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Reddit: the Home Page for Grade-Schoolers

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 18, 2022



Almost two decades ago, I was dining with my brother-in-law in Maryland, when the topic of online posting came up. I mentioned that I never open up my articles to posting, and my brother-in-law asked why. After all, he said, don't I want feedback?

Yes, I said, but feedback from whom? An axe murderer in Albania? A snarky 14-year-old bully in Baltimore? Someone who has studied the subject in question for 10 minutes whereas I have contemplated it for four decades?

Opening oneself up to indiscriminate comments, imho, is emotional suicide. By doing so, you set malicious minds working, trying to think how they can push your buttons most emphatically in order, not to elucidate the issue at hand, but rather to show off their rhetorical skills and make you, the author, feel like a non-entity. Why on earth would I wish to open myself up for that, unless my very point in posting was to get in a shouting match with anonymous morons?

That's why I should have known better than to start my own Reddit group called Philosophy of the Drug War. The first comment I received was from someone who told me I complained too much, that I was "hardcore," that everyone knew that the Drug War was nonsense anyway, and that I should "drop the philosophy schtick."

The guy was gaslighting 1 me2: attempting to convince me that all was well: that I was imagining the Drug Wars that the US has created in Mexico, that I was imagining the existence of Duterte, the self-proclaimed "Drug War Hitler" in the Philippines, that I was imagining the fact that millions of minorities have been removed from the voting rolls due to drug laws that were specifically written for that purpose. I was also apparently imagining the fact that most menial workers in America still have to urinate for their employers in order to get a job -- and the fact that scientists were censoring their work so as not to violate Drug War ideology, by treating the Drug War as a natural baseline (that is to say ignoring it in their writings) rather than admitting openly that their research on medicines in particular has been hobbled by drug law that outlaws an entire category of psychoactive plant medicines.

No, no, Brian, "all is well," says the poster, just before he rushes off to take the annual drug test for his minimum-wage job at Lowe's hardware store -- after which he goes home and watches a Drug War movie in which the DEA openly trashes the constitution, tortures drug suspects, and shoots the so-called "kingpins" at point-blank range.

Who needs this kind of grief? And to write back was folly. It would be like trying to convince a bully 4th grader that you, as an adult, actually know things that he, as a child, does not, including entire back stories about natural law, jurisprudence and theology.

As an adult, one has to stop, take a deep breath, and shut down the whole conversation at once -- because the alternative is to have this button-pusher drag you back four decades into grade school and a tit-for-tat shouting match.

And so I closed my Reddit group entitled Philosophy of the Drug War. At least I think I closed it. The Reddit interface is so moderator-unfriendly that I never could find the links that would seem to shut it down entirely, so all the grade schoolers on the planet are now free to pile on at will, to tell me how needless it is to speak up against the Drug War. Of course, one wants to tell him that he is part of the problem: that the whole reason the Drug War has lasted 100+ years is because folks like himself fail to appreciate the Drug War's role in facilitating the election of fascists, in militarizing police forces, in making drug-hating Christian Science the state religion, and in violating the Natural Law upon which Jefferson founded America. If the freedom of the press were suddenly outlawed, we'd justifiably be screaming about it, not writing dispassionate wishy-washy articles which state that "all things considered, we should probably let the press be free again, don't ya think?"

That said, I'm always open to mature criticism and valuable feedback, but if the critic can't be bothered to email me personally with their concerns-- and using their real name -- then why should I be bothered to read their critique?

Brian Quass @ quass@quass.com









Notes for essay entitled Reddit: the Home Page for Grade-Schoolers:

1: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
2: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Mayo Clinic is peddling junk. They are still promoting Venlafaxine, a drug that is harder to kick than heroin.

Drug prohibition is a caustic lye that destroys every democratic freedom that it comes in contact with.

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx

Drug warriors are too selfish and short-sighted to fight real problems, so they blame everything on drugs.

America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.

Alexander Shulgin is a typical westerner when he speaks about cocaine. He moralizes about the drug, telling us that it does not give him "real" power. But so what? Does coffee give him "real" power? Coke helps some, others not. Stop holding it to this weird metaphysical standard.

Musk and co. want to make us more robot-like with AI, when they should be trying to make us more human-like with sacred medicine. Only humans can gain creativity from plant medicine. All AI can do is harvest the knowledge that eventually results from that creativity.

Ketamine is like any other drug. It has good uses for certain people in certain situations. Nowadays, people insist that a drug be okay in every situation for everybody (especially American teens) before they will say that it's okay. That's crazy and anti-scientific.

Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.

Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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