Silence equals Death in America's Drug War

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Silence equals Death in America's Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 8, 2020

I recently contacted the Chair of the Botany Department at the University of Hawaii to complain about the appearance of drug-war propaganda in some of his department's online material.

2025 Update

I felt a little guilty at first because I planned to publish my lengthy letter to him on my website, and I thought that it might be unfair to single his department out for having fallen prey to Drug War propaganda. (The offending subject matter, apparently written by a UoH professor, claimed that LSD was outlawed because it was being abused, whereas Richard Nixon actually outlawed all psychedelics in order to throw his opponents into jail and charge them with felonies, thereby removing them from the voting rolls.)

I stopped feeling guilty at once, however, when the Botany Department chairman responded with a terse email, complaining about the length of my message and suggesting that I contact instead the author of the material that I found objectionable. Of course, the whole reason I had contacted the chair in the first place was that the offending material appeared online without an author's credit and with hyperlinks to missing pages. But, resolving to remain civil, I replied as follows:

Dear Professor Kasey:

The page is not credited and the links are invalid. But I'll investigate and see if I can deduce who might have written the text in question. Thanks.

My email is lengthy because I'm trying to combat the wrong-headed thinking of an anti-scientific Drug War that keeps botanists from doing their job.

Sorry if I overwhelmed you.

If you're ever open to persuasion on this topic -- and the need for American botanists to protest governmental restrictions on what they can and cannot research -- I invite you to visit my website devoted to such topics at abolishthedea.com.

Then I started thinking. Why am I feeling guilty for bothering Professor Kasey? Grade-schoolers are being shot down in inner cities every day of the week thanks to the Drug War, which single-handedly created gangs and cartels to profit from American prohibition. Mexicans are dying around the clock. Why? Because the Drug War lingers like an unwelcome guest, blithely accepted by the American public, who feel free to repeat Drug War propaganda as gospel truth, even in college courses.

Maybe America has become far too polite on this subject. America's movers-and-shakers did little or nothing to stop sexual harassment until feminists started "outing" them for their silence on that topic. The powers-that-be were also generally silent about race relations until Black Lives Matter shamed them into speaking up.

Maybe it's time to start shaming the many stealth collaborators of the Drug War whose silence (and lies) on this topic keep the bullets flying.

There is a lot of blame to go around.

Take TV producers, for instance. Cop shows are full of Drug War propaganda: in fact, the whole genre could scarcely exist in a world where natural plant medicines were considered the birth right of every citizen, as they had been throughout world history until the racially motivated Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. But show producers have email addresses and website contact forms. If you're opposed to America's Drug War -- or simply dislike the unnecessary slaughter of grade-schoolers that the Drug War brings about -- why not contact these producers via email and encourage them to stop spreading Drug War propaganda? Every time their show episodes demonize cocaine ¹ ² , these producers are supporting Drug War prohibition and the violence that it creates (meanwhile ignoring the fact that medicines from the coca plant have been used responsibly by non-western cultures for millennia).

?216?

Psychiatrists are drug-war collaborators as well whenever they fail to speak up about the Drug War. If the government told doctors that they could no longer use aspirin, they would scream bloody murder: but when the government tells psychiatrists that they can't use natural therapeutic godsends, such doctors merely shrug and then start browsing through the slick and glossy catalog of highly addictive pills that the pharmaceutical salesperson left outside their office door. It's time that we start publicly pestering psychiatrists to do their part by speaking out against the anti-patient status quo of the Drug War.

Even authors are drug-war collaborators. Think of the thousands of non-fiction books that have been written about creativity and relaxation over the past half-century, with scarcely any of them even mentioning the power of psychoactive plants to bring about these very states. And what about books on consciousness? How many weighty philosophical tomes (using 50-cent words like "qualia" and "neurofeedback") have completely ignored the role that psychoactive plants have played in altering (and elucidating the nature of) consciousness over the ages, not just for village shaman under the influence of "the food of the gods," but for western luminaries such as Plato and Aristotle, under the influence of the psychedelic kykeon at Eleusis. It's about time that we "outed" such authors for this self-censorship whereby they toe the Drug War party line, thereby giving the green light to the drug-war prohibition that kills.

