an open letter to the CBS affiliate in Charlottesville, Virginia
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 17, 2022
i 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 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.
The Links Police
Pull over to the side of the web page: topic-related links coming through viz. the media and the way they misunderstand the Drug War:
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.
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.
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.
Michael Pollan is the Leona Helmsley of the Drug War. He uses outlawed drugs freely while failing to support the re-legalization of Mother Nature. Drug laws are apparently for the little people.
But that's the whole problem with Robert Whitaker's otherwise wonderful critique of Big Pharma. Like almost all non-fiction authors today, he reckons without the drug war, which gave Big Pharma a monopoly in the first place.
Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
I passed a sign that says "Trust Trump." What does that mean? Trust him to crack down on his opposition using the U.S. Army? Or trust him not to do all the anti-American things that he's saying he's going to do.
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.
MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. The FDA: these are the people that think Electro Shock Therapy cannot be used often enough! What sick priorities.
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)
i there.
Pull over to the side of the web page: topic-related links coming through viz. the media and the way they misunderstand the Drug War:
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)