ell, pull up a chair and sit down, pardna! Let me tell you what this here website is all about. But first, let me tell you a little about yours truly. I am the Drug War Philosopher and founder of abolishthedea.com, one Ballard Quass by name. I am not a board-certified philosopher, but I am a lover of wisdom and so I make so bold as to use the appellation. Last time I checked, it had not been trademarked......... Truth be told, my lack of tenure actually makes me MORE of a philosopher than those old "dry-as-dusts" at the university. Why? Because I am able to speak truths that academics could only speak on pain of losing their jobs!
Take the subject of laughing gas, for instance. The FDA recently decided that they were going to regulate that substance as a "drug." Now, as a philosopher, I knew that it was the use of laughing gas, nitrous oxide, that had inspired the ontology of William James itself. I knew, moreover, that William James had conjured us philosophers to study the effects of such substances.
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final," wrote James, "which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."
So I was appalled at the FDA's efforts to treat N20 as a drug and so make it even less available to the public than it already was.
But guess what happened when I tried to alert board-certified philosophers to this injustice? Not one of them responded. Not one. You would have thought that at least the Harvard philosophers would have been up in arms, since James founded the Harvard Psychology8 Department. But not a bit of it. So I tried my luck "across the pond" and wrote individual letters on this subject to every single philosopher at Oxford University -- every single one of them -- and not one of them responded. Not one.
And so when the FDA called for public comment on their attempts to demonize laughing gas, I was the only philosopher who wrote in to protest the proposed action in the name of academic liberty.
There are hundreds of things that we should outlaw before drugs (like horseback riding) if, as claimed, we are targeting dangerous activities. Besides, drugs are only dangerous BECAUSE of prohibition, which compromises product purity and refuses to teach safe use.
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.
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.
In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.
This massive concern for safety is downright bizarre in a country that will not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.
A Pennsylvanian politician now wants the US Army to "fight fentanyl." The guy is anthropomorphizing a damn drug! No wonder pols don't want to spend money on education, because any educated country would laugh a superstitious guy like that right out of public office.
Cop and detective shows are loaded with subtle drug war propaganda, including lines like, "She had a history of drug use, so..." The implication being that anyone who uses substances that politicians hate cannot be trusted.
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 life and times of the Drug War Philosopher: well, the life, anyway, published on January 1, 2024 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)
ell, pull up a chair and sit down, pardna! Let me tell you what this here website is all about. But first, let me tell you a little about yours truly. I am the Drug War Philosopher and founder of abolishthedea.com, one Ballard Quass by name. I am not a board-certified philosopher, but I am a lover of wisdom and so I make so bold as to use the appellation. Last time I checked, it had not been trademarked......... Truth be told, my lack of tenure actually makes me MORE of a philosopher than those old "dry-as-dusts" at the university. Why? Because I am able to speak truths that academics could only speak on pain of losing their jobs!
You have been reading an article entitled, The life and times of the Drug War Philosopher: well, the life, anyway, published on January 1, 2024 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)