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.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
VICTIMS OF THE DRUG WAR
Right. In fact, the drug war can be seen as a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."
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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. (For proof of that latter charge, check out how the US and UK have criminalized the substances that William James himself told us to study in order to understand reality.) It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions (like the Vedic), Nazifies the English language (referring to folks who emulate drug-loving Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin as "scumbags") and militarizes police forces nationwide (resulting in gestapo SWAT teams breaking into houses of peaceable Americans and shouting "GO GO GO!").
(Speaking of Nazification, L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates thought that drug users should be shot. What a softie! The real hardliners are the William Bennetts of the world who want drug users to be beheaded instead. That will teach them to use time-honored plant medicine of which politicians disapprove! Mary Baker Eddy must be ecstatic in her drug-free heaven, as she looks down and sees this modern inquisition on behalf of the drug-hating principles that she herself maintained. I bet she never dared hope that her religion would become the viciously enforced religion of America, let alone of the entire freakin' world!)
In short, the drug war 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.
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. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.
PPS Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
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
Andrew, Christopher "The Secret World: A History of Intelligence" 2019 Yale University Press
Aurelius, Marcus "Meditations" 2021 East India Publishing Company
Bache, Christopher "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven" 2019 Park Street Press
Mate, Gabriel "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" 2009 Vintage Canada
Maupassant, Guy de "Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques - Guy de Maupassant: Les classiques du fantastique " 2019
McKenna, Terence "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution " 1992 Bantam
Pinchbeck, Daniel "When Plants Dream" 2019 Watkins Publishing
Poe, Edgar Allan "The Essential Poe" 2020 Warbler Classics
Pollan, Michael "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence " 2018 Penguin Books
Reynolds, David S. "Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville " 1988 Oxford University Press
Richards, William "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences Hardcover" 2015 Columbia University Press
Straussman, Rick "DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences " 2001 Park Street Press
Streatfield, Dominic "Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography" 2003 Picador USA
Swartzwelder, Scott "Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy" 1998 W.W. Norton
Szasz, Thomas "Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers" 1974 Anchor Press/Doubleday
Whitaker, Robert "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America " 2010 Crown
Whitaker, Robert "Mad in America"2002 Perseus Publishing
Zinn, Howard "A People's History of the United States: 1492 - present" 2009
Zuboff , Shoshana "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2019 Public Affairs
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.
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.
