Time to ACT UP about the racist drug war

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Time to ACT UP about the racist drug war

Speaking truth to prohibitionist power

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 9, 2022

I tuned in last night to see Joseph Biden boring an all-too-polite crowd with incontrovertible generalities at the Summit of the Americas: The American hemisphere is large and diverse, quoth Joe; the COVID crisis gave the region a disproportionate wallop, quoth Joe; the ensuing economic downturn ravaged economies throughout the Americas, quoth Joe. So far, so bland.

2025 Update

But then the president turned to a topic near and dear to his anachronistic heart:

"The United States is... working with partners to... go after drug traffickers."

What? Is Joseph Biden still supporting the Drug War?

Does Joseph Biden still not realize that the Drug War itself creates the bad-guy traffickers against whom we and our "partners" are fighting? Did he learn absolutely nothing from America's disastrous experimentation with liquor prohibition? Does he not realize, moreover, that most of these "traffickers" are simply selling medicine from a plant which the Incans considered to be a "god" and that therefore the Drug War is western colonialism run amok?

Two cavemen in cave. Caveman on right, holding burning stick toward second caveman on left. Caveman on left says: 'Fire bad. Fire kill.' — Saying things like 'Fentanyl kills' is philosophically equivalent to saying 'Fire bad'. Both statements would have us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them wisely for the benefit of human beings.

Sadly, I expected no better from Biden, the so-called Godfather of the Drug War, the man who first plumped for the creation of a "drug czar" in the 1980s. Here is a man who endorsed a rule at the Office of National Drug Control Policy that REQUIRED the agency to ignore any evidence about the beneficial effects of illegal drugs -- whether for medical or any other use --as part of an official propaganda campaign to discourage "drug use." Here is a man who drafted the 1994 anti-crime bill that resulted in the wildly disproportionate sentencing of Blacks for possession of crack cocaine ¹ ² , while whites with a similar amount of powdered product could go free.

What bothered me was the complete silence in the massive hall as Biden made it clear that he was still pursuing the same failed Drug War policy that had already turned America into a penal colony and disfranchised millions of Americans, thereby resulting in the election of unapologetic fascists.

Not one of the well-heeled attendees coughed disparagingly, or groaned, or booed, let alone stood up and shouted "End the Drug War!" or "Decriminalize Mother Nature at long last!"

The gorilla in the room is getting larger every day - the emperor's nudity is evermore apparent - and yet the placid heads in the audience just bobbed up and down complacently, as who should say: "Continue the Drug War, check! Yes, of course, that goes without saying."

No one seems aware of the historical backstory which shows that the very substances that we criminalize today have inspired entire religions in the past and that the Drug War is therefore an attack upon religion, nay, an attack upon the very wellspring and fountainhead of the religious impulse itself.

So just when I was starting to get a toasty patriotic feeling in my tum-tum from all the fine talk about democracy and "the rule of law," Biden reminds me of his unrepentant Drug War bona fides, and I change the channel, telling Uncle Joe as I did so that: "Ya lost me."

By the way, I wonder what Biden means by the "rule of law": does he mean the right of law enforcement to confiscate entire houses and property without a trial should the property itself be suspected of facilitating "drug trafficking"? Does he mean the right of businesses to remove Americans from the workforce without trial because an unconstitutional drug search has indicated that they have used mere traces of plant medicine of which botanically clueless politicians disapprove?

But before I exchanged Joe Biden ³ ⁴ for The Three Stooges, I had an epiphany: those of us who are "woke" viz. the insidious nature of the Drug War need to steal a page from the ACT UP movement of the 1980s. We should stop the self-congratulatory chat on obscure Reddit groups and start ACTING UP -- in settings, like (oh, I don't know) the Los Angeles Convention Center, for instance. There were thousands of sleepy attendees there this week silently signing off on everything that Drug War Joe said. Surely the anti-Drug War crowd could have found at least one attendee who would have had the chutzpah and sense of moral indignation to shout out "End the Drug War!" the second that Biden broached the topic of cracking down still further on "drug dealers." The ACT UP protest strategy put gay rights and AIDS awareness on the map. It can do the same for the decriminalization effort.

