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 and coca wine respectively. Plato got his view of the afterlife
from the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries. 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 humanity. 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 to addict America. As I write this, one in four American women must take a Big Pharma med every day of their life, some of which are harder to kick than heroin. 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 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 in 2021 alone, for as Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014: "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."
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'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.
5% of proceeds from the sale of the above product will go toward getting Brian a decent haircut for once. Honestly. 9% will go toward shoes. 50% will go toward miscellaneous. 9% of the remainder will go toward relaxation, which could encompass anything from a spin around town to an outdoor barbecue at Brian's brother's house in Stanardsville (both gas and the ice-cream cake that Brian usually supplies).
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. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.
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
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.
hen it comes to the DEA, I say, "LOCK THEM UP!" 
