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Ten Reasons why the Drug War is Nonsense

well, actually 18 reasons and counting

by 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 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: Why the Holocaust Museum must denounce the Drug War: The Unconstitutional Drug War has led Americans to dehumanize human beings simply because they sell substances of which scheming and hypocritical politicians disapprove)



  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 mysteries, 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, books, and movies in which "drugs" are always used by scumbags, and so we see a badly dressed lowlife snorting cocaine 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 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 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 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 and their billionaire stockholders.







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Next essay: The Drug War Virus at the Institute of Art and Ideas
Previous essay: There is no drug problem

More Essays Here




Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.
This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.
People groan about "profiling," but why is profiling even a "thing"? There would be little or no profiling of blacks if the Drug War did not exist.
We know that anticipation and mental focus and relaxation have positive benefits -- but if these traits ae facilitated by "drugs," then we pretend that these same benefits somehow are no longer "real." This is a metaphysical bias, not a logical deduction.
New article in Scientific American: "New hope for pain relief," that ignores the fact that we have outlawed the time-honored panacea. Scientists want a drug that won't run the risk of inspiring us.
That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.
I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
What is the end game of the drug warrior? A world in which no one wants drugs? That's not science. It's the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. You know, the American religion that outsources its Inquisition to drug-testing labs.
Capitalism requires disease-mongering -- and disease-mongering requires the suppression of medicines that work holistically, that work by improving mood and elating the individual AND THEREFORE improving their health overall.
More Tweets



The latest hits from Drug War Records, featuring Freddie and the Fearmongers!


1. Requiem for the Fourth Amendment



2. There's No Place Like Home (until the DEA gets through with it)



3. O Say Can You See (what the Drug War's done to you and me)






front cover of Drug War Comic Book

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, Ten Reasons why the Drug War is Nonsense: well, actually 18 reasons and counting, published on July 15, 2020 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)