Herding minorities into overcrowded prisons no longer enough for booze-swilling Drug Warriors
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 12, 2020
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.
Author's Follow-up: March 10, 2025
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 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 disapproved1. At least one raving critic began likening drug use to child abuse2. 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.
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.
The December Scientific American features a story called "The New Nuclear Age," about a trillion-dollar plan to add 100s of ICBM's to 5 states, which an SA editorial calls "kick me" signs. This Neanderthal plan comes from pols who think that compassion-boosting drugs are evil!
America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
Irony of ironies, that the indignant 19th-century hatred of liquor should ultimately result in the outlawing of virtually every mind-affecting substance on the planet EXCEPT for liquor.
If we let "science" decide about drugs, i.e. base freedom on health concerns, then tea can be as easily outlawed as beer. The fact that horses are not illegal shows that prohibition is not about health. It's about the power to outlaw certain "ways of being in the world."
Brits have a right to die, but they do not have the right to use drugs that might make them want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of the many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world.
First America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own pain by rendering opium illegal. Then the psychiatric field treats the resultant epidemic of depression by damaging the patient's brain, i.e., by treating depressed patients with shock therapy.
"Chemical means of peering into the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine exordia in man’s quest for the beyond... before the coarseness of utilitarian minds reduced them to the status of 'dope'." -- Eric Hendrickson
We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, President Calls for Executing Drug Dealers: Herding minorities into overcrowded prisons no longer enough for booze-swilling Drug Warriors, published on February 12, 2020 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
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. 
You have been reading an article entitled, President Calls for Executing Drug Dealers: Herding minorities into overcrowded prisons no longer enough for booze-swilling Drug Warriors, published on February 12, 2020 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
