Reddit: the Home Page for Grade-Schoolers
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 18, 2022
lmost 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 me: 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
More Essays Here
Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs
We need to push back against the very idea that the FDA is qualified to tell us what works when it comes to psychoactive medicines. Users know these things work. That's what counts. The rest is academic foot dragging.
This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.
I think we should start taking names. All politicians and government officials who work to keep godsends like psilocybin from the public should be held to account for crimes against humanity when the drug war finally ends.
The Drug War has turned America into the world's first "Indignocracy," where our most basic rights can be vetoed by a misinformed public. That's how scheming racist politicians put an end to the 4th amendment to the US Constitution.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
The FDA will be accepting comments through September 20th on the subject of ways to fight PTSD.
PTSD@reaganudall.org
Ask them why they support brain-damaging shock therapy but won't approve drugs like MDMA that could make ECT unnecessary.
The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.
"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!"
All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.
How else will they scare us enough to convince us to give up all our freedoms for the purpose of fighting horrible awful evil DRUGS? DRUGS is the sledgehammer with which they are destroying American democracy.
More Tweets
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Reddit: the Home Page for Grade-Schoolers published on February 18, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)