God bless us, we drug-war opponents are just too polite for our own good. If we want to get our point across in the media, ⁵ if we want to change the narrative, if we want to put drug-war collaborators on notice that we are wise to their hypocritical and racist game, then we need to start acting up. We need to start pointing to the 64,000-pound gorilla in the room. We need to start screaming out loudly and clearly (at the most inappropriate times, of course) that the Emperor is indeed buck-naked and has been for decades now.

We missed a great opportunity to do this during Biden's opening remarks at the 2022 Summit of the Americas. Our cause would have advanced by leaps and bounds had someone simply stood up in that auditorium after Biden said the word "drugs" and shouted: "End the flippin' War on Drugs!" (Or here's my favorite: "Stop criminalizing plant medicine!")

But as Shakespeare reminds us, "Omittance is no quittance." Presidents give plenty of speeches, and some of them are actually open to the public - or at least to such a large number of "vetted" guests that there's sure to be at least one among them whom we can convince to speak truth to power when the well-publicized opportunity arises.

So stop letting President Joe "Crackdown" Biden off the hook: ACT UP at his next public speech -- and/or suborn a like-minded attendee to do so for you.

Online articles about "Drug War Joe":

Biden should end America's longest war: The War on Drugs, by John Hudak of the Brookings Institute

Joe Biden: The Architect of America's Disastrous War on Drugs by Brittany Hunter

Joe Biden's Drug War Record Is So Much Worse Than You Think by David Bienenstock

editor note from abolishthedea.com

June 9, 2022

_18_Biden still holds the long refuted belief that marijuana is a "gateway drug." But what if marijuana truly is a gateway drug, Joe? What if marijuana actually gets you to try, say, one of the psychedelic plant medicines that inspired the Vedic religion? Or one of the psychoactive plant medicines that gave Plato a view of the afterlife? Why precisely is that wrong? This whole talk of "gateway drugs" is premised on drug-war lies. Why do we call coca and opium hard drugs any way? To the extent that their use leads to negative outcomes, it is because of the DRUG WAR'S institutionally adopted preference for fear over facts. As noted above, Biden's Office of National Drug Control Policy actually had a rule whereby learning about wise use was forbidden!

The DRUG WAR has made these drugs "hard" by encouraging ignorance in users. They want us to fear substances, not understand them. The fact is that coca and opium can be used non-addictively. That can be taught, if we cared about something other than incarcerating minorities. But what if one DOES form a habit of opium ⁶ use, for instance? Benjamin Franklin had that habit, as did Marcus Aurelius. Why is that so much worse than being chemically dependent on a hodgepodge of expensive Big Pharma ⁷ ⁸ "meds" that one has to take every morning of one's entire life? Especially considering the fact that the latter legal drugs can be harder to quit than heroin ⁹ thanks to the way that they muck about with brain chemistry, while causing a chemical imbalance that they purport to be fixing (sources: Julie Holland and Robert Whitaker respectively).

Author's Follow-up: March 21, 2023

follow-up on essay by the Drug War Philosopher

It's particularly galling that the president should tout the Drug War in a conference of the Americas. It is the Drug War that destroyed the rule of law in Latin America and brought civil war to Mexico at the behest of George Bush et al.

At best, Biden is criminally uninformed. At worst, he is cynically using the Drug War to achieve unstated goals -- like keeping Latin America under the thumb of amoral and immoral capitalists.

Author's Follow-up: April 3, 2023

Given its obviously disastrous effect on Latin America, the Drug War can only be seen as a war against socialism, aka a war for the advancement of American capitalism ¹⁰ . If it were really just a war against drugs, it would have been recognized as a huge failure by now.

Author's Follow-up: March 30, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

I love it when folks associate me with one single political policy merely because I support a candidate who supports the same. They fail to appreciate that we Americans basically only have two choices when it comes to modern presidential politicians, so the likelihood that anyone is going to support every single policy approach of their "favorite" candidate is rather slim, indeed -- unless you are dealing with a cult of personality that believes in winning at all costs, to the point of insurrection... if ever there should be such an hateful and anti-patriotic movement as that in this beloved country of ours. (I know, it's hard to imagine such a thing, isn't it? Oh, wait a minute... that actually happened, didn't it? Jeepers!)

