Psst! You have been bamboozled by America's Drug War

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Psst! You have been bamboozled by America's Drug War

(Yes, you!)

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 25, 2020

You're bamboozled, my friend.

Have a seat and I'll explain.

Don't be offended: 99% of the world has been bamboozled by Drug Warrior lies and propaganda, but I can set you straight in a few minutes.

First of all, I bet you think that cocaine is evil, right?

Aha, I thought so.

Well, you're wrong. Sigmund Freud considered it a godsend and a great fix for depression.

But the Drug Warrior suppresses that fact and lies about illegal substances, claiming they fry the brain ¹.

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That's a lie, dawg. A bold-faced and inexcusable lie. Cocaine sharpened Freud's mind. If there are any drugs that fry the brain, they are Big Pharma ² ³ meds, to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted.

Bet you never heard that statistic either. That's because Drug Warriors invent problems with illegal drugs and cover up real problems with the legal ones.

What's that? If cocaine ⁴ ⁵ has positive uses, then why have you never heard of them before?

Good question. The answer is that Drug Warriors are all around us, even in movie and broadcasting studios. And so you never see illegal drugs portrayed favorably on tv or in the movies ⁶ ⁷ because the directors and producers are good little Drug Warriors, who would never dare show such forbidden truths.

You've got to remember that the whole cop show genre could not exist without the Drug War, which essentially lets police officers keep constantly busy by punishing the pre-crime of substance possession. So tv producers are eager to perpetuate the Drug War because it fills the world with custom-made bad guys who can be demonized as "scumbags" and "filth," thus encouraging the script writer's creation of hypocritical good guys who gleefully bypass constitutional niceties in the name of eradicating such vermin. Yet without the Drug War, neither these good guys nor these bad guys would exist, and so tv and movie producers have a vested stake in promoting Drug War lies and hysteria.

But check this out.

Did you know that Benjamin Franklin was a regular opium ⁸ smoker?

No? How about the fact that Francis Crick discovered the DNA helix with the help of liberal amounts of psychedelics?

No? How about the fact that JFK's doctors routinely prescribed "speed" for the president and his wife?

No? How about the fact that the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries ⁹ lasted for almost 2,000 consecutive years, and was said to be the most important event in the lives of many of its attendees, including such western luminaries as Plato, Cicero and Plutarch?

No? Did you know that the time-honored Vedic religion was founded to worship the psychoactive properties of a plant?

No? See? What did I tell ya? The Drug War has made sure that you never learned any of this.

And so you're a babe in the woods when it comes to this stuff, a perfect mark for the cult of the Drug War and its ahistorical claim that Mother Nature's psychoactive substances have no therapeutic value whatsoever. What a flat-out lie, which the DEA maintains to this very day: yes, the self-same DEA that poisoned American pot smokers in the '80s by lacing marijuana plants with paraquat, a weed killer that has since been shown to cause Parkinson's disease.

But do you want to know the real problem with the Drug War? I know, I'm loading you up with bombshell revelations, but you look healthy enough to me: I'm sure your ticker can take it...

Besides the fact that Drug Warriors lie through their teeth... the Drug War is the establishment of a religion: namely, the religion of Christian Science. You know, Christian Science: the religion established by Mary Baker Eddy in 19th century America, according to whom we should do without drugs to heal and improve ourselves.

Does that religious ideology sound familiar? Well, it should: because it is precisely the mindset inherent in America's Drug War, the idea that we should be able to do without drugs when it comes to psychological healing and improvement.

Aha! Beginning to see now, eh? Yes, my friend, that means that the Drug War is the establishment of a religion: the religion of Christian Science.

But it gets worse: You see, the whole special thing about America was that Thomas Jefferson founded it on the basis of natural law, under which human beings have basic rights that can never be justifiably taken away by government, and what could be a more basic right than our access to the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet?

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Get it, my friend? The Drug War is not only the establishment of a religion, but it represents the triumph of common law over natural law. In other words, the Drug War is a coup against the very republic that Jefferson created. And it was intended to be a coup, and what's more an anti-Jeffersonian coup. That's why the DEA stomped onto Monticello ¹⁰ in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants: to make it hideously clear that the Drug War had overthrown Jefferson's natural law and that government was now claiming the right to tell you what plants you can so much as grow in your own garden, a claim that surely made the garden-loving Jefferson roll in his grave.

That's it, take a deep breath. You've been fed a lot of lies by the Drug War: it will take a while for you to make your peace with the devastating truth.

But the real problem with the Drug War is that it keeps bamboozled folk like yourself focusing on this evil bugaboo called "drugs." Well, let me tell you something: there are no such things as "drugs" in the politically selective and hypocritical way that the Drug Warrior uses that term. There are only substances in the world. If there are problems in the world, they are do to a lack of education about using substances advisedly, not with the substances themselves. To think otherwise is to say that salt should be banned because it can kill in high doses.

Well, guess what: ANYTHING can kill in high doses. The problem is never with the substance, but rather with how it is used.

When we make a boogieman out of the word "drugs," we think illogically. That's why the peaceful rave scene shut down in UK: because we blamed "E" for the death of one single raver, one Leah Betts (forgetting that even aspirin kills thousands yearly in England). Of course, Leah's death was actually caused by a lack of information about how to use "E" safely - and the reason for that lack of information was the Drug War itself, which discourages and punishes research into psychoactive substances once they have been criminalized.

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Aha! Get it? Well, don't be too surprised: just remember this: the Drug War actually causes all of the problems that it purports to be fixing.

Oh, dear, you look dizzy. I know, it's a lot to take in in one short session.

Here, let me get you a cup of coffee - which probably would be illegal now, too, except that the coffee growing conglomerates launched a full court PR campaign during the Drug War hysteria of the '80s to make damn sure that Americans never started associating the word "drug" with the word "coffee."

Oh, you're starting to faint now. Sorry. I'll hold my tongue!

Notes for essay entitled Psst! You have been bamboozled by America's Drug War: (Yes, you!):

1: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
4: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
5: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
6: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
7: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
8: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
9: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
10: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)

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against the hateful war on US

Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.

Mad in America publishes stories of folks who are disillusioned with antidepressants, but they won't publish mine, because I find mushrooms useful. They only want stories about cold turkey and jogging, or nutrition, or meditation.

People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.

Drug testing labs should give high marks for those who manage to use drugs responsibly, notwithstanding the efforts of law enforcement to ruin their lives. The lab guy would be like: "Wow, you are using opium wisely, my friend! Congratulations! Your boss is lucky to have you!"

AI is like almost every subject under the sun: it takes on a very different and ominous meaning when we view it in light of the modern world's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine.

Hollywood presents cocaine as a drug of killers. In reality, strategic cocaine use by an educated person can lead to great mental power, especially as just one part of a pharmacologically balanced diet.

The prohibitionist motto: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."

There are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???

We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.

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.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Psst! You have been bamboozled by America's Drug War

(Yes, you!)

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend