Herding minorities into overcrowded prisons no longer enough for booze-swilling Drug Warriors
onald 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. 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 mills 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.
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 (in, say, increasing the creativity of Benajamin Franklin) or coca (to help authors like HG Wells write books) or shrooms (in helping Paul Stamets 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 meds, namely Effexor, 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, 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 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
MINORITIES AND DRUGS
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."
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
Sana Collective Group committed to making psychedelic therapy available to all regardless of income.
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.
onald 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. 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 mills 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.
