oday is National Suicide Prevention Day, but no one's talking about the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room. For the fact is that the Drug War has outlawed all the godsend psychoactive medicines that could actually help to prevent suicide.
The coca leaf (as opposed to cocaine) has been used for millennia by the Indians of Peru to combat fatigue and keep their society together in peace and harmony. Re-legalize the leaf and the suicide crisis would disappear overnight. But Drug Warriors have tarred the leaf's reputation by conflating its effects with those of the cocaine alkaloid that the leaf contains. This is like demonizing peaches because they contain prussic acid. By re-legalizing the coca leaf, we would not only cut down on suicides, but we would end the civil wars in South America that our Drug War has caused and is causing this very minute in Mexico.
Laughing gas could end the suicide crisis overnight, by giving the depressed temporary relief from sorrow -- and, as importantly, something to look forward to in their darker moments: namely, the fact that they can use laughing gas occasionally to take a break from gloomy introspection. Yes, there are legitimate safety concerns with all substances, but that is precisely why we need to start educating people about safe use, rather than conducting the fearmongering smear campaigns that the Drug Warrior always launches against psychoactive medicine.
MDMA (aka ecstasy) brought peace, love and understanding to the dance floor. It could work wonders in preventing suicide, and is already being fast-tracked for psychotherapy. It should have been legalized 40 years ago, but the self-serving DEA ruled against its own legal council in 1985 in order to keep the drug illegal, clearly so that the DEA could keep its relevance and its workload. (Ecstasy was blamed for a handful of deaths, but these deaths were all caused by the Drug War itself, which discourages education about substances and demonizes them instead.)
And what about the shrooms that grow at my very feet? Psilocybin is a therapeutic godsend for depression, and yet the government says I cannot use this gift from Mother Nature, thus violating the natural law upon which America was founded.
And what about ayahuasca? It has spawned new religions. Surely it could help prevent suicide as part of a therapeutic regimen of some kind.
And yet the world is so bamboozled by Drug Warrior lies that we can actually have a Suicide Prevention Day in which nobody even mentions the Drug War! Why not? Because we have been fed the unscientific lie that certain substances (namely "drugs" as hypocritically defined by racist and warmongering politicians) are bad in and of themselves, without regard for how, when or why they are used. But, of course, there are no substances of that kind. Even the deadly Botox has positive uses.
The Drug War not only encourages suicide by denying godsend medicine, but it even forces children to suffer severe pain. Why? Because many countries outlaw the use of morphine in hospice because they'd rather fight a war on drugs than to keep children from suffering intense pain.
When will this madness end? Only when America wakes up to the true evil of the anti-patient and unscientific "war on drugs."
In short, we have no right to complain about suicide if we're not willing to complain about the Drug War.
You have no right to complain about suicide if you're not willing to complain about the war on drugs.
1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life, drugs which cause emotional flat-lining in long-term users. They are eternal patients. And the Drug Warrior has no problem with this. For the Drug Warrior does not want us to stop using drugs, he or she wants us to start using the RIGHT drugs -- the ones that benefit Wall Street and the healthcare industry while giving jobs to law enforcement by outlawing the stuff that actually works when used wisely. Of course, the Drug Warriors make sure that there is no "wise use," since they're all about slandering drugs, not educating about them.
No Drug War Keychains The key to ending the Drug War is to spread the word about the fact that it is Anti-American, unscientific and anti-minority (for starters)
Monticello Betrayed Thomas Jefferson By demonizing plant medicine, the Drug War overthrew the Natural Law upon which Jefferson founded America -- and brazenly confiscated the Founding Father's poppy plants in 1987, in a symbolic coup against Jeffersonian freedoms.
The Drug War Censors Science Scientists: It's time to wake up to the fact that you are censored by the drug war. Drive the point home with these bumper stickers.
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.
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)
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.
oday is National Suicide Prevention Day, but no one's talking about the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room. For the fact is that the Drug War has outlawed all the godsend psychoactive medicines that could actually help to prevent suicide.
