he US Holocaust Museum displays a sign on the wall titled "Early Warning Signs of Fascism," and it reads like a checklist for the war on drugs.
1 Disdain for human rights.Check. It's no coincidence that one of the cops who killed George FLoyd shouted 'Just say no to drugs' during the crime, because the Drug War has always given them carte blanche to crack down on minorities, just as it gives the US military the green light to target Latinos in South America
2 Identification of enemies as a unifying cause.Check. Those who sell mother nature's plant medicine are literally considered to be vermin. In "Four Good Days," the wine-swilling housewife played by Glenn Close looks at a teenage "dealer" and says, "He should be shot!"
3 Supremacy of the military.Check. The Drug War has militarized police forces around the globe
4 Controlled mass media.Check. The media companies -- like Gannett and Hearst -- who own local papers nationwide never even mention the Drug War when discussing inner-city gun violence, even though it was the Drug War that turned inner cities into armed camps.
5 Obsession with national security.Check. The Drug Warrior tells us that our national security is threatened because plant medicines are being shipped from overseas and so we're told we have to travel there and burn the plants in question. Given that reasoning, Islam should feel free to come stateside and burn our wine vineyards.
6 Religion and government intertwined. Check. The Drug War is the enforcement of Christian Science with respect to psychoactive medicine, since it tells us that such medicines are morally bad, even though such medicines have inspired entire religions.
7 Corporate power protected.Check. The Drug War protects the liquor industry, Big Pharma and psychiatry from competition.
8 Labor power suppressed. Check. The Drug War humiliates and imposes unconstitutionally upon workers by forcing them to urinate for their billionaire employers, most of whom would be indignant to be required to urinate themselves, and some of whom use the very illicit substances that their drug-checking techs are looking for. Nor is the employer checking for impairment, but rather for mere traces of the substances that the Drug War tells us to hate.
9 Disdain for intellectuals and the arts. Check. Opium and coca have inspired western writers for centuries, as in the works of Lovecraft, Poe, HG Wells, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander Dumas and Henrik Ibsen, and yet the Drug War associates such use with "scumbags" and "vermin."
10 Obsession with crime and punishment.Check. America has the largest per capita prison population in the world, with the majority of inmates being sentenced for crimes that never existed before the war on drugs.
11 Rampant cronyism & corruption.Check. The Drug War incentivizes corruption for the same reason that it creates gangs and cartels out of whole cloth: because it creates enormous financial incentives to violate the draconian drug laws.
12 Fraudulent elections.Check. The Drug War "gave" the 2016 election to Donald Trump by removing hundreds of thousands of minority voters from the voting rolls. How? By charging them with "felony drug offenses," typically for selling godsend plant medicine of which botanically clueless politicians disapprove.
I think the only 'signs of early fascism' that I missed were "nationalism" and "rampant sexism," but the Drug War is no slacker in these categories either. The Drug War is nationalist beyond belief, in that it legislates America's own prudish Christian Science morality to the entire world! As for "rampant sexism," it should be noted that the Drug War outlaws precisely those substances that promote the stereotypically feminine conditions of peace, love and understanding. Suppressed drugs like MDMA and psilocybin could help hate-filled humanity live with its hot-headed self, but the Drug War prefers SWAT raids and prison time over peace, love and understanding. And if that's not enough machismo for you, the Drug War, even as we speak, is causing a devastating civil war in Mexico, meanwhile corrupting local and national government through and through as it does so.
The only problem with the 12 'signs of early fascism' is that the word 'early' is misplaced when it comes to the Drug War. America has been on this fascist path ever since 1914, when sinophobic politicians first criminalized a plant medicine, in violation of the natural law upon which America was founded. America long since missed its opportunity to recognize the "early" signs of this fascism, and we are now in the latter stages of this disease, in which we have been so hoodwinked by the Christian Science propaganda of the Drug War that our scientists willingly ignore forbidden substances in their research -- and worse yet, they do not even recognize this as the ideological self-censorship that it is, even though as scientists they are duty-bound to disclose their working premises in every paper that they write.
The Links Police
All right, buddy, do you know why I stopped you? That's right, because the Drug War gives me carte blanche to be a noxious busybody. But I also thought you might be interested in the following additional essays touching on fascism -- and also the need for the Holocaust Museum to speak out against the same -- at long last, be it said!!!
The list of early signs of fascism should also include the following:
13 The reliance on newspeak.Check. The Drug War owes its staying power to the politically created pejorative term "drugs." Prior to the Drug War, "drugs" included everything from sugar to magic mushrooms, from cafe to coca. After 1914, the term was redefined to mean the following: "substances for which there are no positive uses: not for you, not for me, not in any doses, at any time, in any place, ever." Of course, there are no such substances in the real world: inanimate substances are only good or bad with respect to how they are used and why. Even the deadly Botox has positive uses. So the whole Drug War is based on this superstitious Christian Science lie, that substances that have inspired entire religions have no positive uses whatsoever. Yet Americans agree in large numbers to this proposition, that we should fear and loathe "drugs," rather than understand them -- indeed, that merely understanding such devil substances is heresy in the age of a war on drugs.
14 The reliance on fearmongering.Check. The Drug War discourages understanding of drugs, in fact it prohibits it, based on the charter of the ONDCP, which tells us that safe and positive uses of drugs must not even be discussed. Instead of educating us about psychoactive substances, the Drug Warrior tells us: "Be afraid! Be very afraid!"
15 Indoctrination of the young.Check. The Drug War enrolls grade-schoolers in "just say no" clubs, where they are encouraged to fear and loathe the kinds of psychoactive substances that have inspired entire religions in the past. This is Christian Science indoctrination, not education.
Author's Follow-up: June 5, 2023
For these reasons and more, I have repeatedly written to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., urging them to denounce prohibition and the Drug War, not least because it has led to the election of fascists like Donald Trump by throwing Trump's opponents in jail by the hundreds of thousands.
But, of course, it's much easier to see past outrages than to criticize contemporaneous ones. That's why the Museum has not yet deemed it prudent to so much as acknowledge my messages on these topics, let alone to offer its support in protecting modern-day liberty. The motto seems to be: "never again, unless speaking up could impact me negatively in any way or make me appear to differ with the modern Christian Science Weltanschauung."
5% of proceeds from the sale of the above product will go toward getting Brian a decent haircut for once. Honestly. 9% will go toward shoes. 50% will go toward miscellaneous. 9% of the remainder will go toward relaxation, which could encompass anything from a spin around town to an outdoor barbecue at Brian's brother's house in Stanardsville (both gas and the ice-cream cake that Brian usually supplies).
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
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.
he US Holocaust Museum displays a sign on the wall titled "Early Warning Signs of Fascism," and it reads like a checklist for the war on drugs.
