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The Drug War as a Greek Tragedy

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 9, 2020



The Drug War is bullet-riddled Greek Tragedy American-Style. It's a way of looking at the world that allows us to enforce puritan piety that passe religion can no longer command. It's a way to keep the Wild West going so that gun addicts can satisfy their need to play the good guy. Custom-made violence. It is the new Tenth Commandment. Thou shalt not use dope. It is Mary Baker Eddy on steroids. It is responsible for the OXY epidemic because it not only outlaws far safer substances but it criminalizes their mere research. It makes a boogieman and a scapegoat out of psychoactive substances (dumping them all into the discreditable category of "drugs") in a way that no other civilization has ever done.

But substances are not the problem. Ignorance is a problem. A violence-creating black market is a problem. The outlawing of safe psychoactive plant medicine is a problem. The ideological war on human consciousness, THAT is a problem. Politicians telling us how and how much we can think, that is a problem. Politicians violating natural law by presuming to tell us what plants and fungi we can access, that is a problem. DEA thugs who poison Americans with paraquat and stomp onto Monticello 1 to steal Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants, that is a problem. A tyrannical government that denies gainful employment to Americans who dare to access time-honored plant medicine, THAT is a problem.

Then, because America has such a jaundiced attitude toward psychoactive substances, we arrogantly go around the world burning plants, as if we've discovered some great truth about evil substances, never realizing that our willfully purblind attitude toward "drugs" is the problem, not amoral substances themselves. Our hatred of education. Our hatred of plant medicine. Our need for a scapegoat for social ills. Our idiotic view of psychology that takes exactly zero account of the human being's unquenchable desire for self-transcendence and "seeing beyond the veil." These are all problems, not "drugs".

If we must have a Drug War, let's crack down on alcohol use and remove anyone from the work force should their urine reveal any traces of booze whatsoever2. Let's then remove them from the voting rolls. Then let's make America great again by executing alcohol distributors, thereby hoisting the beer-swilling Drug Warriors by their own petard.

Of course I'm speaking rhetorically here. I do not personally want to punish ANYONE based on the substances that they choose to consume -- I only wish I could say the same of the vast majority of Americans, bamboozled as they are by daily doses of ideological Drug War propaganda on TV and in movies 3 4 (as in cop shows, for instance, in which cocaine 5 6 is only ever used by the scummiest of board-certified scumbags, lest the viewer get any crazy ideas about personally profiting from the psychoactive powers of Mother Nature's plant medicines).









Notes for essay entitled The Drug War as a Greek Tragedy:

1: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
2: Blast-off for Planet Hypocrisy! DWP (up)
3: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
4: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
5: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
6: “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)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."

The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.

The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.

A company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.

Ketamine is like any other drug. It has good uses for certain people in certain situations. Nowadays, people insist that a drug be okay in every situation for everybody (especially American teens) before they will say that it's okay. That's crazy and anti-scientific.

The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.

Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.

Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.

Drug prohibition has resulted in hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths thanks to totally preventable drug overdoses!

In response to a tweet that "some drugs cannot be used wisely for recreational purposes": The problem is, most people draw such conclusions based on general impressions inspired by a media that demonizes drugs. In reality, it's hard to imagine a drug that cannot theoretically be used wisely for recreation at some dose, in some context.


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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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