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Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no war on drugs

an open letter to freelance writer Cassandra Willyard, author of 'A next-gen pain drug shows promise, but chronic sufferers need more options'

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 5, 2024



With respect, Cassandra, your article1 about next-gen pain medicines ignores the 6,400-pound gorilla in the room: namely, the fact that the Drug War has outlawed almost any form of treating pain. Opium, for starters, is illegal, as are a host of other medicines that could treat pain by helping one ignore it or think about it in a new way (like psilocybin and huachuma cactus).

But like almost all Science News writers, you reckon without the Drug War2, pretending that you are writing from a natural baseline, when, in fact, drugs like opium have been considered panaceas throughout history, with the exception of the last century or so, when America began demonizing effective medicines for political reasons. Being prohibited from using Mother Nature is not something that is common sense -- unless maybe one is a drug-hating Christian Scientist. The fact that naturally occurring drugs like opium 3 are illegal should be part and parcel of any truly scientific piece about pain relief.

For as author Jim Hogshire wrote:

"The poppy's central and indispensable position in our civilization makes access to it important, and thus forbidding public access to the poppy is staggeringly cruel."4


To remain silent on this topic merely serves to normalize the anti-scientific Drug War, which falsely tells us that...

a substance that can be misused by one person at one dose must not be used by any person at any dose.

Chronic sufferers need more options, Cassandra? THEN WHY DON'T WE RE-LEGALIZE MOTHER NATURE!!!












Notes:

1: A next-gen pain drug shows promise, but chronic sufferers need more options Willyard, Cassandra, Science News, 2024 (up)
2: Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War DWP (up)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
4: Opium for the Masses: Harvesting Nature’s Best Pain Medication Hogshire, Jim (up)




read more essays here





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.

Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.

Trump supports the drug war and Big Pharma: the two forces that have turned me into a patient for life with dependence-causing antidepressants. Big Pharma makes the pills, and the drug war outlaws all viable alternatives.

MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. These are the people who think Electro Shock Therapy is not used often enough! What sick priorities.

Researchers insult our intelligence when they tell us that drugs like MDMA and opium and laughing gas have not been proven to work. Everyone knows they work. That's precisely why drug warriors hate them.

As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.

I personally hate beets and I could make a health argument against their legality. Beets can kill for those allergic to them. Sure, it's a rare condition, but since when has that stopped a prohibitionist from screaming bloody murder?

Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.

Here's one problem that supporters of the psychiatric pill mill never address: the fact that Big Pharma antidepressants demoralize users by turning them into patients for life.

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.


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






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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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Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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