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.
Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.
Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.
"My faith votes and strives to outlaw religions that use substances of which politicians disapprove."
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug:
Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits
Ann Lemke's case studies make the usual assumptions: getting free from addiction is a morality tale. No reference to how the drug war promotes addiction and how banned drugs could solve such problems. She does not say why daily SSRI use is acceptable while daily opium use is not. Etc.
Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.
The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.
Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.
Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.
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)
