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Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM

an open letter to station manager Joel Oxley

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 6, 2023



Dear Mr. Oxley:

The following headline is extremely misleading: 

Marijuana use raises risk of heart attack, heart failure and stroke, studies say


When you read the article, you find that these symptoms are associated with the smoking of ANY substance.

It's clear that the author wanted to damn marijuana and so wrote the headline accordingly.

If accuracy and usefulness had been in the author's mind, the headline would have read as follows:

"Edible marijuana is safest way to enjoy cannabis"


But the Drug War is all about demonizing Mother Nature's drugs.

Please vet your news stories for drug-bashing headlines like this. Such articles promote the prohibition mentality that has turned America into a police state and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America, all WITHOUT ending drug use, but rather increasing the use of DEADLY DRUGS by forcing users to employ product of which the quality and dose are uncertain.



Author's Follow-up: November 6, 2023



Look, there's nothing wrong about reporting downsides to any drug. But until drugs are depoliticized and legalized, the stories about downsides represent pure propaganda, even if they're true. Why is this? Because the establishment is determined to cite ONLY downsides -- and so all such reports are propaganda when considered collectively. They never consider the value of being relaxed, the value of having a break from full-on sobriety, the value of treating pain, etc. They simply toss mud at the picture of marijuana and hope that some of it sticks. The collective propaganda is exacerbated by the establishment's refusal to recognize the value of a drug that helps some people forswear alcohol, a far deadlier drug than any, if mere statistics tell us anything at all.

Author's Follow-up: November 10, 2023

In fact, all arguments of prohibitionists are based on the false idea that there is no rational reason for "drug use." It's as if the prohibitionists are channeling Dr. Spock. No, there would be no reason for psychoactive drug use if we were all Dr. Spock from Star Trek, oblivious to the yearnings of the heart for self-transcendence, but the inconvenient truth is that we are actually human beings and that consciousness counts, notwithstanding the dogmatic myopia of materialists on this point.

So we can say of prohibitionists what William Brereton said of the critics of opium 1 : "They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts."

Finally, the decision to use any drug is based on a cost/benefit analysis. And as long as prohibitionists ignore all the benefits, one cannot help but be suspicious of the long lists of costs that they are forever compiling. Nor can science help them in their campaign of substance demonization, because the decision to use any psychoactive drug is based on a cost/benefit analysis that only the user can make, for only the user knows his or her own goals in life, how much they value transcendence, how much they believe with William James, for instance, that we must study other worlds that are not visible to our senses in the sober state.












Notes:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




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.

We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.

America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own depression by making opium and cocaine illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.

Even if the FDA approved MDMA today, it would only be available for folks specifically pronounced to have PTSD by materialist doctors, as if all other emotional issues are different problems and have to be studied separately. That's just ideological foot-dragging.

Drugs like opium and cocaine 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."

Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks. People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!

Jim Hogshire described sleep cures that make physical withdrawal from opium close to pain-free. As for "psychological addiction," there are hundreds of elating drugs that could be used to keep the ex-user's mind from morbidly focusing on a drug whose use has become problematic for them.

Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!

Pundits tell us that there are medical reasons not to "snort" cocaine. So what? There are medical reasons not to drive a car: you may have an accident. The question is: does cocaine use or car driving make sense in a given case! Details matter!

FDA drug approval is a farce when it comes to psychoactive medicine. The FDA ignores all the obvious benefits and pretends that to prove efficacy, they need "scientific" evidence. That's scientism, not science.


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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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