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The Hypocrisy of the Gun-Owning Drug Warrior

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 7, 2019



It’s amazing how many American gun owners fiercely defend their right to firearms while gladly relinquishing their right to the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet. Talk about misplaced priorities! Any government that claims the right to criminalize naturally growing plants will not refrain from outlawing man-made firearms should the winds of political expediency happen to blow in that direction. Yet these gun owners gladly (and even proudly) support the Drug War’s efforts to keep naturally-occurring plant remedies out of the hands of those who need them most: the depressed, the lonely, the anxious, and the victims of chronic pain – all because our government (conveniently assisted by tabloid journalism and a self-interested medical establishment) has launched a propaganda campaign to paint all such users of these substances as irresponsible outlaws and hooligans.

Gun owners like to style themselves as defenders of liberty, insisting proudly with Clint Eastwood that:

“They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.”


But if these gun fanatics were truly interested in individual rights (and not just in the fetishization of this man-made object known as a “gun”), then they would transform their defiant mantra as follows:

“They can have my psilocybin mushroom when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.”




Author's Follow-up:

December 29, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


NOTE BENE: I indited this admittedly charming harangue seven years ago, when I was still a kid, scarcely even 60 years old yet! I have since learned that 47,000 people die in America thanks to guns every single year. 47,000! And yet these gun fanatics are worried that their young people might access substances that have been considered medical godsends in the past? Please. 47,000 people! And guess how many Americans died from using MDMA? Zero. Zilch. Nada. There are only a handful of deaths associated with the drug, and those were all caused by drug prohibition, which refuses to teach safe use (in this case about proper hydration) and refuses to regulate product as to quality and quantity.

Americans love guns and violence, but they are terrified by freedom of thought. And so they judge people, not by the content of their character, but by the content of their digestive system.








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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




America legalizes alcohol and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.

Our tolerance for freedom wanes in proportion as we consider "drugs" to be demonic. This is the dark side behind the new ostensibly comic genre about Cocaine Bears and such. It shows that Americans are superstitious about drugs in a way that Neanderthals would have understood.

There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill.

Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing.

The FDA approves of shock therapy and the psychiatric pill mill, but they cannot see the benefits in MDMA, a drug that brought peace, love and understanding to the dance floor in 1990s Britain.

His answer to political opposition is: "Lock them up!" That's Nazi speak, not American democracy.

Drug testing should flag impairment only. Any other use is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Cocaine is not evil. Opium is not evil. Drug prohibition is evil.

Psychedelics and entheogens should be freely available to all dementia patients. These medicines can increase neuronal plasticity and even grow new neurons. Besides, they can inspire and elate -- or do we puritans feel that our loved ones have no right to peace of mind?

It is actually illegal to be a Ben Franklin in 21st century America. To put this another way: we outlaw far more than drugs when we outlaw mind and mood medicine.


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






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Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

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Book Cover

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In my spare time, when I am not shaming drug warriors for their heartless drug policies, I create full-cast recordings of classic plays using the latest in synthetic voices licensed by the Natural Reader company. Snag your copy of my production of Volpone, by Ben Jonson... and follow me on Payhip for more where that came from, including classics like The Post Office, The Double Dealer and The Inspector General. -- Yours in all-too-justified outrage, the Drug War Philosopher @ abolishthedea.com.

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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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