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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."











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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for those who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.

Many articles in science mags need this disclaimer: "Author has declined to consider the insights gained from drug-induced states on this topic out of fealty to Christian Science orthodoxy." They don't do this because they know readers already assume that drugs will be ignored.

Drug War propaganda is all about convincing us that we will never be able to use drugs wisely. But the drug warriors are not taking any chances: they're doing all they can to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.

So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.

The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.

In America, they save the depressed from cocaine and opium by turning them into patients for life with dependence-causing "meds." Now 30-year-old doctors get to treat 67-year-olds like children, with new visits every damn three months.

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.

Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.

Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.


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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.

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