four Tweets to Vincent Rado after he unfollowed me
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 29, 2023
y Twitter engagement died almost completely after Vincent unfollowed me. That'll teach me to disagree with Vincent Rado! Anyway, to show that I'm more about truth than I am about popularity, let's take a critical look at Vincent's most recent Tweet about drugs, one which, I admit, has left me scratching my head.
VINCENT RADO'S TWEET:
In 10-20 years, the psychedelic boom thats (sic) occurring right now is gonna look an awful lot like the Rx opioid boom of the '90s and 2000s
I'm not sure what Vincent means by that. In 2016, a user was dying every 16 minutes from opioid overdoses brought about by Drug War prohibition which incentivized the sale of the most ready-to-hand and addictive medicine possible. Does Rado mean that psychedelics will be killing one user every 16 minutes in 2043? If so, psychedelics have a lot of catching up to do, considering that they have been implicated in only a handful of deaths since the beginning of time, and strictly speaking, they have "caused" no deaths at all.
Here are some additional responses that I posted to Rado's curiously alarmist Tweet.
1) Again, I don't understand the obsession with bashing psychedelic enthusiasm. You're still throwing the baby out with the bath water. Hopefully in 20 years, substance prohibition will look to us like liquor prohibition. That's what I'm hoping and fighting for.
2) You probably think it's okay to bash psychedelics because you have not gone an entire lifetime being deprived of godsend meds for your depression and being shunted off onto mind-numbing antidepressants instead.
3) My one psychedelic experience as a teen was the most enlightening experience of my life. It taught me that the antidepressants I was taking were tranquilizing me, not helping me to live large. Let's stop bashing psychedelics, even if the sales hype is irritating.
4) Still to this day, researchers are discouraged and otherwise barred from researching benefits of psychedelics and other "drugs." In 20 years, I hope that that government censorship of science will be at an end.
These are my views in spite of THE GREAT UNFOLLOWING! Agree with me at your own risk!
EPILOGuE:
Vincent subsequently said that I'm shilling for substances:
My response: Yes, I'm shilling for the hundreds of substances that America has outlawed over the years -- to the point that the only recourse for the depressed is shock therapy or antidepressants, which are lobotomy on the instalment plan.
We've all been taught since grade school that human beings cannot use psychoactive medicines wisely. That is just a big fat lie. It's criminal to keep substances illegal that can awaken the mind and remind us of our full potential in life.
And where did politicians get the idea that irresponsible white American young people are the only stakeholders when it comes to the question of re-legalizing drugs??? There are hundreds of millions of other stakeholders: philosophers, pain patients, the depressed.
We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.
First America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own pain by rendering opium illegal. Then the psychiatric field treats the resultant epidemic of depression by damaging the patient's brain, i.e., by treating depressed patients with shock therapy.
The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
Philip Jenkins reports that Rophynol had positive uses for treating mental disorders until the media called it the "date rape drug." We thus punished those who were benefitting from the drug, tho' the biggest drug culprit in date rape is alcohol. Oprah spread the fear virally.
Even fans of sacred medicine have been brainwashed to believe that we do not know if such drugs "really" work: they want microscopic proof. But that's a western bias, used strategically by drug warriors to make the psychotropic drug approval process as glacial as possible.
"Chemical means of peering into the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine exordia in man’s quest for the beyond... before the coarseness of utilitarian minds reduced them to the status of 'dope'." -- Eric Hendrickson
We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
At best, antidepressants make depression bearable. We need not settle for such drugs, especially when they are notorious for causing dependence. There are many drugs that elate and inspire. It is both cruel and criminal to outlaw them.
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, The Great Unfollowing: four Tweets to Vincent Rado after he unfollowed me, published on January 29, 2023 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)
y Twitter engagement died almost completely after Vincent unfollowed me. That'll teach me to disagree with Vincent Rado! Anyway, to show that I'm more about truth than I am about popularity, let's take a critical look at Vincent's most recent Tweet about drugs, one which, I admit, has left me scratching my head.
You have been reading an article entitled, The Great Unfollowing: four Tweets to Vincent Rado after he unfollowed me, published on January 29, 2023 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)
