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Put the DEA on Trial

for crimes against humanity

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 6, 2019



When it comes to the DEA, I say, "LOCK THEM UP!"

Before saying goodbye to the DEA, we should publicly try its leadership in court for having knowingly barred millions of depressed Americans from receiving priceless therapy. How did the DEA do this? By scheduling these drugs based on political motivations, completely ignoring to this day the well-documented benefits of drugs like LSD and psilocybin to change lives for the better in a positive and medically monitored setting. The drugs that the DEA says have no benefits have inspired entire religions and been used by such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius, HG Wells and Jules Verne, these two duos have enjoyed opium 1 and coca wine respectively. Plato got his view of the afterlife
from the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries2. And the Vedic religion was inspired by psychoactive plant medicine.

In other words, the DEA is knowingly lying about these substances when it says they have no potential beneficial uses. They are thereby denying hundreds of millions around the world of godsend medicine, since imperialist America enforces its jaundiced Christian Science view of psychoactive medicine around the globe by financial blackmail and threat of invasion -- except, of course, in countries like Russia and China, whose dictators love the Drug War because it gives them an excuse to crack down still further on their own people as politics demands.


Liberal critics of the Drug War keep saying that it's failed, but the Drug War never had a right to succeed.

It was wrong from the start to ban naturally occurring substances, the gifts of Mother Nature, the birthright of humanity, especially when these substances are banned for political motives. If Americans have any birthright, they surely have a right to the medicinal and nourishing output of Mother Nature and cannot be rightfully separated from that bounty by coercion.


Richard Nixon's political assessment of such drugs remains on the books today, thanks to the fact that the self-dealing DEA, an agency that exists to "fight drugs," is the same organization tasked with deciding the legal status of drugs. That's the mother of all conflicts of interests, one that will continue to eat away at the democratic process until the DEA is excised from the body politic.


But there's one class of Drug War victim that's rarely recognized today: that is the millions of depressed persons who have gone without effective medications for decades now thanks to Richard Nixon's politically motivated scheduling and slandering of psychoactive substances.


What's the cause of depression in America?

The DEA. By denying Americans the medicines that have been shown to dramatically ease that malady.

But the DEA will only be held accountable when politicians start valuing patient outcomes over political outcomes.

While we're at it, we should try Former DEA chief John C. Lawn personally for crimes against humanity3. He was the agency head who poisoned marijuana in the '80s with paraquat, a weed killer that has since been shown to cause Parkinson's disease. (You'll recall that the weed-friendly Robin Williams acquired that disease shortly before his death.)





May 20, 2022

Brian (bless him) apparently wrote this before the real penny dropped, before he recognized, that is, that the Drug War was a violation of the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. For we know that John Locke himself (Jefferson's "go-to" man on Natural Law) declared in his Second Treatise on Government that human beings have a right to "the use of the land and all that lies therein." So we might say that the criminalization of the poppy plant in 1914 was the original sin of the Drug War, by means of which America (and sadly the entire world) adopted an irrational and anti-scientific attitude toward psychoactive substances that has ever since produced nothing but violence and (ironically) addiction, partly because it emphasizes fear over education and partly because prohibition cleared the way for Big Pharma to create a psychiatric pill mill 4 to addict America. As I write this, one in four American women must take a Big Pharma 5 6 med every day of their life, some of which are harder to kick than heroin 7 8. Why? Because they muck about with brain chemistry by causing the chemical imbalances that they purport to fix (see Anatomy of an Epidemic by Richard Whitaker.)

Speaking of Jefferson, that reminds me of another crime for which the DEA should be punished: the fact that they stormed onto Jefferson's estate at Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants, thereby enacting a daylight coup against the very concept of Natural Law, a disgrace to which the Monticello 9 Foundation readily acceded, thereby disowning and dishonoring the very Jeffersonian legacy that they pretend to be protecting.

Here's another reason to throw DEA officials into the same overcrowded jails in which they have locked up millions of minorities for the last half-century: because Americans know from the liquor wars that prohibition creates violence, and yet the DEA has continued quite knowingly to promote that deadly policy, thereby creating gangs and cartels just as surely as liquor prohibition created the Mafia, bringing about the deaths of over 800 black Chicagoans by gun violence 10 in 2021 alone, for as Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014: "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 11 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist.12"

Let's add to that charge the deaths in the civil wars in South America that our imperialistic prohibition has created out of whole cloth, and the above-mentioned addiction crisis, and the fact that the Drug War censors science, and that it leaves millions -- indeed billions -- around the globe without godsend medicines, some of which grow at their very feet. Oh, did I mention that the Drug War created the gangs and cartels over which we Americans hypocritically wring our hands today, just as surely as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.

It's time therefore to hold the DEA hierarchy personally responsible for crimes against humanity -- as well as crimes against Americans in particular, from whom they have unconstitutionally taken away our Jeffersonian natural right to the bounty of Mother Nature.

June 22, 2022

Did I mention that the DEA steals elections for fascists by disfranchising millions of minorities, and why? Because they used plant medicine of which racist politicians disapprove, this despite the fact that the medicines in question have inspired entire religions in the past.

The Drug War is all about making Americans fear psychoactive substances rather than understand them. Joe Biden 13 14's Office of National Drug Control Policy actually FORBIDS the consideration of positive news about substances that the government has demonized as "drugs." Scientists are forbidden to research these scapegoat substances, which is a censorship worse than the Church practiced on Galileo, since Galileo at least REALIZED that he was being censored. Americans have been so bamboozled by over 100 years of "drug" demonization that they don't even realize that their freedom has been emasculated by an anti-scientific plot to scapegoat medicines that have inspired entire religions -- thereby blinding America to countless potential treatments and cures for everything from Alzheimer's to depression.









Notes for essay entitled Put the DEA on Trial: for crimes against humanity:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
2: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
3: Drug Prohibition is a crime against humantiy DWP (up)
4: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
5: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
6: 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)
7: Heroin versus Antidepressants DWP (up)
8: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
9: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
10: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
11: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
12: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
13: Joe Biden (up)
14: Joe Biden’s Drug War Record Is So Much Worse Than You Think Bienenstock, David, Leafly, 2019 (up)




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Besides, why should I listen to the views of a microbe?

Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I thought mycology clubs across the US would be protesting drug laws that make mushroom collecting illegal for psychoactive species. But in reality, almost no club even mentions such species. No wonder prohibition is going strong.

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!"

I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.

"Can I use poppies, coca, laughing gas, MDMA?" "NO," says the materialist, "We must be SCIENTIFIC! We must fry your brain and give you a lobotomy and make you a patient for life with the psychiatric pill mill! That's true SCIENCE!"

Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.

If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.

"Those gentlemen who adopt the anti-opium doctrine... are only comparable to the monomaniac, who, sane upon every subject but one, is thoroughly daft upon that." --William Brereton

There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.


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