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.
Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.
Two weeks ago, a guy told me that most psychiatrists believe ECT is great. I thought he was joking! I've since come to realize that he was telling the truth: that is just how screwed up the healthcare system is today thanks to drug war ideology and purblind materialism.
I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.
We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.
Getting off some drugs could actually be fun and instructive, by using a variety of other drugs to keep one's mind off the withdrawal process. But America believes that getting off a drug should be a big moral battle.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
We need to push back against the very idea that the FDA is qualified to tell us what works when it comes to psychoactive medicines. Users know these things work. That's what counts. The rest is academic foot dragging.
The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that tells us that "shock therapy" is safe.
If Americans cannot handle the truth about drugs, then there is something wrong with Americans, not with drugs.
It's rich when Americans outlaw drugs and then insist that those drugs did not have much to offer in any case. It's like I took away your car and then told you that car ownership was overrated.
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)
