Psst! You have been bamboozled by America's Drug War
(Yes, you!)
ou'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.
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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 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 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 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 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 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 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!
No Drug War Keychains The key to ending the Drug War is to spread the word about the fact that it is Anti-American, unscientific and anti-minority (for starters)
Monticello Betrayed Thomas Jefferson By demonizing plant medicine, the Drug War overthrew the Natural Law upon which Jefferson founded America -- and brazenly confiscated the Founding Father's poppy plants in 1987, in a symbolic coup against Jeffersonian freedoms.
The Drug War Censors Science Scientists: It's time to wake up to the fact that you are censored by the drug war. Drive the point home with these bumper stickers.
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.
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.
ou're bamboozled, my friend.
