Refutation of the fallacies of the Anti-Opium Society and a Defence of the Indo-China Opium Trade
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 3, 2023
Click on the above audio link to listen to a multi-narrator audio version of 'The Truth about Opium'. The text for "The Truth about Opium" may be found at Project Gutenberg.
Important Points
"The poppy is indigenous to China... and has been used in China for various purposes for thousands of years."
"[Opium] is not only harmless but beneficial to the system, unless when practised to an inordinate extent, which is wholly exceptional; whilst spirit drinking ruins the health, degrades the character, incites its victims to acts of violence, and destroys the prospects of everyone who indulges to excess in the practice."
Opium smoking and opium eating are two different things, despite the attempt of opium opponents to confuse the two.
Chinese officials were never driven by public health motives in their opium policies.
Much anti-opium sentiment in UK was aroused by a BIG LIE passed on by an American missionary, who declared that there were two million deaths from opium every year in China, which was an utter falsehood, as regular opium use was more often associated with longevity than with premature death.
"All these anti-opium articles, speeches, and resolutions are based upon the same model. They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts."
Author's Follow-up: November 15, 2023
Like all of us, Brereton was a product of his time. He was unaware of the carcinogenic nature of tobacco, for instance.
Most problematically, he suggests that Brits will never embrace opium smoking for sociocultural reasons. It's a Chinese thing. And that's certainly going to be true if the drug is demonized and prohibited, but in a free world it is common sense that such use would be attractive to many writers, poets and musicians, seeking inspiration. Although materialist prohibitionists scoff at the idea that opium can provide inspiration, it did, of course, lead to the writing of the poem Kubla Khan. And author Richard Middleton wrote in the 19th century that poets of his time smoked opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses." In other words, they smoked opium wisely and for admirable motives as well. And, of course, HP Lovecraft would not be HP Lovecraft without opium. His tales are full of opiate imagery.
"The spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams." -- Celaphais
But because folks like Coleridge blamed their own moral weakness on opium, the drug has been demonized. It's as if we had outlawed horseback riding because the first well-known horse rider in England had been thrown from his horse.
Author's Follow-up: May 15, 2024
Before the reader has a coronary, they might consider the fact that 1 in 4 American women take a Big Pharma med(s) every day of their life. Opium is easier to kick than some of those drugs, like Effexor.1 It's also interesting to point out that Drug Warriors refused to let Americans smoke opium peaceably at home, and now prohibitionists are complaining that opiate users are in the street!
Meanwhile, no imaginable downside could persuade westerners that guns and alcohol were too dangerous. Yet the DEA lies about almost all psychoactive drugs, saying there are no good uses. That's a lie! Then they pass laws that keep us from disproving their puritanical conclusion.
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
It's amazing. Drug law is outlawing science -- and yet so few complain. Drug law tells us what mushrooms we can collect, for God's sake. Is that not straight-up insane? Or are Americans so used to being treated as children that they accept this corrupt status quo?
America is insane: it makes liquor officially legal and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.
Here's one problem that supporters of the psychiatric pill mill never address: the fact that Big Pharma antidepressants demoralize users by turning them into patients for life.
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.
I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.
What is the end game of the drug warrior? A world in which no one wants drugs? That's not science. It's the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. You know, the American religion that outsources its Inquisition to drug-testing labs.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
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 Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton: Refutation of the fallacies of the Anti-Opium Society and a Defence of the Indo-China Opium Trade, published on September 3, 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton: Refutation of the fallacies of the Anti-Opium Society and a Defence of the Indo-China Opium Trade, published on September 3, 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)