The botanist's complicity in the Drug War is especially culpable, however, since the DEA's "drug scheduling" system limits their very ability to practice their profession. The DEA places thousands of plants and fungi off-limits to research, despite the fact that such flora could include godsends for ending cancer, depression, and Alzheimer's ³ disease. Surely any self-respecting botanist should be outraged by this emasculating Drug Warrior interference in their work, just as they would profess outrage at the way that the Church stymied the research of Galileo in the 17th century. But, like the authors and psychiatrists mentioned above, it looks like America's botanists need to be politely reminded of their duty to be outraged, since their silence on this topic supports the drug-war status quo: a status quo that not only kills grade-schoolers, but leads to the miserable and totally unnecessary suffering of the elderly and the depressed, who must go without god-send medications which, in the absence of Drug War restrictions, could be provided for them.

Yes, we should be polite when outing the many drug-war collaborators mentioned above, since many of them are silent about the Drug War for fear of being ostracized -- financially and otherwise -- should they speak out. That's unfortunately a very realistic concern. I myself can only speak truthfully here since I am self-employed. But one goal in "outing" these folks is to start normalizing the process of speaking plain truth about drugs, first and foremost by reminding Americans that the term "drugs" is really just a Drug Warrior pejorative for "Mother Nature's plant medicines."

Because what was true of the AIDS crisis 30 years ago is true about the Drug War today: Silence equals Death: the daily death of inner-city minorities (over 800 in 2021 in Chicago alone), as well as the wholesale massacre of Mexicans and other nationalities. Why? Because they deal in a plant medicine that the Incas considered to be a god.

Author's Follow-up: April 1, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

It's been five years since I tried in vain to awaken the botany chair at the University of Hawaii to the evils of government censorship of academia ⁴. I have since been troubled to see that most mycology websites either ignore psychoactive mushrooms entirely or else make it clear that they will have no "truck" with such impertinent and illegal fungi. Humph!

In reflecting upon my 2020 adumbrations, it occurred to me that I might want to provide some factual support of the violence occasioned by substance prohibition. You must know then that there were over 67,000 gun-related deaths in America's inner cities in the two decades between 2003 and 2023 ⁵. To grasp the full significance of this statement, you must also understand that it was the Drug War that filled the 'hood with guns in the first place. So even the suicides included in such figures were facilitated by the War on Drugs, even if they were not caused thereby -- especially when you consider that the Drug War outlawed all substances that could have cheered and elated the suicidal, especially when you consider that Americans actually prefer suicide ⁶ over drug use, so successfully have they been brainwashed in the drug-demonizing ideology of the Drug War.

In short, Heather Ann Thompson said it all when she wrote the following in The Atlantic in 2014:

"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence ⁷ that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist.⁸"

It's not enough to present statistics, however. Let's look at a victim of Drug War ideology, a boy who would be alive today were it not for people like William Bennett, Donald Trump, Joe Biden ⁹ ¹⁰, Kevin Sabet...

Notes for essay entitled Silence equals Death in America's Drug War:

1: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
2: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
3: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
4: Coverup on Campus DWP (up)
5: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
6: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
7: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
8: 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)
9: Joe Biden (up)
10: Joe Biden’s Drug War Record Is So Much Worse Than You Think Bienenstock, David, Leafly, 2019 (up)

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The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.

So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.

The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.

"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary

After watching my mother suffer because of the drug war, I hate to hear people tell me that the problem is drugs. WRONG! That's a western colonialist viewpoint. God loved his creation (see Genesis). He did not make trash. We need to use entheogenic medicines wisely.

We should place prohibitionists on trial for destroying inner cities.

I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.

Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.

The New York Times gets it wrong again. Yes, kratom, like all drugs, has downsides. The problem is not kratom, it's drug prohibition which limits choice. Nor are young people the only stakeholders in the debate, as the Times always assumes.

"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."

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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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tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

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Silence equals Death in America's Drug War

Author's Follow-up: April 1, 2025

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

Diary of a Drug Fiend