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Scientific Collaboration in the War on Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

October 1, 2024



Today I posted the following tweet on X:

Scientists are responsible for endless incarceration 1 s in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.


I then got some apparent pushback, stating that scientists have been trying for years to get the DEA to acknowledge drug benefits and that conservatives are the real problem.

This is true in a way, but not without major important qualifications, and so I responded to this thoughtful individual with a small barrage of qualifying tweets, which I hope elucidated rather than miffed.

I reproduce my responses here in the hopes of illuminating the subtleties involved in this important topic viz. scientists and their guilt (or lack thereof) in promoting the War on Drugs -- and its hateful incarceration 2 s of people who are, after all, merely trying to improve their own damn minds!


1) Yeah, there are definitely good guys out there. Unfortunately, they are either limited by their materialist orthodoxy into adducing only specific and limited microscopic evidence or they abandon materialism 3 for the nonce and talk the common psychological sense that we all understand implicitly and for which we need neither degrees nor lab coats.

2) In other words, scientists qua scientists (i.e., as materialists) are very limited in what they can demonstrate positively about drugs. This is because it is a category error to consider them specialists about human emotions and psychology in the first place.

3) Folks like Ben Franklin enjoyed opium 4 and used it wisely and to good effect, as did Marcus Aurelius. But to PROVE that this helped them is asking a lot. Indeed, it's asking too much. Materialist science is not qualified to do that: the user's own successful life itself IS the evidence of efficacy! (When we look elsewhere for proof of efficacy, we are like OJ Simpson launching a search for a killer -- anyone at all, other than himself.)

4) And so when scientists and/or the d e a claim a lack of established benefits, they are making a philosophical statement peculiar to westerners, that efficacy must be judged under a microscope.

5) Conservatives set the pernicious trend in the Drug War and are happy to have materialist scientists in charge of determining drug efficacy. they know that such progress will be glacial. the fda STILL can't wrap its materialist head around the obvious, that mdma 'works,' in every meaningful sense of that word.

And so while it's fine to say that scientists have tried to be helpful, that statement can only be properly understood in the light of a number of important qualifications that could never be compressed into a single tweet (except perhaps by the linguistically thrifty William Shakespeare himself) hence the foregoing mini essay.











Notes:

1: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
2: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
3: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
4: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The Partnership for a Drug Free America should be put on trial for having blatantly lied to Americans in the 1980s about drugs, while using our taxpayer money to do so!

America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own depression by making opium and cocaine illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.

This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.

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.

Researchers say that the New York Times has been flooding the world with Drug War agitprop.

Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.

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.

Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."

We should not be talking about the potential harm of drugs -- we should be talking about the well-established harm of drug PROHIBITION.

Someday, the First Lady or Man will tell kids to "just say no to prohibition." Kids who refuse will be required to watch hours' worth of films depicting gun violence, banned religions, civil wars, and adults committing suicide for want of medicine that grows at their very feet.


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






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