James Alan Fox is a professor at Northwestern University who has been tracking mass shooting deaths in America since 2006. The following comment is in response to Gun violence in America: A long list of forgotten victims" published July 6, 2022 on WTOP.com.
Hi, Professor Fox.
I find the Gannett Corporation's coverage of inner-city shootings to be very un-enlightening, since they report on deaths without ever mentioning the Drug War. For as Ann Heather Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014, "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."
Mayors around the country profess bafflement at the increase in such violence, and yet they ignore the obvious cause: the fact that inner cities are armed to the teeth thanks to the way that drug prohibition has incentivized drug dealing in poor and poorly educated communities.
Lisa Ling even produced a whole documentary about Chicago violence (over 800 killed in 2021) and did not even MENTION the Drug War.
This is why the Drug War survives to this day, because no one holds it to account for the evil that it's facilitating.
I hope you will do your part to get USA Today (and the other media outlets that you advise) to acknowledge this connection and to stop pretending that the yearly rise in inner-city gun deaths is some kind of inexplicable fluke.
As to mass shootings, I'm not sure they are as rare as you suggest, at least in inner cities. I think the reality is that the press does not characterize multi-victim shooting incidents as "mass shootings" if they occur in inner cities that are rife with daily gunfire. On July fourth, at least 5 people were shot outside a Richmond hot spot but I didn't see that story running nationwide, or even on news station WTOP.com, for that matter, located in Washington D.C., just 150 miles north of Richmond.
Open Letters
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
Many of my essays are about and/or directed to specific individuals, some well-known, others not so well known, and some flat-out nobodies like myself. Here is a growing list of names of people with links to my essays that in some way concern them.
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.
If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault. The Drug War is the triumph of hypocritical idiocy.
Mad in America solicits personal stories about people trying to get off of antidepressants, but they will not publish your story if you want to use entheogenic medicines to help you. They're afraid their readers can't handle the truth.
"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.
This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.
Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.
Anyone who has read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin knows that the drug warriors have it exactly backwards. Drugs are our friends. We need to find safe ways to use them to improve ourselves psychologically, spiritually and mentally.
This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.
Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
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 Invisible Mass Shootings: open letter to Criminologist James Alan Fox, published on July 6, 2022 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, The Invisible Mass Shootings: open letter to Criminologist James Alan Fox, published on July 6, 2022 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)
