Essay date: February 23, 2023

Snoop Pearson's muddle-headed take on drugs

don't want to pick on Snoop, but I cannot resist because her confusion about so-called "drugs" is so typical of the muddle-headed thinking of Americans in general on this subject. So hopefully in clarifying her confusion, I'll be of assistance to others who may be similarly bamboozled.

First, let's be honest about what we Americans mean by drugs, Snoopie: We do not mean liquor. We do not mean tobacco. And we certainly do not mean Big Pharma's massively prescribed antidepressants to which 1 in 4 American women are currently addicted.

No, by "drugs" we merely mean natural substances that our government has decided are bad for us. In other words, our hatred of drugs is simply Christian Science with respect to psychological well-being, it is the metaphysical idea that we have some moral duty to forego the mind-improving pharmacopeia of Mother Nature.

Why? It's hard to say*. But our mistrust of Mother Nature is "all of a piece" with our historic fear of witches in the west and the way that they freely availed themselves of psychoactive plants. This fear in turn no doubt dates to societal PTSD from the Garden of Eden debacle. More recently, the psychoactive bounty of Mother Nature has become a threat to traditional medical practitioners, and they're right to be concerned.

If the government allowed humanity to access its natural birthright of Mother Nature's pharmacy, then who in their right mind would use the handful of addictive and inadequately effective synthesized drugs that Big Pharma has created to take Mother Nature's place? No one, at least if the cure and/or benefit that we seek is psychological.

That's why, to keep that bounty off-limits, Hollywood has to keep cranking out films to support the Drug War, to remind Americans how incapable they are of handling freedom, how incapable they are of wisely using the bounty of Mother Nature that grows at their very feet. And so those seeking increased mental acumen and expanded consciousness are forced to seek out white-coated professionals who tell us what we "really" need - and you can be sure that it's not the plants of Mother Nature, but rather the addictive nostrums of Big Pharma, in particular the brand name drugs that a Big Pharma huckster brought to their door that very morning with a promise to reward the doctor for prescribing.

Thus humankind gets a one-two whammy by the unconstitutional Drug War: we're deprived of our natural birthright of mother nature's plants and then we're treated as children by the medical industry, to which we have to sue for psychological help, only because government has told us that the medicines that grow at our feet are somehow now illegal.

What's more, if we dare to act in defiance of the Drug War, we are removed from the job market by the extrajudicial punishment of drug testing. Sharia is enforced by businesses, who check urine to ensure that only Christian Scientists can earn a living in "free" America.

Turning to our friend Snoop's crazed Drug War mentality, let's consider her statements on this subject during her appearance on Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations." In that show, she brags to the host about her scorn for cocaine, insisting that "I would never put nothin' in my nose." She says her mother taught her better than that.

This from an actress who killed two people as a youngster and who allegedly peddled "drugs" herself in her pre-television incarnation. Apparently obeying the government's ban on natural substances is so important that even murderers will stop short of transgressing our government-sponsored holy war on these matters.

Does Snoop know that Sigmund Freud was a prolific user of cocaine? Does she realize that he did not use the substance to party hearty, but rather to achieve self-fulfillment in life, insofar as the drug made possible the prolific output without which the famous Austrian would never have achieved self-actualization? Does she realize that Amazon tribes use the substance to this day in life-affirming ritual?

Snoop, like the rest of America, doesn't think in this way, because Hollywood shows us nothing but hedonistic substance misuse - thereby constantly encouraging Americans to think that they can't handle the freedom of actually having access to Mother Nature. And so the government and Hollywood slander psychoactive drugs, essentially turning the US Government into a theocracy based on the principles of Christian Science.

*Then again, it's not so hard to say. If you're a millionaire Senator with a portfolio that's loaded with pharmaceutical stocks, the last thing you want is for non-addictive plants to become available that would render Big Pharma's addictive nostrums obsolete.



Next essay: In Praise of Opium
Previous essay: How Thomas Nagel Reckons Without the Drug War

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You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.

A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.

The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.

It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)

If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.

Brian Quass
The Drug War Philosopher
abolishthedea.com

PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley.

Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)

Selected Bibliography

  • Bandow, Doug "From Fighting The Drug War To Protecting The Right To Use Drugs"2018
  • Barrett, Damon "Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Polices on Young People"2011 IDEBATE Press
  • Bilton, Anton "DMT Entity Encounters: Dialogues on the Spirit Molecule"2021 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Boullosa , Carmen "A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the 'Mexican Drug War'"2016 OR Books
  • Brereton, William "The Truth about Opium / Being a Refutation of the Fallacies of the Anti-Opium Society and a Defence of the Indo-China Opium Trade"2017 Anna Ruggieri
  • Burns, Eric "1920: The year that made the decade roar"2015 Pegasus Books
  • Carpenter, Ted Galen "The Fire Next Door: Mexico's Drug Violence and the Danger to America"2012 Cato Institute
  • Chesterton, GK "Saint Thomas Acquinas"2014 BookBaby
  • Filan, Kenaz "The Power of the Poppy: Harnessing Nature's Most Dangerous Plant Ally"2011 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Griffiths, William "Psilocybin: A Trip into the World of Magic Mushrooms"2021 William Griffiths
  • Hofmann, Albert "The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications"2005 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
  • Irwin-Rogers, Keir "Illicit Drug Markets, Consumer Capitalism and the Rise of Social Media: A Toxic Trap for Young People"2019
  • James, William "The Varieties of Religious Experience"1902 Philosophical Library
  • Mariani, Angelo "Coca and its Therapeutic Application, Third Edition"1896 Gutenberg.org
  • Mortimer MD, W. Golden "Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas"2017 Ronin Publishing
  • Partridge, Chiristopher "Alistair Crowley on Drugs"2021 uploaded by Misael Hernandez
  • Rudgley, Richard "The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances"2014 Macmillan Publishers
  • Shulgin, Alexander "PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story"1991 Transform Press
  • Shulgin, Alexander "The Nature of Drugs Vol. 1: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact"2021 Transform Press
  • Smith, Wolfgang "Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief"0
  • Smith, Wolfgang "Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology"2022
  • St John, Graham "Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT"2021
  • Szasz, Thomas "Interview With Thomas Szasz: by Randall C. Wyatt"0
  • Wedel, Janine "Unaccountable: How the Establishment Corrupted Our Finances, Freedom and Politics and Created an Outsider Class"2014 Pegasus Books
  • Weil, Andrew "From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs"2004 Open Road Integrated Media
  • Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.