just read a tweet in which a certain MLLanzillotta1 claims that he is not pro-drug, he's simply "pro-pragmatism."
This is the usual line of the bamboozled libertarian. They believe with the conservatives that there are, indeed, these horrible things out there called "drugs" that should not be used, but they acknowledge that people are going to use them so (sigh!) we should do our best to help them as needed.
I couldn't agree less with this approach to opposing the Drug War.
Here is the reply I posted on Twitter:
I am pro-drugs, because right now we fry the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them chew the coca leaf. Sobriety is no goal in itself. Most suicides could pass a drug test. The idea that drugs are "bad" is Christian Science.
Folks like MLLanzillotta1 fail to grasp the fact that "drugs" is a political term, not a scientific one, and that medicines like coca and shrooms have inspired entire religions. Nor do they realize that the meds that we classify as "drugs" can do extraordinary things, like cure stuttering overnight (as in the case of Paul Stamets and shrooms), help us envision the DNA helix (Francis Crick and LSD) and inspire great stories (HG Wells and Coca Wine). "Drugs," as MLLanzillotta1 calls them (or rather slanders them) inspired Plato's view of the afterlife. For "drugs" is just modern slang for "substances of which botanically clueless politicians disapprove."
But MLLanzillotta1 has plenty of company. Whenever I talk about such things, I try not to get too excited from the favorable reactions I receive, because I know that most folks hate prohibition for the wrong reason. They think it was a good idea that does not work, or that prohibition is cruel as currently implemented. But they are usually completely ignorant of the fact that the very term "drugs" as used today is a modern invention which proposes a sort of pharmacological dualism, in which we have the evil "drugs" on one side of the extant pharmacopoeia and the sainted "meds" on the other, what Julian Buchanan refers to as drug apartheid.
ML and company are victims of Drug War propaganda. They've been indoctrinated to "hate drugs." They may well have received a teddy bear from DARE as a child for saying no to Mother Nature's godsend medicines. The media then shielded them from stories about POSITIVE uses of "drugs," by featuring "users" as scumbags. We don't see Jules Verne drinking coca wine on TV and in movies: instead we see a scroungy looking "bad guy" in denim "snorting blow" under a dangling light bulb in a cellar with a prostitute on his lap. Then we check the urine of ML and company, not to see if they're impaired, but merely to see if they are Christian Science heretics, using substances of which religion founder Mary Baker Eddy would disapprove.
No wonder ML says to himself: "Yeah, drugs are really bad, indeed!"
But with uninformed friends like these in the anti-prohibition movement, who needs enemies?
I am DEFINITELY pro-drugs -- because it is Big Pharma's "meds," not "drugs," that have addicted me for life, ML.
Meanwhile it's DRUGS like MDMA and psilocybin that could help bring about world peace and end school shootings.
Who is not in favor of that?
Or would we prefer nuclear annihilation to legalizing MDMA, in the same way that we currently prefer frying the brains of the depressed to legalizing the coca leaf?
No Drug War Keychains The key to ending the Drug War is to spread the word about the fact that it is Anti-American, unscientific and anti-minority (for starters)
Monticello Betrayed Thomas Jefferson By demonizing plant medicine, the Drug War overthrew the Natural Law upon which Jefferson founded America -- and brazenly confiscated the Founding Father's poppy plants in 1987, in a symbolic coup against Jeffersonian freedoms.
The Drug War Censors Science Scientists: It's time to wake up to the fact that you are censored by the drug war. Drive the point home with these bumper stickers.
You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.
A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.
The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.
It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)
If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.
PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley.
Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)
Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.
just read a tweet in which a certain MLLanzillotta1 claims that he is not pro-drug, he's simply "pro-pragmatism."
