To End America's Christian Science War on Plant Medicine
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 3, 2020
See what I did there? I titled this article without even using the word "drugs," since that word itself is a Drug Warrior creation, at least in the hypocritically selective way that it is used in 21st-century America. (See "The Word 'Drugs' is a Political Term" for more on this seldom-mentioned outrage.)
But if you want to fight the REAL drug problem... (the fact that America has made a superstitious scapegoat out of this thing that they call "drugs," thereby creating a whole new movie genre worth of unnecessary violence both at home and abroad)... then here are some ideas about how you can fight back.
E-mail the Monticello Foundation to protest how they betrayed Thomas Jefferson's natural-law legacy when they let the DEA confiscate the garden-loving Jefferson's poppy plants. (See "How the Monticello 1 Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987.")
Submit a letter of protest with the next unconstitutional urine test that you're forced to take in order to feed your family. (See "Protest Drug Testing Now.")
Support organizations like MAPS2 (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and the Drug Policy Alliance.
Stay tuned to this page for more ideas about how you can fight back against America's state religion of Christian Science, aka the Drug War, coming up in 2021.
Finally, check back here in January 2021 in order to purchase my Drug War Comic Book, which satirically skewers the Drug War from every imaginable angle - plus several unimaginable angles as well, judging by the fact that I seem to be the first to have noticed some of the nonsense that my political cartoons point out.
No, this is not just some shameless plug on my part in order to sell books: this is a calculated scheme to place my philosophical broadsides (now in convenient cartoon format!) on coffee tables around the world, so the next time that you're entertaining guests and they start spouting Drug War lies (like the "fact" that substances fry the brain3 the minute that they are outlawed by racist politicians...) you can simply draw attention to those cartoons of mine that rebut the propaganda in question.
Tired of dull coffee klatches? Set my Drug War Comic Book out on the coffee table and let the feathers fly. If your guests leave in a huff, so what? At least you will now realize that they are part of the problem. But if they're half as intelligent as you think that they are, you should be able to use my book to deprogram them methodically, disabusing them of one drug-war piety after another, until they voluntarily renounce their membership in America's Cult of the Drug War.
What is this comic book of which I speak? Well, I'm glad you asked. Below is a sneak preview of the upcoming full-color tome that will finally hold Drug Warriors up to the philosophical ridicule that they so richly deserve.
My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine, 1884
In a free world, almost all depressed individuals could do WITHOUT doctors: these adult human beings could handle their own depression with the informed intermittent use of a wide variety of psychoactive substances.
The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
The war on drugs has destroyed America's faith in the power of education. In fact, it has made us think of education as WRONG in and of itself. It has made us prefer censorship and fear-filled ignorance to education!
Q: Where can you find almost-verbatim copies of the descriptions of religious experiences described by William James? A: In descriptions of user reports of "trips" on drugs ranging from coca to opium, from MDMA to laughing gas.
The goal of drug-law reform should be to outlaw prohibition. Anything short of that, and our basic rights will always be subject to veto by fearmongers. Outlawing prohibition would restore the Natural Law of Jefferson, which the DEA scorned in 1987 with its raid on Monticello.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
Q: Why are we never told about the potential benefits of drugs?
A: Follow the money.
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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