Why CBS 19 should stop supporting the Drug War

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Why CBS 19 should stop supporting the Drug War

an open letter to the CBS affiliate in Charlottesville, Virginia

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 17, 2022

2025 update

Hi there.

I just overheard your station promoting an upcoming concert that will be promoting the War on Drugs.

I urge you not to promote such concerts for the following reasons:

1) Americans should be educated about substances, not taught to fear them.
2) The Drug War killed almost 800 blacks in Chicago alone last year by gunfire. And as Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014: "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence ¹ that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist.²"
3) The Drug War makes it criminal for scientists to do their work.
4) The Drug War outlaws the mere study of plants that could help cure Alzheimer's ³ disease and autism, not to mention end school shootings (as could the therapeutic use of the drug Ecstasy by folks prone to violence).
5) The Drug War led to the psychiatric pill mill ⁴ , which has addicted 1 in 4 American women to Big Pharma ⁵ ⁶ meds, some of which are harder to kick than heroin ⁷.
6) The Drug War has forced American soldiers to go for almost 40 years now without MDMA , a super-safe medicine that is a godsend for fighting PTSD.
7) The Drug War, as we speak, is causing civil wars in South America and empowering a self-styled "Drug War Hitler" in the Philippines.
8) HG Wells and Jules Verne loved coca wine, Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius enjoyed opium . Plato's views of the afterlife were inspired by psychedelics (at Eleusis). And the entire Vedic-Hindu religion was inspired by the psychoactive effects of the Soma plant.

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.

Closer to home, the DEA stomped onto Monticello ⁸ in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in the name of the Drug War, thereby overthrowing the natural law upon which Jefferson founded America. (Natural Law tells us that some rights cannot be justifiably abridged, like the right to what John Locke called "the use of the land and all that lies therein.)

By the way, the Drug War event that you were promoting was being sponsored by Bud Light. How ironic. Alcohol kills 95,000 a year in the US, and yet you want kids to say no to plant medicine that grows at their very feet. That's indoctrination, not patriotism. Sounds like Bud Light doesn't want competition for the shabby self-transcendence that its tasteless brew provides.

Facts not fear. Education not incarceration.

Please stop promoting the hateful Drug War, which has militarized police forces around the world and which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some.

Think of Thomas Jefferson, and stop promoting the anti-American War on Drugs. Just say no to the violence-causing Drug War ideology of substance demonization.

PS If we have to have a Drug War, let's focus on the biggest killers. Let's throw anyone in jail who has the least trace of tobacco or alcohol in their systems, drugs which, combined, kill a half a million people in the US every year. Let's deny such people jobs and government loans. Let's confiscate their houses. In other words, let's give the Drug Warriors a taste of their own racist medicine.

Author's Follow-up: February 4, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

I wrote the above letter to CBS after a visit to my elderly mother in hospice, where she was suffering unnecessarily thanks to the outlawing of godsend medicines.

Incidentally, isn't it the mother of all irony when the Budweiser corporation sponsors a "just say no" rally? The corporation's product results in 178,000 deaths per year ⁹, and yet they want us to say no to substances that have inspired entire religions.

William Brereton would have appreciated that irony. He frequently contrasted opium with liquor in his treatise entitled ¹⁰," in answer to the Anti-Opium Society of England when they first started spreading extravagant lies about the smoking of opium in China.

Brereton pointed out that Chinese opium smokers did not beat their wives, that they were never kept from performing their occupations thanks to opium , nor was their health ravaged by the drug, despite English lies to the contrary.

But the very word "opium ¹¹ " is used as a conjuring spell these days to summon up all that is evil about drugs. So let's think of phenethylamines instead like MDMA ¹² . Alexander Shulgin synthesized hundreds of such drugs that inspired and elated without causing dependency or addiction ¹³.

But Budweiser corp. would prefer that young people keep dying from alcohol -- while turning up their self-righteous snouts at the modern government-created boogieman called "drugs."

Here's a comedy routine that illustrates what's wrong with the Drug War -- and the hypocritical folks at CBS and Budweiser who support it. As for the Christian Science rallies mentioned above: I wonder how many young people have failed to show up at such events because they were killed en route by a drunk driver.

Click below for a short comedy routine ¹⁴ about the hateful hypocrisy of the War on Drugs.

Mass Media and Drugs

Notes:

1: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
2: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
3: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
4: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
5: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
6: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
7: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
8: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
9: Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use in the United States CDC, 2022 (up)
10: “The Truth about Opium, by William H. Brereton—a Project Gutenberg EBook.” 2024. Gutenberg.org. 2024. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44043/44043-h/44043-h.htm. (up)
11: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
12: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
13: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
14: COPS PRESENTS the top 10 traffic stops of 2023 DWP (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Musk and co. want to make us more robot-like with AI, when they should be trying to make us more human-like with sacred medicine. Only humans can gain creativity from plant medicine. All AI can do is harvest the knowledge that eventually results from that creativity.

Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.

I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.

Today's Washington Post reports that "opioid pills shipped" DROPPED 45% between 2011 and 2019..... while fatal overdoses ROSE TO RECORD LEVELS! Prohibition is PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.

Now the US is bashing the Honduran president for working with "drug cartels." Why don't we just be honest and say why we're REALLY upset with the guy? Drugs is just the excuse, as always, now what's the real reason? Stop using the drug war to disguise American foreign policy.

Despite the 50 year-long war on drugs, the global cocaine supply has grown by 400%. --Elma Mrkonjic

There are definitely good scientists out there. Unfortunately, they are either limited by their materialist orthodoxy into showing only specific microscopic evidence or they abandon materialism for the nonce and talk the common psychological sense that we all understand.

The MindMed company (makers of LSD Lite) tell us that euphoria and visions are "adverse effects": that's not science, that's an arid materialist philosophy that does not believe in spiritual transcendence.

I just can't believe... [image]

Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war: "clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."

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

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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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