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The DEA Scheduling System is Based on Lies

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 27, 2022



The entire drug scheduling system is based on lies. And for at least two reasons:

1) The system tells us that the substances it "rates" have no medical uses whatsoever. But there are no substances of that kind on planet Earth. Virtually every substance in the world has positive uses at some dose, in some circumstance, for some person, at some time. Even cyanide and botox have recognized uses in the medical world. To say otherwise is not simply false, but it's also anti-scientific and anti-patient, since it prevents us from finding positive uses for the drugs in question. That's why America continues to struggle with Alzheimer's, because we outlaw medicines that grow new neurons in the brain, deeming them, a priori, of no medical value. In the age of the Drug War, our medical system is thus based on superstition, not science.


BUMPER STICKER: The DEA: Blocking therapeutic drug research since 1973

Millions have needlessly suffered over the last 50 years because the DEA has lied about psychedelics, claiming that they are addictive and have no therapeutic value. Stop the lies, start the research.


2) What's more, some of the positive uses are extant. They are right before our eyes. Coca puts a spring in one's step and sharpens the mind, as everyone knows, including HG Wells and Jules Verne, who were big fans of Coca Wine. When the DEA tells us there are no good uses for coca, it is therefore making a moral judgment, not a scientific one. It is declaring, along with folks like Mary Baker Eddy, that the best life is one led without "drugs." The scheduling system is thus just a harsh moral code based not on science, but on Christian Science, the religion that tells us that we should say "no" to drugs.


Author's Follow-up: January 4, 2023


And so what if substances have no medical uses? Psychoactive substances have religious uses. Did Soma have a medical use? Probably not if you were to ask a materialist. But it inspired the creation of the Vedic religion. Should government have outlawed it? A more pertinent question might be: what new religions is the DEA outlawing in advance by criminalizing the substances that might have otherwise inspired new religions today?

This is why writers like Michael Pollan -- and even Andrew Weil -- are missing the point about "drugs." Both are concerned about the juvenile's potential misuse of substances, as if that's the only concern whatsoever in determining whether drugs should be re-legalized. Drugs should be legalized in order for religious liberty and free science to flourish. If a free world puts white American kids in danger, that's no reason to give up on freedom -- especially since the war that we propose to save them will kill thousands of Mexican children and militarize police forces around the globe, while denying freedom of thought, and hence religious liberty, to billions.








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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




You can get a master's degree in healthcare today and not learn a thing about the power of hundreds of outlawed drugs to inspire and elate.

If media were free in America, you'd see documentaries about people using drugs wisely for a wide variety of praiseworthy purposes.

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.

The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.

Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.

The reasons that people use drugs are psychologically obvious. Academics gaslight us on this topic and invent new diseases to explain away our desire to live large.

Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.

American businesses judge people, not by the color of their skin but by the contents of their digestive systems.

Drug War censorship is supported by our "science" magazines, which pretend that outlawed drugs do not exist, and so write what amount to lies about the supposed intransigence of things like depression and anxiety.

In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."


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






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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.

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