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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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Ten Tweets

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Just saw a People's magazine article with the headline: "JUSTICE FOR MATTHEW PERRY." If there was true justice, their editorial staff would be in jail for promoting user ignorance and a contaminated drug supply. It's the prohibition, stupid!!!

Laughing gas inspired the philosophy of William James. Outlawing N20 is outlawing academic freedom. Laughing gas should be available for the suicidal. Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.

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.

Here's one problem that supporters of the psychiatric pill mill never address: the fact that Big Pharma antidepressants demoralize users by turning them into patients for life.

The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.

"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. The very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.

Videos about science and psilocybin are funny. They show nerds trying to catch up with common sense.

Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.

As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.

Scientists are so used to ignoring "drugs" that they don't even realize they're doing it. Yet almost all books about consciousness and depression (etc.) are nonsense these days because they ignore what drugs could tell us about those topics.


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