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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 year9, 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 addiction13.

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.













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: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (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




The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for withholding godsend medicine from the depressed. Here is just one typical drug-user report that appeared in "Pihkal": "A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."

We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.

Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity. It is the outlawing of our right to take care of our own health.

Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!

Even prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. We should not drugs "up or down" any more than we should judge penicillin or aspirin in that way.

Self-medication is not a dirty word. It has always been a fundamental right to take care of one's own health -- until the medical establishment demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.

Wade Davis wrote in Rolling Stone that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?! 178,000 people die from alcohol every year in America alone.

What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.

Most people think that drugs like cocaine, MDMA, LSD and amphetamines can only be used recreationally. WRONG ! This represents a very naive understanding of human psychology. We deny common sense in order to cater to the drug war orthodoxy that "drugs have no benefits."

If there were no other problem with antidepressants, they would be wrong for the simple reason that they make a user dependent for life -- not as a bug (as in drugs like opium) but rather as a feature: that's how they "work," by being administered daily for a lifetime.


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






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Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

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Drama lovers: collect full-cast recordings of classic plays

In my spare time, when I am not shaming drug warriors for their heartless drug policies, I create full-cast recordings of classic plays using the latest in synthetic voices licensed by the Natural Reader company. Snag your copy of my production of Volpone, by Ben Jonson... and follow me on Payhip for more where that came from, including classics like The Post Office, The Double Dealer and The Inspector General. -- Yours in all-too-justified outrage, the Drug War Philosopher @ abolishthedea.com.

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