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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 (up)


Mass Media and Drugs




Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice. The media has played its role with movies like "Running with the DEA," "The Crisis" and "The Runner." In the first of these three, the DEA are the "good guys" for murdering a suspect in cold blood. In the second, the DEA plants evidence to cover up the murder of a drug suspect by an indignant mother. And in the third, a white detective stages a raid that kills a young Black teenager that said detective refers to as "a waste of space."

The Drug War is all about making us hate -- making us hate anybody except for the folks that brought about the violence and drug problems in the first place: the damned prohibitionists who, having failed to outlaw liquor, turned their scapegoating on every less dangerous substance in the world.

Meanwhile, the media have done all they can to support this drug war by holding the use of outlawed substances to safety standards that are never applied to any other risky activity on earth, meanwhile ignoring the fact that prohibition encourages ignorance and leads to contaminated drug supply. Thousands of American young people die each month because of unregulated supply and ignorance, not from drugs themselves.

The media also supports the drug war by failing to hold it accountable for all the problems that it causes. Just read any article on inner-city shootings -- today's journalists will trace the problem to a lack of jobs or to global warming, to anything but the drug war which incentivized violence in the first place. As for violence overseas, we're told that it's caused by evil rotten drug cartels -- without any acknowledgement that it was American drug policy that created those cartels out of whole cloth, just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia here in the States.

Meanwhile, the media have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's fentanyl... It's all part of the DEA's tried-and-true formula to stay relevant, as academic Philip Jenkins clearly demonstrates in "Synthetic Panics": Take a local drug problem and publicize it so that it goes national. Then work with a film crew at "48 Hours" to show that the drug in question threatens the white American middle class. Then go to Congress, hat in hand, and accept billions to 'solve' the latest drug problem.

And Americans fall for it every time. In fact, their gullibility seems to be increasing over time. They love to hate drugs, so much so that drugs have become the new horror trope. Recent movies have taken to personifying "evil" drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. It's sad that America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs -- and the media can take much of the blame.

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  • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    Musk vies with his fellow materialists in his attempt to diss humans as insignificant. But we are not insignificant. The very term "insignificant" is a human creation. Consciousness rules. Indeed, consciousness makes the rules. Without us, there would only be inchoate particles.

    Why don't those politicians understand what hateful colonialism they are practicing? Psychedelics have been used for millennia by the tribes that the west has conquered -- now we won't even let folks talk honestly about such indigenous medicines.

    Drugs are not the enemy, ignorance is -- the ignorance that the Drug War encourages by teaching us to fear drugs rather than to understand them.

    I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.

    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.

    Drug prohibition began as a racist attempt to prevent so-called "miscegenation." The racist's fear was not that a white woman would use opium or marijuana or cocaine, but that she might actually fall in love with a Chinese, Hispanic or Black person respectively.

    Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.

    M. Pollan says "not so fast" when it comes to drug re-legalization. I say FAST? I've gone a whole lifetime w/o access to Mother Nature's plants. How can a botanist approve of that? Answer: By ignoring all legalization stakeholders except for the kids whom we refuse to educate.

    Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.

    Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.


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






    Prohibitionists Never Learn
    A Dope Comedy Routine About Drugs


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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