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 brain1.
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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 23 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 45 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 67 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 mysteries9 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!
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
The line drawn between recreational and medical use is wishful thinking on the part of drug warriors. Recreation, according to Webster's, is "refreshment or diversion," and both have positive knock-on effects in the lives of real people.
The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.
Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.
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.
Prohibitionists think that they merely have to use the word "drugs" to win an argument.
"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau
People talk about how dangerous Jamaica is -- but no one reminds us that it is all due to America's Drug War. Yes, cannabis and psilocybin are legal there, but plenty of drugs are not, and even if they were, their illegality elsewhere would lead to fierce dealer rivalry.
Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use drugs that speed up and sharpen mental processes.
Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.
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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