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.
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.
If fearmongering drug warriors were right about the weakness of humankind, there would be no social drinkers, only drunkards.
Prohibition turned habituation into addiction by creating a wide variety of problems for users, including potential arrest, tainted or absent drug supply, and extreme stigmatization.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx
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?!
The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.
This is why America is creeping toward authoritarianism -- because of the prohibitionists' ability to get away with everything by blaming "drugs." The fact that Americans still fall for this crap represents a kind of collective pathology.
It's disgusting that folks like Paul Stamets need a DEA license to work with mushrooms.
The drug war encourages us to judge people based on what they use and in what context. Even if the couch potato had no conscious health goals, their use of MJ is very possibly shielding them from health problems, like headaches, sleeplessness, and overreliance on alcohol.
This is why "rock stars" use drugs: not just for performance anxiety (which, BTW, is a completely UNDERSTANDABLE reason for drug use), but because they want to fully experience the music, even tho' they may be currently short on money and being hassled by creditors, etc.
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)
