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Prohibitionists Never Learn

an open letter to San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher




November 8, 2023

The following is in response to today's Tweet by DA Brooke Jenkins calling for a crackdown on "rampant" drug dealing in open air markets. Does she not realize that America has already cracked down to the point that our nation is little more than a penal colony in the eyes of the world? Gee, thanks, prohibition. It's sad to see such a young and apparently bright individual believing so thoroughly in such a hateful policy, one that has ruined the lives of millions of poor people around the globe by entrapment: tempting them with fantastic sums and then turning around and arresting them for taking advantage of the opportunity: the opportunity that prohibition itself has foisted upon them. It's sad to see her supporting a policy that has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America and turned America's inner cities into shooting galleries.


Dear Ms. Jenkins:

I was saddened to see a Tweet in which you announced your determination to crack down on open air drug markets. Do you not realize that these markets are a direct result of prohibition? There was no opioid crisis when opium was legal. People used the drug peaceably in their homes.

It is mindblowing to me that prohibitionists keep blaming "drugs" for the problems that prohibition itself is causing. It is a vicious circle that will never end until responsible people like yourself stop this tail chasing and shout: "Hey, wait, a minute folks, this policy is just not working!!!"

We do not need prohibition, we need RE-legalization of mother nature. We do not need incarceration, we need education.







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Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
Why does no one talk about empathogens for preventing atrocities? Because they'd rather hate drugs than use them for the benefit of humanity. They don't want to solve problems, they prefer hatred.
Ketamine is like any other drug. It has good uses for certain people in certain situations. Nowadays, people insist that a drug be okay in every situation for everybody (especially American teens) before they will say that it's okay. That's crazy and anti-scientific.
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
When folks die in horse-related accidents, we need to be asking: who sold the victim the horse? We've got to crack down on folks who peddle this junk -- and ban books like Black Beauty that glamorize horse use.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.
Drug warriors have taught us that honest tweets like that are "encouraging drug use." Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.
Drug warriors do not seem to see any irony in the fact that their outlawing of opium eventually resulted in an "opioid crisis." The message is clear: people want transcendence. If we don't let them find it safely, they will find it dangerously.
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.
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You have been reading an article entitled, Prohibitionists Never Learn: an open letter to San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins, published on November 8, 2023 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)