no access
Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
open letter to Laura Sanders
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 29, 2023
Hi, Laura.
Thanks for the great articles over the years, but I have a long-standing complaint with Science News and all other authoritative science sources in the nation. With due respect, you all "reckon without the Drug War."
You ask the question: what IS the solution for depression?
My answer is simple: RE-LEGALIZE MOTHER NATURE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The depression "crisis" would end overnight if folks could chew the coca leaf -- or use any of hundreds of drugs on an intermittent basis.
But Science News completely ignores such treatments in blind fealty to the Drug War ideology which tells us that outlawed substances have no positive uses for anybody, at any dose, for any reason, ever.
If Science News really feels this way, they should have a disclaimer that states that fact. If they don't, then they should wake up to the fact that they are self-censoring themselves when telling us about depression, anxiety and consciousness, etc.
The stories about electrifying the brain and using implants scares and bothers me. How dare we use all these technological fixes when we've outlawed any help from Mother Nature? My uncle's brain was destroyed by shock therapy -- because we outlawed all godsend medicines that could have cheered him up. That's Christian Science barbarism.
Many places now allow euthanasia: in the age of the Drug War, this means that we will let people use drugs to kill themselves but we will not let them use drugs to make themselves want to live!!!!!!
When is Science News going to acknowledge the role that the Drug War plays in censoring science and keeping you guys from writing about these issues???
This is about the tenth letter that I've written to Science News on this topic and I've always been ignored.
Please, please, do me a favor and at least take these ideas "on board."
Drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.
Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.
Saying "Fentanyl kills" is philosophically equivalent to saying "Fire bad!" Both statements are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as safely as possible for human benefit.
Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!
As great as it is, "Synthetic Panics" by Philip Jenkins was only tolerated by academia because it did not mention drugs in the title and it contains no explicit opinions about drugs. As a result, many drug law reformers still don't know the book exists.
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.
The worst form of government is not communism, socialism or even unbridled capitalism. The worst form of government is a Christian Science Theocracy, in which the government controls how much you are allowed to think and feel in life.
Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.
The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
(up)