and its leaders put on trial for crimes against humanity
Letter to the US Justice Department.
Your DEA is disgraceful.
They have been lying about godsend plant medicine for almost half a century now.
They have denied godsend medicine to soldiers suffering from PTSD for the last 40 years, by criminalizing MDMA against the advice of their own counsel.
They have sprayed marijuana plants with a known toxin called paraquat, that has been shown to cause Parkinson's Disease.
They have militarized police forces with their drug laws, caused civil wars overseas, and empowered a self-described drug-war Hitler in the Philippines.
They were responsible last year for almost 800 black deaths in Chicago alone, thanks to the gunfire that substance prohibition brings to poor, and poorly educated, neighborhoods.
They have enforced drug laws that have taken millions of minorities off of the voting rolls, thereby ensuring the election of anti-American fascists.
They have made me go my whole life now without godsend medicine, forcing me to rely on the expensive and addictive psychiatric pill mill which was created by Big Pharma thanks to the monopoly that the Drug War gave them on mood medicine.
They violated Natural Law by stomping onto Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in 1987 and confiscating his poppy plants.
They have censored science every bit as much as the Catholic Church censored Galileo.
They have criminalized peace-making drugs like Ecstasy and psilocybin, which could be used therapeutically to end school shootings.
They created the opioid crisis out of whole cloth thanks to their policy of substance prohibition, which incentivizes dealers to sell the most addictive and readily available substances, for which there's an eager market when the DEA has outlawed all safer pharmacological paths to self-transcendence.
They have violated religious liberty by outlawing the same plant medicine that inspired the Vedic-Hindu religion and countless South American and Native American religions.
Your DEA should be abolished and its leaders put on trial for crimes against humanity.
May 28, 2022
Shortly after submitting the above interesting message, our apparently masochistic author sent the following message directly to the DEA via the comment form on the DEA Museum Page. Brian, of course, found the mere existence of that page outrageous, since it paraded plants before the public as if to show us a criminal lineup. Surely even a grade-schooler can see the anti-scientific folly of such brain-dead show trials. At least Stalin's henchmen were "trying" actual people for made-up crimes. Today's Drug Warrior is demonizing plants and fungi.
THE DEA IS A DISGRACE. YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO CRIMINALIZE PLANTS. THOMAS JEFFERSON ROLLED IN HIS GRAVE WHEN YOU STOMPED ONTO MONTICELLO AND CONFISCATED HIS POPPY PLANTS. TEACH ABOUT SUBSTANCES, STOP DEMONIZING THEM. YOU CAUSED 2000+ DEATHS IN CHICAGO ALONE LAST YEAR BY THE VIOLENCE WROUGHT BY PROHIBITION. YOU CREATED WARS IN SOUTH AMERICA. YOU EMPOWERED FASCISTS BY REMOVING MINORITIES FROM THE VOTING ROLLS. YOUR PROHIBITION HAS CREATED THE PSYCHIATRIC PILL MILL, UPON WHICH 1 IN 4 AMERICAN WOMEN ARE DEPENDENT FOR LIFE. YOUR DRUG WAR HAS CAUSED ALL OF THE PROBLEMS THAT IT PURPORTS TO SOLVE, AND THEN SOME.
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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. (For proof of that latter charge, check out how the US and UK have criminalized the substances that William James himself told us to study in order to understand reality.) It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions (like the Vedic), Nazifies the English language (referring to folks who emulate drug-loving Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin as "scumbags") and militarizes police forces nationwide (resulting in gestapo SWAT teams breaking into houses of peaceable Americans and shouting "GO GO GO!").
(Speaking of Nazification, L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates thought that drug users should be shot. What a softie! The real hardliners are the William Bennetts of the world who want drug users to be beheaded instead. That will teach them to use time-honored plant medicine of which politicians disapprove! Mary Baker Eddy must be ecstatic in her drug-free heaven, as she looks down and sees this modern inquisition on behalf of the drug-hating principles that she herself maintained. I bet she never dared hope that her religion would become the viciously enforced religion of America, let alone of the entire freakin' world!)
In short, the drug war 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.
PPS Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
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
Bache, Christopher "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven" 2019 Park Street Press
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
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
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
Whitaker, Robert "Mad in America"2002 Perseus Publishing
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.
