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 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."
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 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, which has addicted 1 in 4 American women to Big Pharma meds, some of which are harder to kick than heroin.
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 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
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 year1, 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 The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton2," 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" 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. Alexander Shulgin synthesized hundreds of such drugs that inspired and elated without causing dependency or addiction3.
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 about the hateful hypocrisy of the War on Drugs.
Mass Media and Drugs
The media have done all they can to support the drug war by holding the use of outlawed substances to safety standards that are never applied to any other risky activity on earth, meanwhile ignoring the fact that prohibition encourages ignorance and leads to contaminated drug supply. Thousands of American young people die each month because of unregulated supply and ignorance, not from drugs themselves.
The media also supports the drug war by failing to hold it accountable for all the problems that it causes. Just read any article on inner-city shootings -- today's journalists will trace the problem to a lack of jobs or to global warming, to anything but the drug war which incentivized violence in the first place. As for violence overseas, we're told that it's caused by evil rotten drug cartels -- without any acknowledgement that it was American drug policy that created those cartels out of whole cloth, just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia here in the States.
Meanwhile, the media have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's fentanyl... It's all part of the DEA's tried-and-true formula to stay relevant, as academic Philip Jenkins clearly demonstrates in "Synthetic Panics": Take a local drug problem and publicize it so that it goes national. Then work with a film crew at "48 Hours" to show that the drug in question threatens the white American middle class. Then go to Congress, hat in hand, and accept billions to 'solve' the latest drug problem.
And Americans fall for it every time. In fact, their gullibility seems to be increasing over time. They love to hate drugs, so much so that drugs have become the new horror trope. Recent movies have taken to personifying "evil" drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. It's sad that America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs -- and the media can take much of the blame.
I personally hate beets and I could make a health argument against their legality. Beets can kill for those allergic to them. Sure, it's a rare condition, but since when has that stopped a prohibitionist from screaming bloody murder?
Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.
When people tell us there's nothing to be gained from using mind-improving drugs, they are embarrassing themselves. Users benefit from such drugs precisely to the extent that they are educated and open-minded. Loudmouth abstainers are telling us that they lack these traits.
The Partnership for a Death Free America is launching a campaign to celebrate the 50th year of Richard Nixon's War on Drugs. We need to give credit where credit's due for the mass arrest of minorities, the inner city gun violence and the civil wars that it's generated overseas.
Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?
The drug war is a slow-motion coup against democracy.
There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."
The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.
The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.
The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.
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, Why CBS 19 should stop supporting the Drug War: an open letter to the CBS affiliate in Charlottesville, Virginia, published on May 17, 2022 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, Why CBS 19 should stop supporting the Drug War: an open letter to the CBS affiliate in Charlottesville, Virginia, published on May 17, 2022 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)
