Se Llama Mushrooms

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Se Llama Mushrooms

Live from the DEA Lounge!

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 26, 2019

[standup]

Welcome back to the DEA Lounge.

[applause]

How many know that psychedelics are good for learning languages? Raise your hands?

[applaud]

Let's see, 24, carry the one...

Looks like nobody here knows that.

[drum]

No, seriously. That's just one of the millions of things that we don't know about Mother Nature's pharmacy thanks to our government's policy of placing her off-limits.

[boo]

Wake up, folks: that's as anti-scientific as it gets.

[boo]

Think about it: Why do kids learn languages? Surely, it has something to do with the flexibility of their brains. Whereas the adult brain has gotten into a rut. Am I right?

[murmur]

Look at the guy at the bar over there. He's like, "I can't speak for the rest of us here, but my own brain is certainly nothing to write home about."

[drum]

I know you didn't say anything, sir, but there is such a thing as telepathy, you know.

[drum]

No, seriously. Mark my words: someday language courses will require the consumption of a modest amount of psychedelics during certain crucial lessons.

[applaud]

You know, to let the vocabulary and grammar sink into that otherwise thick brain of ours.

[applaud]

Quiero presentarte a una amiga. Commo se llama? Se llama mushroom.

[laughter]

I kid you not, ese.

[drum]

{^Do you have what it takes to be a Drug Warrior? Only the most logic-challenged and nature-hating individuals need apply. Jackboots may be provided, however the ideal candidate will already be wearing jackboots as a matter of course.}{

Mind you, if we lived in a sane world, psychiatrists would be petitioning Congress to allow the use of psychedelics in therapy sessions too.

[applaud]

Seriously, psychedelics seem custom-designed to bring out the raw material with which psychiatry has hitherto wanted to deal.

[applaud]

It's like, some supreme being is serving this stuff up to us on a silver platter, absolutely for free, saying, "Here it is, I've grown it for you," and we're like, "Oh, no, not a plant! We couldn't possibly use a plant for mental healing!"

[boo]

And I'm like, since when did America adopt the religion of Christian Science with respect to psychological healing? I for one never signed off on the notion that we have some religious or patriotic obligation to scorn Mother Nature's freely offered therapies.

[applaud]

And yet the government is going to check my urine to make sure that I avoid the plants and fungi that grow at my very feet? Puh-lease.

[boo]

Hello? That's, um, like the enforcement of Christian Science, folks.

[boo]

Hello? It's the establishment of a religion.

[applaud]

You know, I've recently begun reading the complete essays of CS Lewis and they make me feel so small, philosophically speaking. I mean, that guy is smart, girlfriend, I am telling you.

[drum]
[laughter]

But just when I'm feeling that I don't know jack, I suddenly remember that I'm one of the only people in this country to realize all of the philosophical problems with the Drug War, and I suddenly feel smart again.

You know what they say about the one-eyed man in the country of the blind.

[drum]

No, seriously. My name is Ballard Quass and I'll be here ranting against the anti-scientific war on Mother Nature until further notice --

[applaud]

Or until the next "crack down" on drugs entails the silencing of critics -- which, I wouldn't put it past a government that has already had the unprecedented chutzpah to outlaw plants.

AFTERTHOUGHT:

I'm sure I'm not the only one who realizes that the Drug War is philosophically rotten to the core -- but I'm certainly one of the few to speak up. That said, I really can't blame most people for touting the party line. After all, you are literally kicked out of the job market (via drug testing ¹ ) if you do not renounce your right to Mother Nature's plants. And given that harsh treatment, it's reasonable to fear that you could be discriminated against in hiring merely by making your anti-drug-war viewpoints known.

Incidentally, here's where American hypocrisy kicks in. It is considered a truism that rock and rap are anti-institutional forces in America, where our artists are willing to say anything to the establishment. But not so. There are precious few songs that seek to tweak the nose of the establishment for outlawing Mother Nature's plants. Oh, sure, there are plenty of songs about hedonistic drug use, but such songs only help to reinforce the Drug Warrior dogma that psychoactive plants are only used by hedonists, allowing the warrior to conveniently ignore the fact that many such plants improve human cognition and give the partaker a therapeutic sense of their place in the cosmos.

So even rock bands and rappers are cowered into staying mum about the true fascist state of affairs.

The DEA has been willfully withholding godsend medications from the American public for 40+ years now, yet that outrage has never been addressed by an American musician. Meanwhile, films like "Running with the Devil" continue to glorify the DEA and encourage us to accept its unconstitutional practices (including, according to the film, torture and cold-blooded murder of mere suspects), all in the name of keeping Americans from having access to naturally growing plants.

