To End America's Christian Science War on Plant Medicine
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 3, 2020
ee 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.
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 MAPS (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 brain 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.
Christian Science
On a superficial level, Christian Science may be seen as a drug-hating religion and so its very existence tends to support the effort of drug warriors to outlaw godsend psychoactive medicines. On a deeper level, however, the religion's founder Mary Baker-Eddy was fighting not so much against drugs as against the failure of modern science to acknowledge the power of the human mind. In Mary's case, of course, this was the mind as influenced by Jesus Christ, but yet she recognized a principle with which even a non-believer can agree and which, moreover, is clearly true in light of drug user reports from the Vedic days to the present: namely, that the human mind has a great as-yet untapped power to control one's outlook on life and to therefore positively affect overall human health to some as-yet undetermined degree. Mary does seem to have overestimated the mind's ability to cure the body, of course, but it is worth noting in her defense that the government has outlawed the very research that would be required to determine exactly where the line should be drawn between the mind-curable condition and that which is beyond the help of this sort of holistic healing.
We would need to be able to use psychoactive medicines freely in order to generate the sort of user reports that could help us answer such questions adequately. And this would be research of the greatest philosophical importance, because it would essentially be a search into the true nature of mind-body dualism.
Mind-body dualism is like the weather when it comes to the field of philosophy: everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Well, here is a chance for philosophers to launch a first-hand investigation of the interaction between mind and body and to thereby determine the nature of each -- as well as the nature of the interactive whole which they in some sense comprise. Philosophers just have to decide: Do they want to perform the kind of hands-on philosophic research that William James advocated viz. altered states, or do they want to keep pretending that the drug war does not exist and that it has no downsides for philosophical research. For the opposite is so obviously true: namely, that drug prohibition forbids us from performing the kind of research that could blow the whole "mind-body" problem wide open from the western point of view and so inspire whole new fields of research.
We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.
In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.
NOTICE OF SCAM
You may have seen messages from a so-called DEA, purporting to tell you that drugs have no positive uses. This is a SCAM. All substances have potential positive uses at some dose, for some reason, in some circumstance.
Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
Drug warriors have harnessed the perfect storm. Prohibition caters to the interests of law enforcement, psychotherapy, Big Pharma, demagogues, puritans, and materialist scientists, who believe that consciousness is no big "whoop" and that spiritual states are just flukes.
"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.
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.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, What You Can Do: To End America's Christian Science War on Plant Medicine, published on October 3, 2020 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
ee 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.)
You have been reading an article entitled, What You Can Do: To End America's Christian Science War on Plant Medicine, published on October 3, 2020 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
