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The Unpeople of Southeast Washington, D.C.

by Brian 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



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#.



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."











Notes for essay entitled The Unpeople of Southeast Washington, D.C.:

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




Almost every article about suicide is shallow because it takes drug prohibition as a natural baseline, even though drug prohibition outlaws substances that could so clearly elevate mood.

Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.

When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!

Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.

Why does no one talk about empathogens for preventing atrocities? Because they'd rather hate drugs than use them for the benefit of humanity. They don't want to solve problems, they prefer hatred.

If our loved ones should experience severe depression and visit an emergency room for treatment, they will be started on a regime of dependence-causing Big Pharma drugs. They will not be given any drugs that elate and inspire.

The courts ignore the 1st and 4th amendments when it comes to drugs; why are they not ignoring the 2nd amendment when it comes to guns?

All drugs have potential positive uses for somebody, at some dose, in some circumstance, alone or in combination. To decide in advance that a drug is completely useless is an offense to reason and to human liberty.

And where did politicians get the idea that irresponsible white American young people are the only stakeholders when it comes to the question of re-legalizing drugs??? There are hundreds of millions of other stakeholders: philosophers, pain patients, the depressed.

America's "health" system was always screaming at me about the threat of drug dependency. Then what did it do? It put me on the most dependence-causing drugs of all time: SSRIs and SNRIs.


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