Anyone who thinks such vicious law enforcement is just a movie plot is unfamiliar with the amorality of our current president, Donald Trump. He's jealous of Filipino Duterte who gets to order the killing of mere drug suspects outright, without all that nonsense about due process and jury trials. Here we see problem 2,456-B (or is it 2,456-C?) with our war against plants: it plays into the hands of would-be tyrants, who will gladly use Drug War hysteria to bring about the kind of fascist bloodshed that they hunger for. What better way to dress up their blood-lust and their raw will to power in the colors of the American flag?

And America claims it's a scientifically oriented country? Stop me if you've heard this before but: puh-lease!

editor note from abolishthedea.com

June 18, 2022

Okay, that was... quaint, shall we call it? But you've got to remember, these curious effusions were indited a full 2 1/2 long years ago, when Brian was still a lad (couldn't have been more than 62 years old at most), and he had only just started his task of upbraiding the establishment for its nonsensical drug-war pieties. He's connected a lot of philosophical dots since then. Like the fact that the Drug War is a makework program for law enforcement personnel which actually obliges them to become noxious busybodies.

It's like a movie I just saw in which a female drugs agent comes into town looking for medicines of which pharmalogically clueless politicians disapprove. You'll have to forgive my French, but I couldn't help but think of this self-righteous public servant as a... well, as a "panty sniffer," if you will, as she rushes about town drawing her gloved finger over any and all surfaces that appear to harbor the least amount of particulate of any kind. You could see she was just waiting for the moment that she could cry out: "Bingo!" or "Gotcha!"

She doesn't care about bank robberies, she doesn't care about nuclear war ² ³ ⁴ , she doesn't care about terrorism. She's just a prudish schoolmarm trying to find out if the locals have been naughty or nice.

LOCAL: "But we're good people here, Ma'am!"
OFFICER: "That's as shall appear, my pretty! Heh-heh-heh-heh! Say, do you mind if I sniff your jacket, young man?"

And then when you think of the thousands of her self-aggrandizing colleagues in the US alone who only have jobs because of this Big Brother fight against the "pre-crime" of substance possession, folks who, barring that, would be slopping together Whoppers at Burger King. Well, it's a boon for the glove industry at any rate. Somebody has to clad those busybody fingers of theirs as they poke about for a legal excuse to confiscate mansions and yachts on behalf of the local police.

America has come within a hair's breath of being nuked multiple times (accidentally and otherwise) in the last 50 years, including once in Arkansas, once in North Carolina, and once in Pearl Harbor. But it never seems to have occurred to strategically hysterical authorities that these thousands of "panty sniffers" that we're employing today in the name of the Drug War might be of more service to the Republic if they were looking for nuclear threats, not pharmacological ones.

I guess they figure that if we're blown to bits, we can all go to heaven secure in the knowledge that we have just said no to Mother Nature's godsends. Or if we survive the initial blast, we can stand up to the invader (the one who comes stateside after we do the dirty work for them by blowing up Arkansas) and cry: "Don't shoot, comrade, we're good people here, we have all just said no to godsend medicine!" To which the Russian sniper replies, "Just say no to THIS!"

I'm just sayin', let's get our priorities straight here!

Notes for essay entitled Se Llama Mushrooms: Live from the DEA Lounge!:

1: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition DWP (up)
2: 8 Nuclear Close Calls that Nearly Spelled Disaster Davidson, Lucy, History Hit, 2022 (up)
3: Global Nuclear Warhead Stockpiles (1945-2024) Voronoi, 2023 (up)
4: Nuclear Near-Misses: The Close Calls That Almost Changed the World Atomic Toasters, 2024 (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

The goal of drug-law reform should be to outlaw prohibition. Anything short of that, and our basic rights will always be subject to veto by fearmongers. Outlawing prohibition would restore the Natural Law of Jefferson, which the DEA scorned in 1987 with its raid on Monticello.

If they're going to throw doctors in jail for prescribing too much pain medication, they should also throw them in jail for prescribing too LITTLE.

The DEA stomped onto Thomas Jefferson's estate in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And the TJ Foundation helped them! They sold out Jefferson.

Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.

I have nothing against science, BTW (altho' I might feel differently after a nuclear war!) I just want scientists to "stay in their lane" and stop pretending to be experts on my own personal mood and consciousness.

We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.

All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.

Drug testing labs should give high marks for those who manage to use drugs responsibly, notwithstanding the efforts of law enforcement to ruin their lives. The lab guy would be like: "Wow, you are using opium wisely, my friend! Congratulations! Your boss is lucky to have you!"

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

State-assisted suicide for the depressed is murder in a world in which the state outlaws all substances that could make the depressed wish to live.

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

No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).

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.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

(up)

Se Llama Mushrooms

Live from the DEA Lounge!

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend