Reddit: the Home Page for Grade-Schoolers
by 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:
1: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
2: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.
The reasons that people use drugs are psychologically obvious. Academics gaslight us on this topic and invent new diseases to explain away our desire to live large.
Drug prohibition is the perfect racist crime. It brought gunfire to inner cities, yet those who seek to end the gunfire pretend that drug prohibition has nothing to do with it.
Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.
"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.
I'm looking for a United Healthcare doctor now that I'm 66 years old. When I searched my zip code and typed "alternative medicine," I got one single solitary return... for a chiropractor, no less. Some choice. Guess everyone else wants me to "keep taking my meds."
We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.
Wade Davis wrote in Rolling Stone that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?! 178,000 people die from alcohol every year in America alone.
I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.
Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.
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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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