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Psst! You have been bamboozled by America's Drug War
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!
After watching my mother suffer because of the drug war, I hate to hear people tell me that the problem is drugs. WRONG! That's a western colonialist viewpoint. God loved his creation (see Genesis). He did not make trash. We need to use entheogenic medicines wisely.
Any self-respecting mycologist should denounce the criminalization of mushrooms.
We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for those who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.
The DEA stomped onto Thomas Jefferson's estate in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And the TJ Foundation helped them! They sold out Jefferson.
The media called out Trump for fearmongering about immigrants, but the media engages in fearmongering when it comes to drugs. The latest TV plot line: "white teenage girl forced to use fentanyl!" America loves to feel morally superior about "drugs."
If we let "science" decide about drugs, i.e. base freedom on health concerns, then tea can be as easily outlawed as beer. The fact that horses are not illegal shows that prohibition is not about health. It's about the power to outlaw certain "ways of being in the world."
I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.
Psychedelics and entheogens should be freely available to all dementia patients. These medicines can increase neuronal plasticity and even grow new neurons. Besides, they can inspire and elate -- or do we puritans feel that our loved ones have no right to peace of mind?
Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."
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!"
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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