I preface thus much by way of both explaining and apologizing for my past support of Joseph Biden, for his main "selling point" in my book has always been the fact that he at least claimed to believe in democracy. That's pretty much it. And as King Lear observed after first being confronted with the ingratitude of his daughters: "Not being the worst stands in some rank of praise" -- even if said praise would seem to condemn by dint of its faintness. Joe Biden was, in fact, the candidate from hell for enemies of substance prohibition. Luckily for him, however, his political stars so aligned as to pit him against a presidential candidate (or rather a candidate for president) who was even worse than Joe when it came to drugs, a possibility that one had naively once thought to be impossible -- one who was advocating the execution of "drug dealers" and the bombing of Mexico on behalf of the anti-indigenous and intoxiphobic mindset of the west.

If we were to judge candidates merely on their attitude toward drugs, the question would then become: which candidate was determined to manufacture the LEAST number of deaths out of whole cloth in the name of substance demonization -- which candidate was going to abolish the efficacy of the LEAST number of amendments and the LEAST number of America's founding principles, which candidate was going to destroy our lives LEAST should we dare to use God-given substances of which racist politicians disapprove?

Talk about a Hobson's choice!

It is reflections like these that make me question Schopenhauer's belief that truth will ultimately triumph. I do not believe that most readers even understand what I am doing here. Most readers do not understand the point of approaching a subject philosophically. They want to talk specifics -- failing to see that "what we talk about and how" is itself based on unspoken assumptions and that we will never make progress until we examine the foundations of our beliefs. Most Americans seem to think that the Drug War is a good idea that either did not work or else needs to be tweaked to do a better job of working. Both ideas are colonialist absurdity when examined in light of the principles upon which they are based. But Americans never examine those principles. This is odd, because most Americans seem to acknowledge that a colonialist viewpoint is problematic, and yet they champion a Drug War (or at least a Drug War lite) which is based through and through on colonialist principles: in fact that makes laws based on the attitude of Francisco Pizarro with respect to native medicines.

Most Americans have also been shielded for their entire lifetime from all stories of positive drug use, of the use of psychoactive substances in a wise way and for good reasons. And yet they never stop to think that this cradle-to-grave indoctrination might -- just possibly -- have distorted their views about drugs. For in reality, there is endless proof of positive uses for drugs -- from anecdote, from history, and based on plain common sense -- the common sense that most Americans have jettisoned thanks to the triumph of behaviorism in modern science. Behaviorism is the inhumane psychological doctrine of JB Watson ¹¹ ¹² according to which emotions do not matter -- only quantifiable data. It is this hateful presumption that permits modern scientists to sign off on the DEA's lie that godsend medicines have no positive uses whatsoever. How can they say that? Because behaviorism tells them to ignore all common sense -- or any proof that is right before their eyes, like the "mere" happiness and sociability of a drug user, etc.

_20_

Glub-glub!

Americans are loaded to the gills with false but unspoken premises about drugs -- and this is why a philosophical approach to drug use is important. What I am trying to do here is to reveal a seldom-mentioned but crucial reason why America is making such glacial progress in re-legalizing psychoactive medicine: it is because they fail to understand the role and the power of philosophy in helping a nation get its head screwed back on straight when it comes to common sense, compassion and true scientific progress. For until drugs are re-legalized and we decide to benefit from them based on psychological common sense, America will be living in the superstitious stone age when it comes to psychoactive medicine: a world in which we say of drugs what our paleolithic ancestors said of the gift of Prometheus. Where once we shouted "Fire bad!" we now shout "Drugs bad!" We have been rendered just that stupid thanks to our lifetime indoctrination in the substance-demonizing ideology of the prohibitionist. The fact is that both fire and drugs have positive uses -- indeed both have marvelous and wonderous uses! To hate the latter is just as idiotic and superstitious as to hate the former!

