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.
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Had the FDA been around in the Indus Valley 3,500 years ago, there would be no Hindu religion today, because they would have found some potential problem with the use of soma.
"The depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds." -- Arthur Crowley after using cocaine
Problem 2,643 of the war on drugs:
It puts the government in charge of deciding what counts as a true religion.
This is why I call the drug war 'fanatical Christian Science.' People would rather have grandpa die than to let him use laughing gas or coca or opium or MDMA, etc. etc.
Hollywood presents cocaine as a drug of killers. In reality, strategic cocaine use by an educated person can lead to great mental power, especially as just one part of a pharmacologically balanced diet.
The healthcare industry turns all the emotional downsides of drug prohibition into "illnesses."
The evidence has been in for well over a century now: people want to use psychoactive substances to transcend the rational mind. It's about time we stopped punishing them for that.
We should place prohibitionists on trial for destroying inner cities.
There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.
Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.
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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.
Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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