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Spike Lee is Bamboozled by the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 3, 2022



"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 1 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist- Heather Thompson, The Atlantic, 2014 2


How does the Drug War get away with killing thousands of black Americans every year? It does so thanks to the complicit silence of the black social and political leadership, which is blind to the fact that the Drug War is responsible for these deaths.

In 2021 alone, the Drug War killed almost 800 blacks in Chicago, almost 500 blacks in New York City, and almost 400 blacks in Los Angeles.

How did the Drug War accomplish this? By substance prohibition.

This is not rocket science, folks. Liquor prohibition created the American Mafia. Why is it so hard for black leaders to believe that substance prohibition created the armed gangs that continue to snuff out inner-city lives to this very day?

And yet Spike Lee doesn't get it. He seems to dimly grasp the fact that the Drug War is directed against blacks and minorities, which is a step in the right direction, but he misses the big takeaway message: that substance prohibition is the means by which the Drug War conducts its anti-minority campaign, for it allows the Drug Warrior to disenfranchise blacks while simultaneously promoting a genocidal civil war in the black community.

Why is Spike silent about the real cause for black-on-black violence, namely substance prohibition? Because Spike Lee is bamboozled by Drug War propaganda. He believes the Drug War lie that we should fear psychoactive substances rather than understand them and that we have to do everything we can to get these evil substances off the street, even if it means fomenting a genocidal civil war among minorities.

Wrong. Substances like coca and the poppy have inspired entire religions and been used by such Western luminaries as Marcus Aurelius, Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, HG Wells and Jules Verne. Plato himself used psychedelics at the Eleusinian Mysteries, which inspired his view of the afterlife3. Mesoamerican shaman routinely employed psychedelic mushrooms to heal and prophesy. And the entire Vedic-Hindu religion was inspired by the psychoactive properties of a plant.

The answer to substance misuse is clearly education, Spike, not incarceration.

Yet the black leadership continues to believe in the politically created boogieman called "drugs," a category of substances that did not even exist in the 1800s, at a time when American worrywarts were stressing about the evils of alcohol instead.

Of course, alcohol was eventually shielded from criticism with a constitutional amendment, at which point the former temperance party worrywarts started to lavish their still-unsated moral concerns on the politically created boogieman called "drugs," a pejorative epithet for "botanical substances of which WASP Americans disapprove."

And black Americans were hoodwinked by this bait-and-switch tactic. Leaders like Jessie Jackson Sr. were soon referring to black "drug dealers" as vampires. And conservative politicians were laughing all the way to the voting booth, where the Drug War allowed them to elect more conservatives because it disfranchised millions of minority voters. How? By creating drug laws for that very purpose, laws that allowed them to crack black heads under the pretence of fighting the politically created boogieman called "drugs." (Joe Biden 4 5 did his part by crafting the infamous drug laws that made black Americans easier to arrest than whites when it came to cocaine 6 7 possession.)

So, please, wake up, Spike, before it's too late.

Because conservative Drug Warriors are no longer content with merely incarcerating as many blacks as possible, they now want to execute them as well, as Donald Trump himself has made all too clear.

If we must execute anyone, let's execute the racist politicians who support substance prohibition when they know full well that prohibition creates violence in poor and poorly educated communities - violence that will continue, alas, until black spokespeople like Spike Lee finally connect the dots between black genocide and substance prohibition.





Why does the author believe that Spike Lee is bamboozled? For two reasons: First, he has never known Spike to speak out against substance prohibition. Second, because of lines like this in Spike's movies 8 9 :

"If you ever use drugs, I'll kill you." - Jungle Fever, 1991

(Really? What if the guy smokes? What if the guy drinks liquor? What if the guy uses one of those Big Pharma 10 11 meds upon which 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent for life? What if the guy drinks Red Bull?)

That quote makes it clear that Spike believes the drug-war lie that there are such things as "drugs" that are no good for anybody.

