The Unpeople of Southeast Washington, D.C.

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The Unpeople of Southeast Washington, D.C.

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 28, 2022

Last week, I looked up info about buying edibles in Washington, D.C., and found a place that offered local delivery -- except, that is, for the residents of Southeastern Washington, who are asked to call in to arrange for a driver. This stipulation, of course, is due to the fact that Southeastern DC has been a battle zone for decades now thanks to the guns and violence which the Drug War brought to the region by creating armed gangs out of whole cloth. If our society considered all Americans to be equally valuable, then this story of American no-go zones (inner city areas with skyrocketing homicide rates) would be on the front burner of the media every single day of the week, in the same way that the ABC News show Nightline carried on for over a year reminding Americans on a daily basis how many days their 52 fellow nationals had been held hostage in Iran in the late '70s.

Just as we then saw headlines screaming "The Iran Hostage Crisis: Day 252," we should see headlines today screaming "Southeast Washington Homicide Crisis: Day 2,502." Why don't we?

Answer:

Because, as Chomsky points out, human beings become "unpeople" when their needs and problems are not included on the "to-do" list of moneyed America and the media outlets that work for them. And to highlight the DC homicides would be to highlight the huge failure of the Drug War, which is the policy which keeps Americans under the ideological thumb of the elite while pushing profits through the roof for the healthcare industry, which profits enormously from its monopoly on mood medicine (highly addictive mood medicine at that). Nor can we count on the local press to cover such minority deaths, since local papers these days are owned by national companies, especially Gannett (see Gannett and the Death of Local Newspapers) who impose their corporate agendas on their skeleton staff of local reporters.

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Take the Milwaukee Journal which recently rather tersely covered the death of 15-year-old Dechale N. Hampton by gunfire in the dangerous-sounding 9000 block of North 95th Street. He was the 14th juvenile killed this year in Milwaukee and the 109th homicide so far this year. Instead of honoring his untimely death by launching an investigative series to show how the Drug War had armed inner cities to the teeth, the skeleton staff of Gannett reporters quickly moved on to covering the important stuff, like a Sporkies Competition at the Wisconsin State Fair -- stories that were about and for real people, as that term is defined today by the 1%.

As Ann Heather Thompson wrote in the Atlantic: "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence ¹ that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist." That's why these inner city deaths cannot be covered in detail, because the Drug War is the accepted policy of the "haves" who are therefore loath to run rabble-rousing articles that might conduce to that war's demise.

Author's Follow-up: August 21, 2022

follow-up on essay by the Drug War Philosopher

Why are the daily deaths of blacks NOT reported across the country every day as the unacceptable tragedy that it is? Read or listen to the following to find out:

Herman, Edward S.. "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media." Scribd.com. February 02, 2015. https://www.scribd.com/listen/345471878#.

editor note from abolishthedea.com

August 22, 2022
Of course, there are other no-go zones around the globe since the drug-war is worldwide. Like the favela of Heliopolis in Brazil. Brazil should spend its money on improved housing instead of fighting the American boogieman called "drugs."

Mass Media and Drugs

Notes:

1: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Your drug war has caused the disappearance of over 60,000 Mexicans over the last 20 years. It has turned inner cities into shooting galleries. It has turned America into a penal colony. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and put bureaucrats in charge of deciding if our religions are "sincere."

Attempts to improve one's mind and mood are not crimes. The attempt to stop people from doing so is the crime.

Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.

Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.

Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.

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.

This is the mentality for today's materialist researcher when it comes to "laughing gas." He does not care that it merely cheers folks up. He wants to see what is REALLY going on with the substance, using electrodes and brain scans.

The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.

Scientists hold holistically working drugs to reductionist standards, thereby practicing a sort of pharmacological colonialsm.

The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?

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

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