large,' and that's nothing that scientists and their tranquilizing meds are going to help me with.

Author's Follow-up: October 28, 2022



Speaking of tranquilizing meds, I woke up this morning with a hangover. No, I hadn't been drinking yesterday, but I had been taking my Big Pharma 4 5 meds, namely Effexor 6 , which every now and then causes me to wake up in a brain fog. Of course, that's a drawback that 'drug experts' like Kevin Sabet are never going to worry about. Their goal in life is to spread fear about the drugs that have been criminalized by pharmacologically clueless politicians. As for those godsend meds, it never occurs to them to teach how to use them safely, only to incarcerate folks for using them at all. And this is the mainstream view about drugs -- supported by such liberal icons as Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and The Atlantic magazine. You remember the Atlantic. That's the magazine that writes feel-good stories about depression in which neither the author nor the scientists even bother to mention that the government has outlawed almost all the psychoactive medicines that could solve that problem almost overnight.

That's why if an American is severely depressed, our doctors will gravely intone that the patient, alas, needs shock therapy -- because said doctors are blind to the fact that we have outlawed all the godsend meds that could help the patient WITHOUT FRYING THEIR BRAIN!!! What a wild irony, that it is the Drug War that literally fries American brains, by forcing us to use shock therapy instead of Mother Nature's remedies. The severely depressed could be given the coca leaf to chew and sent on delightful intermittent guided trips with shrooms, morphine 7 , etc. etc. Yet Americans so despise Mother Nature's godsend meds that we would literally rather destroy a patient's brain than to let them partake. That's why I say that America's attitude toward psychoactive substances should be classed as a mental illness 8 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.



Author's Follow-up: March 10, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




The Drug War reminds me of 'The Lord of the Flies' by William Golding. In that cautionary tale for anglophone youngsters, a bunch of young boys are stranded on an island and forced to create some sort of social system thanks to the total absence of adults. Being isolated from the influence of reason, the island becomes an echo chamber for bad ideas and the kids devolve into savages, eventually rationalizing even coldblooded murder based on their perceived need for group unity in the face of a variety of existential threats.

We live in an echo chamber of our own in the age of the Drug War. We got stranded on this island of unreason thanks to the hysterical fears of teetotalers who, having failed in their epic attempt to outlaw liquor forever, had focused all their puritanical indignation on the evils of 'drugs' instead, as a sort of consolation prize in their search for a scapegoat for all things that they considered to be wrong with their world. Like the kids on the island, they started small when it came to the tyranny they had introduced. They figured they could outlaw a drug here and a drug there and still treat most substance users as human beings. Being isolated from the influence of reason, however, the Drug Warrior society devolved into savagery. They began using the inquisitorial practice of drug testing 9 so that they could deprive the Drug War heretic of the right to earn a living. Full-grown adults began calling for the beheading of drug users and the bombing of countries that were suspected of supplying substances of which our echo-chamber puritans disapproved10. At least one raving critic began likening drug use to child abuse11. It seemed like each Drug Warrior was seeking to outdo the other when it came to demonizing drug use in the most emphatic terms possible.

Unfortunately, this story has no happy ending, as did the Golding story, despite the tragic death of 'Piggy.' No wise human being has yet landed on the island of the Drug Warriors and implicitly reprimanded the savages by his or her dignified support for common sense and philosophical sanity. Why not? Because most of the smartest people have fallen victim to the proselytization in Drug War ideology that they have been subject to since grade school, when they first received teddy bears for saying no to godsend medicines. And the few who are philosophically smart enough to see through Drug War lies are scared of speaking truth to the power of the modern Drug Warrior, and understandably so. The Drug Warriors have usurped all arms of government and media in order to broadcast the mendacious message that drugs can have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, ever -- a message that they spread, first and foremost, by the almost total censorship of stories about the positive use of drugs, either in anecdote or in history.

Speaking of modern politics, we all know what role our current leader would play were he drafted for a grown-up version of Lord of the Flies. Hint: he would not play Ralph, the underdog who supported common sense and the protection of the weak.









Notes for essay entitled President Calls for Executing Drug Dealers: Herding minorities into overcrowded prisons no longer enough for booze-swilling Drug Warriors:

1: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
2: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
3: Paul Stamets The Joe Rogan Experience (podcast), 2017 (up)
4: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
5: 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)
6: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
7: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
8: How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs DWP (up)
9: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition DWP (up)
10: Beheading of Convicted Drug Dealers Discussed by Bennett LA Times - Reuters, 1989 (up)
11: Marci Hamilton Equates Drug Use with Child Abuse DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.

The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.

There will always be people who don't use drugs wisely, just as there are car drivers who don't drive wisely, and rock climbers who fall to their death. America needs to grow up and accept this, while ending prohibition and teaching safe use.

When is the Holocaust Museum going to recognize that the Drug War has Nazified American life? Probably, on the same day that the Jefferson Foundation finally admits to having sold out Jefferson by inviting the DEA onto his estate in 1987 to confiscate his poppy plants.

Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.

The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?

The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that signs off on Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself.

A Pennsylvanian politician now wants the US Army to "fight fentanyl." The guy is anthropomorphizing a damn drug! No wonder pols don't want to spend money on education, because any educated country would laugh a superstitious guy like that right out of public office.

"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.

In 1886, coca enthusiast JJ Tschudi referred to prohibitionists as 'kickers.' He wrote: "If we were to listen to these kickers, most of us would die of hunger, for the reason that nearly everything we eat or drink has fallen under their ban."


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






back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow
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..."

Purchase Your Copy
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.

Purchase Your Copy



No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).


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.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.


Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP (up)