an open letter to Clinical Professor Bobby Smyth at the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
November 12, 2022
ith 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, 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 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. 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.
Most people think that drugs like cocaine, MDMA, LSD and amphetamines can only be used recreationally. WRONG ! This represents a very naive understanding of human psychology. We deny common sense in order to cater to the drug war orthodoxy that "drugs have no benefits."
The Drug War is based on a huge number of misconceptions and prejudices. Obviously it's about power and racism too. It's all of the above. But every time I don't mention one specifically, someone makes out that I'm a moron. Gotta love Twitter.
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
I'm grateful to the folks who are coming out of the woodwork at the last minute to deface their own properties with "Trump 2024" signs. Now I'll know who to thank should Trump get elected and sell us out to Putin.
The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.
Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.
Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.
Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.
The 2024 Colorado bill was withdrawn -- but only when pols realized that they had been caught in the act of outlawing free speech. They did not let opponents speak, however, because they knew the speeches would make the pols look like the anti-democratic jerks that they were.
Listen to the Drug War Philosopher as he tells you how you can support his work to end the hateful drug war -- and, ideally, put the DEA on trial for willfully lying about godsend medicines! (How? By advertising on this page right c'here!)
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Teenagers and Cannabis: an open letter to Clinical Professor Bobby Smyth at the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, published on November 12, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
ith respect to your recent Tweet, Bobby: 
You have been reading an article entitled, Teenagers and Cannabis: an open letter to Clinical Professor Bobby Smyth at the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, published on November 12, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)