an open letter to Clinical Professor Bobby Smyth at the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
November 12, 2022
With respect to your recent Tweet, Bobby:
The reason that cannabis is omnipresent these days is because we have outlawed all of its natural competition. The answer is to re-legalize Mother Nature, which we had no right to outlaw in the first place. It's a clear violation of natural law for a government to tell its citizens what plants they can access. Depression could be solved overnight if we re-legalized the coca leaf, which was used in the form of coca wine by HG Wells, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen and Alexandre Dumas, to name a few. As for safety, it was used for millennia by the long-lived Peruvian Indians, until the Spanish enslaved them and started foisting alcohol upon them.
Criminalization is nonsense because people will always seek self-transcendence. That's never going to stop. Prohibition is therefore just a make-work program for law enforcement. The answer is education, not demonization. The prohibition that you champion has killed over 100,000 in Mexico since 2006. When we worry about the safety of kids, we should worry about the kids in Latin America, who continue to lose their lives and/or their parents thanks to the War on Drugs, yes, including the war on cannabis. Why all this death? Because we have decided to "fight plants" instead of fighting ignorance and the prohibition which brings lopsided attention to substances like cannabis.
Author's Follow-up: November 12, 2022
This is why the go-slow approach to drug legalization is a mistake. Instead of acting on principle and denying government's right to criminalize plants and fungi in the first place, we have selected to legalize one single substance, chiefly (let's be honest) because it was the go-to drug for white Americans. The result? Cannabis use has now become the poster child for drug legalization 1 , thereby giving the Neo Drug Warrior the ammunition that he or she needs to blast the whole idea of ending the War on Drugs.
Still, if Bobby really wants to help young people, he would insist that the billions currently being spent on law enforcement in the name of the Drug War would henceforth be spent on substance education instead, which in practical terms would mean that the Drug Enforcement Agency would be replaced by the Drug EDUCATION Agency, and then we would all start being 100% honest about substances -- imagine that -- both as to their subjective and objective benefits and downsides as well as their historical use (as when psychedelics gave Plato a view of the afterlife or coca wine inspired the stories of HG Wells and Jules Verne). I can't speak for Bobby, but I'm afraid that most people in his position do not REALLY want such honesty, because it would force them to admit some inconvenient truths, like the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma 23 meds for life -- proving that the Drug Warriors do not really want us to say no to drugs; rather they want us to say yes to the "right" drugs as judged by Wall Street.
Take me, for instance: Clinical professors protected ME from marijuana. How? By making me a lifetime ward of the healthcare state with tranquilizing "meds" like Effexor 4 . Far from wanting to protect ME from this demoralizing status quo, today's clinical professors are telling me that I have a duty as a patient to "keep taking my meds!"
November 12, 2022
Note: The author writes of Bobby as "championing prohibition." By this, he does not mean that Bobby necessarily supports prohibition explicitly, but rather that the stand he takes on these topics certainly implies such support.
When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.
Getting off antidepressants can make things worse for only one reason: because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help with the transition. Right now, getting off any drug basically means becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist. No wonder withdrawal is hard.
All of our problems with opioids and opiates could have been avoided had the busybody Chicken Littles in America left well enough alone and let folks continue to smoke regulated opium peaceably in their own homes.
My cousin says we should punish drug dealers. I say we should punish those politicians who created those drug dealers out of whole cloth by passing unprecedented laws against the use of Mother Nature's bounty.
In an article about Mazatec mushroom use, the author says: "Mushrooms should not be considered a drug." True. But then NOTHING should be considered a drug: every substance has potential good uses.
We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
In the age of the Drug War, the Hippocratic Oath has become "First, do no good."
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
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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