Wrong. Drugs are not good or bad except with regard to the reason for which they are used. The Drug Warrior wants us to fear and despise psychoactive substances, not to understand them and use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humankind. (This is why thousands of dying children in hospices must go without godsend pain medicine, because we have turned drugs into such boogiemen that many countries will no longer allow morphine 12 to be used for pain relief -- even for dying children!) With that anti-scientific excuse in their pocket, they seek to justify a substance prohibition that kills thousands of black Americans yearly, causes civil wars in Central and South America, empowers a Drug War Hitler in the Philippines, and blinds us to an endless list of godsend therapies for depression and anxiety thanks to our outlawing of Mother Nature's psychoactive pharmacy -- all this so that we can unconstitutionally outlaw the plant medicines that grow at our very feet, some of which have inspired entire religions.

Author's Follow-up: July 15, 2022



My letter to Lisa Ling of CNN, sent May 11, 2022: Dear Lisa, I was disappointed and puzzled to see that your show about Chicago violence did not even mention the Drug War! For as Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014: "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 13 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist." I hope you'll rectify this oversight in a future documentary.


I keep asking myself why city leaders do not recognize the Drug War for what it is: a violence-causing attempt to demonize substances rather than be honest about them -- an attempt to marginalize users of substances of which WASPS disapprove. And this is why: Reporters like Lisa Ling give the Drug War a huge mulligan by completely ignoring its role in causing violence. The prohibition of psychoactive plant medicine leads to HUGE profits for dealers -- and in poor communities with inadequate education, this is a recipe for disaster.

Think back to the many crime shows you've watched over the years. How much would cops have had to do if plant medicine was actually legal? Answer: very little indeed. They could sit back like Andy Griffith and chat to the locals. The war on plant medicine has made the world enormously violent, and until Americans realize this fact, that "it's the Drug War, stupid," they'll keep generating the very violence that they scream bloody murder about in town hall meetings and on talk shows. Hello, Chicken Little Drug Warrior: it's you yourself who is causing the sky to fall when it comes to inner-city violence. Let's start arresting the real culprits: let's arrest the anti-American fascists who criminalized plant medicine in the first place, thus violating the natural law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America.

And yet black community leaders egg on the Drug War while denoucing "drugs" more vehemently than most WASP Drug Warriors would even dare. Jesse Jackson decries drug dealers as vampires -- more language of demonization which is the product of the Drug War itself. These leaders have been duped by the Drug War into playing along with the game that is meant to marginalize them and remove them from the voting rolls. The black drug dealers that Jesse demonizes (in lockstep with Drug War ideology) have been incentivized by the white man's substance prohibition, which allows for sky-high profits for dealing. Over 800 blacks died in Chicago alone last year because of the guns that prohibition brought into Chicago -- not because of "drugs," Jesse, but because of prohibition, which makes it fantastically tempting to sell desired substances, especially in a community full of poverty and insufficient education for the young.

The black community professes to be "woke" when it comes to police brutality these days, but many of its leaders are still snoring tranquilly when it comes to the great con that the Drug War is perpetrating on them -- on them and on their community -- in the name of outlawing and demonizing the plant medicines that grow at our very feet -- in the name of prioritizing fear over fact when it comes to psychoactive substances and incarceration over education. This great con has disfranchised millions of black voters, thereby giving elections first to conservatives (like Reagan) and now even to fascists (like Trump) -- and yet the response of leaders like Jackson is to say, "Let's pursue this anti-constitutional practice of substance demonization even further! Let's not only arrest drug dealers but let's kill them!!!" The racist WASP Drug Warriors who started the Drug War in the first place must be laughing all the way to the voting booth.











Notes for essay entitled Spike Lee is Bamboozled by the Drug War:

1: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
2: 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)
3: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
4: Joe Biden (up)
5: Joe Biden’s Drug War Record Is So Much Worse Than You Think Bienenstock, David, Leafly, 2019 (up)
6: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
7: “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)
8: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
9: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
10: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
11: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
12: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
13: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)




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Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."

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The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.

People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.

"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley

In his treatise on laws, Cicero reported that the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries gave the participants "not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope."

Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful.

This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.

The war on drugs has destroyed America's faith in the power of education. In fact, it has made us think of education as WRONG in and of itself. It has made us prefer censorship and fear-filled ignorance to education!

If there were no other problem with antidepressants, they would be wrong for the simple reason that they make a user dependent for life -- not as a bug (as in drugs like opium) but rather as a feature: that's how they "work," by being administered daily for a lifetime.


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