She seems to mean well and she argues against harsh penalties for drug possession, etc., but like almost every other liberal on the planet, she fails to grasp the full evil of the Drug War, writing instead as if the Drug War was a good idea which cannot work or which needs to be tweaked significantly in order to be fair. To which I say, no: the Drug War needs to be eliminated root and branch. It has no right to succeed. Points that I attempt to make in the comment that I have posted below.
Karolina appears to say the following: yes, drugs are bad, but people are going to use them anyway. But what are drugs? They are often just "plant medicines," albeit ones that politicians dislike and have criminalized in order to punish their opponents and remove them from the voting rolls (as was the case with the fiercest Drug Warrior of all time, former President Richard Nixon).
And why is it morally good for me to avoid plant medicines? Those who think that I should do so are just asserting their Christian Science prejudice on this topic. There is nothing moral about avoiding mother nature's godsends, no matter how hard government tries to demonize them - especially when that same government wilfully overlooks the fact that 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma antidepressants, many of which are harder to "kick" than heroin (source: Julie Holland).
Moreover, Karolina seems to assume that the only possible use of mother nature's psychoactive plant medicines is to get a cheap high, but that is just Drug Warrior propaganda. HG Wells and Jules Verne praised coca wine for its benefits in helping them focus and write imaginative stories. Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius used opium to increase productivity. Francis Crick used plenty of psychedelics to help him figure out the DNA helix. And the age-old Vedic religion was founded to worship the psychedelic insights provided by a plant-based medicine known as soma.
Liberals don't realize that 'drugs' is a pejorative term for 'mother nature's plant medicine' and that the Drug War is therefore Christian Science Sharia.
It is therefore simply Christian Science indoctrination for adults to tell kids that plant medicines have nothing to offer them as adults. The government can force us to say that to kids, but that's not science at work, it's politics - politics inspired by a Christian Science contempt for the value of mother nature's plant medicines. If we're going to warn kids about psychoactive snares, we should be telling them about the great antidepressant addiction of our time - but we are hypocritically silent about that, and ignore it completely, while yet criminalizing mother nature's bounty.
I appreciate that Karolina dislikes harsh drug laws, but I think she could do more to attack them if she realized that the word "drugs" is often just a pejorative political term for "mother nature's plants."
Why should we recognize that? Because Donald Trump is getting ready to start executing folks for selling "drugs." The best way to stop him is to point out that they're not selling drugs: in many cases they're simply selling "mother nature's plant medicines" - albeit the ones that politicians have decided to criminalize, usually for cynical political motives. These are medicines that no government has the right to deny us, since they grow at our very feet. In fact, to deprive us of such plant medicine is a violation of the natural law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. That's why Jefferson was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the garden-loving Jefferson's poppy plants.
May 26, 2022
The very title of Karolina's article would not make sense unless one accepted the pejorative meaning of the word 'drugs' that was created in the 20th century by Drug Warriors themselves. Just to ask such a question is to profess loyalty to Drug War ideology. If you had asked Marco Polo if he was going to say no to drugs, he would considerate it a crazy question. "No," he would say, "I'm not going to say no to sugar, nor to coffee." If he visited us via time machine and you wanted a good modern answer to that question, you'd have to alert him to the fact that "drugs" now refers to psychoactive medicines of which pharmaceutically clueless politicians disapprove. At which point, he'd tell the modern world and their Drug Warriors to go to hell, since he'd finally realize that the Drug Warrior wished to deprive him of the wonders of the poppy plant, of which Polo was a big fan.
The whole problem is that such Drug War ideology blinds us to godsends that could even end school shootings. Drugs like Ecstasy and psilocybin can be used therapeutically to give a natural-born hater a feeling of love for their fellow human beings. If Americans were not blinded by the Drug War ideology of substance demonization, we would embrace such medicines as a way to end tragedies like that in Uvalde and Newtown -- or at least to make them far less frequent.
Author's Follow-up: May 1, 2023
I wrote this almost three years ago now, when I was still a kid. Reading this now at age 64, I realize that I should have written that I am a liberal AS OPPOSED TO a neo-liberal. You know, neo-liberals: those erstwhile hippies who disastrously embraced Reagan in the late '70s, a president whose anti-scientific efforts at substance demonization locked up hundreds of thousands of blacks and removed America's eyes from the prize when it came to social justice -- and empowered the Francis Fukuyama's of the world, white pundits who, despite their seeming intellect, are 100% blind to all the endless downsides of prohibition, including the fact that it causes wars overseas, militarizes police forces and causes endless "drug" deaths by putting profit-driven dealers in charge of supply -- all in quest of the Quixotic and tyrannical help of getting everyone to think like a materialist and capitalistic Christian: i.e. to renounce their desire for self-transcendence. Neo-liberals are also more than happy to urinate for their government: just ask them where and when. Though most of those who call themselves neo-liberals are in the higher classes and thus have positions where they make YOU piss, not the other way around. You know you've made it in America when you can force your workers to piss, while yet declaring the hands-off sanctity of "your own private urine."
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.
have nothing against liberals. I consider myself to be one. But they never seem to really understand the full problem with the Drug War. If you want to read a typical liberal article on this subject, check out Karolina Zieba's post entitled "In case you choose not to say no to drugs, kids," published September 10, 2018, in The Student Newspaper. 
