fight back against the extrajudicial enforcement of Christian Science Sharia
ttention Job Applicants!
Mad about having to submit to drug tests in order to make a living?
Fight back!
Submit the following protest letter to your current or prospective employer along with that urine sample that you provide them.
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING LETTER SHOULD BE USED ONLY BY THOSE WHO ARE READY TO TAKE A STAND AGAINST THE DEVASTATINGLY MISGUIDED DRUG WAR, IN THE FULL KNOWLEDGE THAT DOING SO IS RISKY IN TODAY'S DRUG WARRIOR CLIMATE. NO ONE, LEAST OF ALL MYSELF, CAN GUARANTEE YOU THAT THE COMPANY YOU ARE DEALING WITH WILL RESPECT YOU FOR PROTESTING IN THIS WAY. ONLY SUBMIT THE FOLLOWING LETTER TO YOUR DRUG-TESTING EMPLOYER IF YOU FEEL STRONGLY ENOUGH ABOUT THE INJUSTICES IN QUESTION HERE THAT YOU ARE WILLING TO LOSE A JOB OPPORTUNITY IF NECESSARY TO MAKE YOUR VIEWPOINT KNOWN.
DRUG TESTING PROTEST LETTER
Dear Employer:
Although I have complied with your company's drug test, I feel a moral duty to inform you that I have done so under duress. I believe that such drug-testing without cause is a fundamental violation of my rights as an American citizen, and that such testing represents the enforcement of a Christian Science viewpoint about drugs, which is one that I do not share. Christian Scientists, as I'm sure you know, believe that human beings have a moral duty to go without using drugs for healing purposes, whether physical or psychological. I do not practice that religion, and I therefore do not believe that I should be subject to its requirements when it comes to the plant medicines around me. For I believe that mother nature is a healing goddess, not a drug kingpin, and that no plants are bad in and of themselves, despite the Drug Warrior's constant attempts to demonize them, largely by failing to acknowledge the positive role that today's demonized plant substances have played in various cultures for literally thousands of years.
I am taking this stand in support of Thomas Jefferson, who I believe was rolling over in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants, in clear and ungrateful violation of the natural law upon which Jefferson had founded this country. Jefferson believed that there were basic rights that the government could not take from us, and few could be more basic, especially to a garden-lover like Jefferson, than our right to the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet. For as Natural Law proponent John Locke wrote in his Second Treatise on Government, human beings have a right to the use of the land "and all that lies therein." To arrest me for accessing and using mere plant medicine is therefore, in my view, a violation of my basic rights as an American citizen, for it represents the unconstitutional triumph of common law over Jefferson's natural law, which was the one thing that was unique and special about America, until the Drug War took it away, beginning in 1914, when racist politicians first outlawed a plant in order to marginalize the minorities that they feared and despised.
I do not seek to convince you of my viewpoint in this short letter. I merely wish to state for the record that I have taken your drug test under duress for a variety of philosophical reasons, including the ones that I've mentioned above. I trust that you will accept this statement of conscience for the earnest political protest that it represents and that it will not bias you against me in considering my suitability for employment, for, putting this one issue aside, I believe I would make a valuable addition to your workforce.
Sincerely Yours,
Name, Date, on behalf of the wronged Thomas Jefferson and the Natural Law upon which he founded this country
WATCH THIS PAGE FOR MORE IDEAS ABOUT PROTESTING CHRISTIAN SCIENCE DRUG TESTING AND ITS VIOLATION OF NATURAL LAW UPON WHICH AMERICA WAS FOUNDED
#DrugTestingSucks
Author's Follow-up: August 17, 2022
There's nothing wrong with checking folks like pilots to see if they're impaired by a substance -- but let's be clear here: drug testing in the vast majority of cases is not about finding impairment: it's rather an extrajudicial fishing expedition in the human body to find signs of previous use of banned substances. Worse yet, the punishment for infraction is cruel and unusual, insofar as it involves barring the 'user' from obtaining gainful employment in the United States of America (or Britain, or Australia, etc.). That is a kind of punishment that is not even meted out to axe murderers.
Moreover, Congress is thus essentially subcontracting drug testing to businesses to enforce Christian Science Sharia, for the kinds of substances that the drug test searches for are those which have inspired entire religions in the past. Coca was an Incan God. The Vedic religion was inspired by a psychoactive plant. Plato's view of the afterlife was inspired by the psychedelic kykeon at Eleusis. And the "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius were inspired by his free use of opium. Yet the use of these substances in America today will bar you from feeding your family. Drug testing is therefore an attack on religious freedom, an attack upon the wellspring and fountainhead of the religious impulse itself: namely, psychoactive plants and fungi.
Author's Follow-up: April 12, 2023
If I follow up on the philosophical investigations of William James and use nitrous oxide, I will no longer be allowed to have a job in America. Ah, the land of the home and the free!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.
It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it 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.
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
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
Miller, Richard Louis "Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle " 2017 Park Street Press
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
Rosenfeld, Harvey "Diary of a Dirty Little War: The Spanish-American War of 1898 " 2000 Praeger
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
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.
ttention Job Applicants!