We need to start teaching kids ¹³ in grade school, not that drugs are bad, but that prohibition is bad! The evidence is extant. How many more bodies need pile up before we recognize that fact, how many more suffering elders have to go without godsend medicine, how many more suicides must take place because we will not allow the depressed to reach down and use the medicine that grows at their very feet!

Those who remain unaware of the positive uses of drugs should first consider that the Hindu religion was inspired by drug use: namely, the use of the psychoactive Soma ¹⁴ of the Vedic scriptures. As for modern instances of drug benefits, consider the following drug user reports from the book Pihkal ¹⁵ -- and then dare to tell me that the following emotional states are not a beneficial outcome of drug use. If you say otherwise, then you are clearly a Christian Scientist, that is, one who believes in the metaphysical proposition that psychoactive drug use is somehow bad in and of itself. You have your right to that religion, of course, but please be so good as to not impose that religion on me by your tyrannical, hysterical and anti-scientific drug prohibitions.

Reports of POSITIVE drug use

"I was caught up with the imagery, and there was an overriding religious aspect to the day.¹⁶"

"This was a great revelation; I had never seen it before. This material had an enormous drive. I feel extremely grateful for exposing a very deep personal problem.¹⁷"

"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place.¹⁸"

And these are the kinds of drugs that our DEA tells us have no benefits whatsoever. Worse still, our scientists collude in this lie merely because they insist that drugs work via the mechanisms required by the inhuman psychological theory of behaviorism.

When are Americans going to rise up and demand that prohibitionists and materialist stop gaslighting ¹⁹ us like this when it comes to the glaringly obvious benefits of time-honored drugs!

Notes for essay entitled Time to ACT UP about the racist drug war: Speaking truth to prohibitionist power :

1: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
2: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
3: Joe Biden (up)
4: Joe Biden’s Drug War Record Is So Much Worse Than You Think Bienenstock, David, Leafly, 2019 (up)
5: How the Media Puts Drugs on Show Trials: an open letter to Bennett Haeberle of NBC 5 Chicago DWP (up)
6: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
7: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
8: 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)
9: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
10: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)
11: JB Watson Britannica (up)
12: The purblind coldness of the Behaviorist doctrine is made clear in the following words of its founder, JB Watson, as quoted in the 2015 book "Paradox" by Margaret Cuonzo: "Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic." (Surely, Watson was proactively channeling Dr. Spock of the original Star Trek series.) (up)
13: Here's an idea: let's start teaching kids the truth about drugs DWP (up)
14: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
15: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
16: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
17: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
18: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
19: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Alcohol makes me sleepy. But NOT coca wine. The wine gives you an upbeat feeling of controlled energy, without the jitters of coffee and without the fury of steroids. It increases rather than dulls mental focus.

The MindMed company (makers of LSD Lite) tell us that euphoria and visions are "adverse effects": that's not science, that's an arid materialist philosophy that does not believe in spiritual transcendence.

Drug warriors have taught us that honesty about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.

My cousin says we should punish drug dealers. I say we should punish those politicians who created those drug dealers out of whole cloth by passing unprecedented laws against the use of Mother Nature's bounty.

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.

New article in Scientific American: "New hope for pain relief," that ignores the fact that we have outlawed the time-honored panacea. Scientists want a drug that won't run the risk of inspiring us.

The drug war is being used as a wrecking ball to destroy democratic freedoms. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and freedom of religion and given the police the right to confiscate the property of peaceful and productive citizens.

William James claimed that his constitution prevented him from having mystical experiences. The fact is that no one is prevented from having mystical experiences provided that they are willing to use psychoactive substances wisely to attain that end.

Over 45% of traumatic brain injuries are caused by horseback riding (ABC News). Tell your representatives to outlaw horseback riding and make it a federal offence to teach a child how to ride! Brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.

Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!

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tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

(up)

Time to ACT UP about the racist drug war

Speaking truth to prohibitionist power

Author's Follow-up: March 21, 2023

Author's Follow-up: April 3, 2023

Author's Follow-up: March 30, 2025

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against the hateful war on US

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

Diary of a Drug Fiend