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She Devils and Substance Prohibition

what 1950s horror movies can tell us about America's coldhearted drug policies

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher




December 23, 2024

watched one of those B horror movies from the 1950s last night. It was called "She Devil" and concerned a poor but attractive young lady who was suffering from an apparently incurable case of tuberculosis. An ambitious doctor gets wind of the case and submits the patient to a new untested drug treatment, with the reluctant help of his more cautious and elderly advisor and mentor. The drug restores the woman's health but has the unintended side effect of changing her erstwhile meek disposition into that of a heartless egoist, one determined to have her way in life no matter what.

After noticing the change, the worried mentor asks his protege if the drug he had created could have affected the lady's personality:

"Do you suppose it could be the serum, that it produced an emotional as well as a physical change in her?"


Without missing a beat, the ambitious protege responds:

"I wouldn't know about that. As a biochemist, I don't deal with the emotions."


He is so self-satisfied and glib as he makes this pronouncement that a modern viewer wants to smack him right in the puss.

A modern biochemist might not be so frank as this B-movie scientist, but Behaviorism is still the order of the day in academia, even if it goes by other names. The drug researcher doesn't care about obvious emotions. Otherwise they would see at a glance that the strategic use of drugs like coca, opium and psychedelics could work wonders, and not just for the depressed and anxious but for those seeking help in achieving spiritual states and self-understanding and/or writing exotic prose and poetry. They cannot see this obvious fact because they believe that to be scientific, they have to ignore obvious emotions and look at brain chemistry instead under a microscope. Anecdote and historical usage mean nothing to them.

These drugs have inspired entire religions but that means nothing to today's scientists. They have accepted the anti-scientific Drug Warrior premise that a drug that can be misused, even in theory, by young American white people must not be used by anyone, anywhere, ever, that we are just too dumb to ever learn to use drugs wisely. These are the same people who insist that we can use guns wisely and that free climbing a sheer cliff face is a reasonable activity, as is driving a car, the same people who sign off on liquor and Jim Beam commercials for young adults, the same people who let Big Pharma advertise "meds" for which the recognized side effects include death itself.

Drug researchers today may be the smartest and nicest people in the world -- but they are forced to play dumb and be cold-hearted thanks to their adherence to the mendacious dogma of today's know-nothing and anti-scientific Drug Warriors.




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Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

It's amazing. Drug law is outlawing science -- and yet so few complain. Drug law tells us what mushrooms we can collect, for God's sake. Is that not straight-up insane? Or are Americans so used to being treated as children that they accept this corrupt status quo?
First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws. 3:51 PM ยท Jul 15, 2024
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
The MindMed company (makers of LSD Lite) tell us that euphoria and visions are "adverse effects": that's not science, that's an arid materialist philosophy that does not believe in spiritual transcendence.
What are drug dealers doing, after all? Only selling substances that people want and have always had a right to, until racist politicians came along and decided government had the right to ration out pain relief and mystical experience.
America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of addiction from drugs. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing meds of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.
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.
A Pennsylvanian politician now wants the US Army to "fight fentanyl." The guy is anthropomorphizing a damn drug! No wonder pols don't want to spend money on education, because any educated country would laugh a superstitious guy like that right out of public office.
That's how Governor Kotek is currently "dealing" with the homelessness problem in Oregon: by arresting her way out of it, in fealty to fearmongering drug warriors.
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You have been reading an article entitled, She Devils and Substance Prohibition: what 1950s horror movies can tell us about America's coldhearted drug policies, published on December 23, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)