o paraphrase JB Haldane, far-left fads are not only stranger than we think, but stranger than we CAN think. I certainly never would have thought that toddlers had the ability, let alone the need, to pick a gender. Merely for school systems to put that idea in kids' heads does seem like a form of child abuse, for it causes kids to doubt the one thing that should be a given for them in an otherwise topsy-turvy new world: that is to say their very feeling of biochemical integrity. By all means, let the child become he-she-or-it after high school, but to make gender such an issue at such an age is clearly part of a highly debatable agenda of sexual politics for which toddlers should not be used as pawns.
Why am I broaching this unpleasant topic in a site that aims to end the Drug War (aka the war on plant medicine)? Because this issue shows how confused Americans are about their rights. The same people who are pushing for this uber-radical overthrow of the basic understanding of our very humanity are those who, for the most part, are absolutely silent about the war on plant medicine, if not egging it on, the same folks who cheer when corrupt DEA agents in the movies shoot suspects at point-blank range and in cold blood. These radicals see outrages all around them that need to be addressed, but only when they're parsed and disseminated by a grievance-filled academia. Tell them they can't use the plants that grow at their very feet -- and that they must urinate to prove their compliance -- and these same uber-radicals will say, "Thank you, sir, may I have another!"
We're all in a Christian Science prison as far as our mental states are concerned, a clear violation of the obvious natural law, but at least we inmates have all sorts of increasingly recherche rights that our forebears never even dreamed of: the right to decide if we're feminine, masculine, or even neuter. And our Christian Science caretakers will gladly bring us all of these outre luxuries that we demand -- as long as we do not demand any self-evident right, like the freedom to reach down and grab the plant medicine that grows at our very feet.
This transgender campaign must be coming from the Ivory Towers, because in the real world, there are much more pressing and obvious concerns. Apart from the nightmare of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we live in an age in which it is no longer legal to access the plant medicine that grows at our very feet. Why? Because botanically clueless politicians want us to fear psychoactive medicine rather than to understand it. That's why they have criminalized the mere study of the plants that they demonize. Outlawing Mother Nature is a violation of the Natural Law upon which Jefferson founded America, and yet those who proclaim that they are "woke" are actually asleep at the wheel on this topic, happily urinating for employers to demonstrate that they are not using the kinds of plant medicines that have inspired the creation of entire religions in the past, as psychedelic soma inspired the Vedic religion and as energizing coca inspired South American cults and cultural practices for millennia. (No doubt when they have their drugs tests, however, today's transgender activists will fiercely demand to provide their urine in the bathroom of their own choice.)
You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.
A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.
The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.
It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)
If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.
PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.
Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)
Selected Bibliography
Andrew, Christopher "The Secret World: A History of Intelligence" 2019 Yale University Press
Aurelius, Marcus "Meditations" 2021 East India Publishing Company
Mate, Gabriel "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" 2009 Vintage Canada
Maupassant, Guy de "Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques - Guy de Maupassant: Les classiques du fantastique " 2019
McKenna, Terence "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution " 1992 Bantam
Miller, Richard Louis "Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle " 2017 Park Street Press
Pinchbeck, Daniel "When Plants Dream" 2019 Watkins Publishing
Poe, Edgar Allan "The Essential Poe" 2020 Warbler Classics
Pollan, Michael "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence " 2018 Penguin Books
Reynolds, David S. "Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville " 1988 Oxford University Press
Richards, William "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences Hardcover" 2015 Columbia University Press
Rosenfeld, Harvey "Diary of a Dirty Little War: The Spanish-American War of 1898 " 2000 Praeger
Straussman, Rick "DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences " 2001 Park Street Press
Streatfield, Dominic "Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography" 2003 Picador USA
Swartzwelder, Scott "Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy" 1998 W.W. Norton
Szasz, Thomas "Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers" 1974 Anchor Press/Doubleday
Whitaker, Robert "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America " 2010 Crown
Zinn, Howard "A People's History of the United States: 1492 - present" 2009
Zuboff , Shoshana "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2019 Public Affairs
Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.
o paraphrase JB Haldane, far-left fads are not only stranger than we think, but stranger than we CAN think. I certainly never would have thought that toddlers had the ability, let alone the need, to pick a gender. Merely for school systems to put that idea in kids' heads does seem like a form of child abuse, for it causes kids to doubt the one thing that should be a given for them in an otherwise topsy-turvy new world: that is to say their very feeling of biochemical integrity. By all means, let the child become he-she-or-it after high school, but to make gender such an issue at such an age is clearly part of a highly debatable agenda of sexual politics for which toddlers should not be used as pawns.
