The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 27, 2022
In response to "The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson," published October 2012 in Smithsonian Magazine.
What about the Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation (aka the Thomas Jefferson Foundation), which betrayed Thomas Jefferson's legacy of natural law in 1987 by inviting the DEA onto his estate to confiscate the founding father's poppy plants? Natural law didn't just give us life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It gave us what Locke called the right to 'the use of the land and all that lies therein.' If we're to judge Jefferson by modern standards, then the writers who ignore this act of betrayal on the part of Monticello should worry about how they'll be judged in the future, when Americans finally stop demonizing Mother Nature's plant medicines and start learning how to use them wisely for the benefit of humankind.
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Trump supports the drug war and Big Pharma: the two forces that have turned me into a patient for life with dependence-causing antidepressants. Big Pharma makes the pills, and the drug war outlaws all viable alternatives.
Check out the 2021 article in Forbes in which a materialist doctor professes to doubt whether laughing gas could help the depressed. Materialists are committed to seeing the world from the POV of Spock from Star Trek.
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.
Outlawing drugs is outlawing obvious therapies for Alzheimer's and autism patients, therapies based on common sense and not on the passion-free behaviorism of modern scientists.
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.
Until prohibition ends, rehab is all about enforcing a Christian Science attitude toward psychoactive medicines (with the occasional hypocritical exception of Big Pharma meds).
It's disgusting that folks like Paul Stamets need a DEA license to work with mushrooms.
Everyone's biggest concern is the economy? Is nobody concerned that Trump has promised to pardon insurrectionists and get revenge on critics? Is no one concerned that Trump taught Americans to doubt democracy by questioning our election fairness before one single vote was cast?
Meanwhile, no imaginable downside could persuade westerners that guns and alcohol were too dangerous. Yet the DEA lies about almost all psychoactive drugs, saying there are no good uses. That's a lie! Then they pass laws that keep us from disproving their puritanical conclusion.
The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.
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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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