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.
First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.
3:51 PM ยท Jul 15, 2024
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
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.
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
This, by the way, is why we can't just "follow the science." The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.
So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.
The first step in harm reduction is to re-legalize mother nature's medicines. Then hundreds of millions of people will no longer suffer in silence for want of godsend medicines... for depression, for pain, for anxiety, for religious doubts... you name it.
It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.
Drug warriors abuse the English language.
We need a few brave folk to "act up" by shouting "It's the drug war!" whenever folks are discussing Mexican violence or inner city shootings. The media treat both topics as if the violence is inexplicable! We can't learn from mistakes if we're in denial.
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. 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.
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)