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Ten Reasons why the Drug War is Nonsense

well, actually 18 reasons and counting

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 15, 2020




  1. It prevents Americans from accessing the plants that grow at their very feet, in clear violation of the Natural Law upon which America was founded.


  2. It makes "drugs" a red herring for all social problems, thereby ignoring the real social problems (including substandard education and the Drug War itself) that give rise to counterproductive substance use in the first place.



  3. It ignores the obvious lesson from American history that prohibition leads to violence. There were almost 800 gun-related deaths 1 in Chicago alone in 2021, all attributable to substance prohibition, which gives rise to well-armed gangs just as surely as liquor prohibition gave rise to the Mafia.



  4. It turns Americans into arch-colonialists who hypocritically go overseas to burn plants that have been used responsibly for millennia by other cultures, all in the name of preventing addiction in the States (by which reasoning, the Islamic world should be free to come stateside and burn our grape vines).



  5. It leaves the depressed and anxious with nothing but highly addictive Big Pharma meds to treat their condition, when hundreds of far less addictive remedies (many not addictive at all) could be harnessed from plant medicines that the Drug War has criminalized.



  6. It turns these sufferers into eternal patients (the exact opposite of empowerment) by requiring them to visit an expensive psychiatrist in person every three months of their life in order to receive yet another expensive prescription, since the DEA has such an absurd fixation on "controlling" this thing called "drugs" that they don't even trust a patient of 40-years standing to use them wisely.



  7. The Drug War has led to the Nazification of language, to the point that substance users and those who sell plant medicine are called "scumbags" and "filth" and other terms that used to be used by the Nazis to describe their enemies. (This is why I wrote a letter to the Holocaust Museum in September 2020 urging them to denounce the Drug War: )



  8. It willfully ignores all inconvenient historical truths, like the fact that the Vedic religion was founded to worship a psychoactive plant and that psychedelics featured prominently in the Eleusinian mysteries2, which lasted 2,000 years until it was tellingly banned by Emperor Theodosius I as a threat to Christianity.



  9. It willfully ignores the historical fact that "drugs" have been used responsibly by such western luminaries as HG Wells, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen, Ben Franklin, Aaron Burr, Marcus Aurelius, Francis Crick, Meriwether Lewis, Samuel Johnson, Frederic Chopin, Plato, Plutarch, Cicero, Aristotle... and even Thomas Jefferson, who surely flipped in his grave when the jackbooted DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants.



  10. It seeks to make the world forget these inconvenient truths by cranking out TV shows 3 , books, and movies 4 5 in which "drugs" are always used by scumbags, and so we see a badly dressed lowlife snorting cocaine 6 7 in a dimly lit backroom, instead of seeing HG Wells and Jules Verne happily writing their books while taking generous swigs of coca wine.



  11. It unscientifically considers a solitary but well-publicized instance of drug misuse to be a knockdown rationale for sweeping drug criminalization, thereby denying godsend medicine to millions based on the uninformed actions of a few.


  12. Despite its constant demonization of plant medicine as being dangerous -- indeed too dangerous for hapless Americans to be allowed to use them -- the Drug Warrior never engages in true, unbiased talk about drugs: to the contrary, they actually criminalize research about the substances that they demonize, to ensure that Americans fear psychoactive botanicals rather than understand them.



  13. The Drug War creates civil wars overseas out of whole cloth, giving imperialist America a convenient excuse to invade sovereign countries at will, by charging them with the bogus crime of using plant medicine of which beer-swilling WASP American politicians disapprove, especially the coca plant, which has been part of South and Mesoamerican cultures for millennia.


  14. The Drug War has disfranchised millions of minorities, removing them from the voting rolls, thereby stealing elections for conservative Drug Warriors, some of whom now want to execute the minorities that they have previously been content simply to marginalize.


  15. The Drug War censors scientists, just as the Church once censored Galileo -- with the exception that westerners do not notice this modern-day censorship since they have been indoctrinated since birth in the drug-war ideology of substance demonization.


  16. Drug testing is not about finding impairment. It is an extrajudicial fishing expedition searching for godsend botanical medicines of which politicians disapprove. Some of these "drugs" (like coca and psychedelics) have inspired entire religions. Drug testing thus adds insult to the injury of outlawing plant medicines in the first place, which was a violation of natural law. That's why Thomas Jefferson, the founder of our country, was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 8 in 1987 and confiscated the garden-loving president's poppy plants.


  17. Drug warriors blithely tolerate 95,000 deaths a year by alcohol without comment, along with almost half a million a year by tobacco, while saying nothing at all about the psychiatric pill mill 9 that their substance prohibition has created. Thanks to the Drug War, in fact, 1 in 4 American women are dependent on the daily use of expensive and uninspiring Big Pharma meds for their entire lifetimes -- a chemical dependency many times that which Americans ever had on opium 10 prior to the unconstitutional outlawing of the poppy plant in 1914.


  18. The Drug War is not about getting Americans off of drugs -- rather it's about getting Americans on the "right" drugs, as judged by the needs of Big Pharma 11 12 and their billionaire stockholders.












Notes for essay entitled Ten Reasons why the Drug War is Nonsense: well, actually 18 reasons and counting:

1: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
2: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
3: The Dead Man DWP (up)
4: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
5: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (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: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
9: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
10: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
11: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
12: 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)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Researchers insult our intelligence when they tell us that drugs like MDMA and opium and laughing gas have not been proven to work. Everyone knows they work. That's precisely why drug warriors hate them.

If we let "science" decide about drugs, i.e. base freedom on health concerns, then tea can be as easily outlawed as beer. The fact that horses are not illegal shows that prohibition is not about health. It's about the power to outlaw certain "ways of being in the world."

I personally hate beets and I could make a health argument against their legality. Beets can kill for those allergic to them. Sure, it's a rare condition, but since when has that stopped a prohibitionist from screaming bloody murder?

As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.

I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.

Psychedelics and entheogens should be freely available to all dementia patients. These medicines can increase neuronal plasticity and even grow new neurons. Besides, they can inspire and elate -- or do we puritans feel that our loved ones have no right to peace of mind?

I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.

The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.

This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.

In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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