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Virus Update

Keeping track of the dreaded Drug War Virus

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 20, 2020



Just a quick message to let our readership know that we are doing everything we can to fight the Drug War virus. The first and most important step is to recognize the symptoms of an infected person:

1) Pathological obstinacy. Those infected with the Drug War Virus stubbornly fail to recognize that criminalizing medicinal plants is the unconstitutional enforcement of Christian Science with respect to psychological healing.

2) Selective amnesia. Infected persons conveniently "forget" that Mother Nature's plants and fungi are the birth right of every human being under the natural law to which the American Declaration appealed in arguing against British injustice.

3) Logical confusion. The infected person also fails to realize that all the problems of drug abuse are either directly brought about or greatly exacerbated by the Drug War itself.

What can you do?

The key is to practice social distancing. Keep at least 6 feet away from every known or suspected Drug Warrior and their specious arguments. In so doing, you will underscore your contempt for the shoddy reasoning and fascist tendencies apparent in every carrier of the Drug War virus.





June 15, 2022

Not to nitpick, but there's another symptom of the Drug War virus, namely the tendency to forget that HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their best stories while drinking coca wine, that Plato's views of the afterlife were inspired by the psychedelic kykeon at Eleusis, that Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius were big fans of the opium 1 poppy, and that the entire Vedic religion was inspired by psychoactive plant medicine. Then there's the fact that the psychoactive medicine that we demonize today could be used to fight Alzheimer's 2 disease, fight depression, increase worker productivity, increase one's love of music, increase one's appreciation of the natural world, etc.

If folks forget all this, it is a sure sign that they have contracted the Drug War virus.

In other words the Drug War virus is far more insidious than anyone has yet to fully appreciate. So remember to social distance yourself -- and to buy a mask so that you can place it over the infected person's mouth the next time these anti-nature blasphemers start demonizing psychoactive botanicals without regard for the context of use.

Author's Follow-up: August 14, 2022



A new more virulent strain of the virus has been reported in Children of the Drug War, a chilling collection of drug-war essays compiled by Damon Barrett 3 . It appears that once-civilized countries are now denying morphine 4 to children in hospice, in servile and dogmatic fealty to the drug-war ideology which says that such demonized substances can have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, for any reason whatsoever. In other words, the virus is causing severe neurological problems in those it attacks -- otherwise so-called civilized human beings would never be so heartless as to knowingly allow dying children to suffer severe ongoing pain for no good reason whatsoever.









Notes for essay entitled Virus Update: Keeping track of the dreaded Drug War Virus:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
2: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
3: Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Policies on Young People Barrett, Damon, IDEBATE Press, 2011 (up)
4: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




UNESCO celebrates the healing practices of the Kallawaya people of South America. What hypocrisy! UNESCO supports a drug war that makes some of those practices illegal!

In a free future, newspapers will have philosophers on their staffs to ensure that said papers are not inciting consequence-riddled hysteria through a biased coverage of drug-related mishaps.

Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!

The drug war is is a multi-billion-dollar campaign to enforce the attitude of the Francisco Pizarro's of the world when it comes to non-western medicine. It is the apotheosis of the colonialism that most Americans claim to hate.

If opium and cocaine were legal again in America, the healthcare industry would suddenly have to undergo extensive downsizing, as Americans were once again put in charge of their own health.

Many people take antidepressants believing their depression has a biochemical cause. Research does not support this belief. --Dr. Noam Shpancer, Psychology Today

We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).

In response to a tweet that "some drugs cannot be used wisely for recreational purposes": The problem is, most people draw such conclusions based on general impressions inspired by a media that demonizes drugs. In reality, it's hard to imagine a drug that cannot theoretically be used wisely for recreation at some dose, in some context.

It is evil to give the depressed drugs to help them die while barring them from using drugs that could make them wish to live.

Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."


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






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Book Cover

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

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Book Cover

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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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Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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