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There is no such thing as DRUGS

there are just substances that, like anything else, can be used and misused

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 4, 2020



There is no such thing as 'drugs,' the way that the modern Drug Warrior defines that term. There are simply substances that can be used or misused. To think otherwise is to be superstitious. To think otherwise is to scapegoat substances and thus ignore true social problems that would otherwise cry out for solutions. To think otherwise is to create a make-work program for modern psychiatry, prison guards, sheriffs, the D E A, and Big Pharma .

Yet America is all about keeping Americans and the world from accessing the plants that grow at their very feet under the fiction that politically demonized substances are evil incarnate. This is a power grab that elevates common law over natural law, destroying the human being's right to Mother Nature, which is about as basic a natural right as possible. Not happy thus merely to deprive Americans of godsend medications, Drug War colonialism spreads the war on Mother Nature planet wide, ensuring eternal suffering of the mentally ill and their continued dependency on Big Pharma 1 2 's addictive meds, all so that imperial America can intervene at will in the countries of its choice, under the pretext of enforcing the American Empire's drug laws -- when we're actually enforcing the monopoly power of Big Liquor and the ideology of the religion known as Christian Science.









Notes:

1: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
2: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




There are endless creative ways to ward off addictions if all psychoactive medicines were at our disposal. The use of the drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin could combat the psychological downsides of withdrawal by providing strategic "as-needed" relief.

The Drug War treats doctors like potential criminals and it treats the rest of us like children. Prohibition does not end drug risks: it just outsources them to minorities and other vulnerable populations.

If politicians wanted to outlaw coffee, a bunch of Kevin Sabets would come forward and start writing books designed to scare us off the drink by cherry-picking negative facts from scientific studies.

"Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?

That's so "drug war" of Rick: If a psychoactive substance has a bad use at some dose, for somebody, then it must not be used at any dose by anybody. It's hard to imagine a less scientific proposition, or one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering.

Psychiatrists never acknowledge the biggest downside to modern antidepressants: the fact that they turn you into a patient for life. That's demoralizing, especially since the best drugs for depression are outlawed by the government.

Our government treats drugs like uranium and spends hundreds of billions of dollars trying to scare us about them.

I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.

Assisted suicide cannot be discussed meaningfully without discussing the drug prohibition that renders it necessary in the first place.

All drugs have positive uses. It's absurd to prohibit them because one demographic might misuse them.


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






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Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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