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Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





June 30, 2020



One of my several shortcomings as a writer -- of which there are no doubt several -- shortcomings I mean, not writers -- is that I assume that my readers know what the hell I'm talking about when they actually do not. Sound familiar, eh? I thus have a tendency to write tersely in cases where a little prolixity would go a long way. Go on, admit it, you were probably thinking the exact same thing, weren't you? Go on, admit it, I won't bite.

2025 Update

With this in mind, I would like to devote this entire post to the task of fleshing out what I mean when I say that America's Drug War represents a kind of Christian Science Sharia—a claim that I have made in passing in at least ten of my essays over the last year, assuming that I was merely stating a commonplace. Then a friend of mine politely pointed out that some of my readers—bless their hearts—might not be familiar with the theology of Christian Science, nay, with the politically charged connotations of the word «sharia» itself as disapprovingly used in the 21st century by a xenophobic Westerner, and that it was therefore incumbent upon me to dilate on the topic at hand.

This task of clarification is crucial because once one understands the statement that «the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia»—the evil of that quixotic project becomes apparent and we develop an immunity to the Drug War propaganda that pervades Western society, not least in the form of cop shows and Drug War movies 1 2 3 4 , both of which promote the once uniquely Western view that Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines can bring about nothing but madness and despair. Briefly then, though hopefully not tersely.

Christian Science is a religion founded in late 19-century America by Mary Baker (aka Mary Baker Eddy), after she discovered what she took to be the overlooked healing power of spirituality as demonstrated by Jesus in the New Testament. She came to believe that physical suffering was an illusion, that it had no objective reality, and that it could be overcome by faith alone. Given this theological understanding, many modern-day Christian Scientists, like Baker herself before them, feel no need for modern medical intervention and seek to do without its various ministrations (including prescriptions and surgery), sometimes with tragic results. In the 1980s, there were sensational media coverage of Christian Scientists being charged with child abuse for allowing their children to die of treatable diseases due to the parents' religious conviction that healing could come about through spiritual intervention alone.

Having thus briefly explained the Christian Science outlook on suffering, I trust that it is apparent why the Drug War represents the enforcement of Christian Science precepts. The Drug War says, in effect, that human beings should not -- and indeed must not - use Mother Nature's medicines in an attempt to improve their psychological well-being. And this is simply the doctrine of Mary Baker herself with respect to illness. It is a religious belief, especially as many Drug Warriors suggest that the proper alternative to so-called drug use is to believe in the Christian God. Yet there is no scientific reason why we should not use the plants and fungi of our choice to improve and expand our cognition - there is only the conviction of the Drug Warrior that it is somehow wrong to do so. Of course Drug Warriors who hold this faith have to work constantly to censor history in order to delete counterfactual examples from the past. Thus we read of Benjamin Franklin's creativity, without being told how he used opium 5 to stimulate that creativity. Thus we read of Sigmund Freud's highly prolific work output, without being told how cocaine 6 7 helped drive him to produce that output. Thus we learn of Francis Crick's great insight in discovering the DNA helix, without being told how he used psychedelics to help achieve that insight.

Having thus established that the Drug War represents the enforcement of Christian Science precepts, I will end my efforts at clarification by defining the word "sharia," both in its original sense and in its generally pejorative modern connotation in the west. We read in Webster's, that "sharia" is:

"the body of formally established sacred law... governing in theory not only religious matters but regulating as well political, economic, civil, criminal, ethical, social, and domestic affairs in Muslim countries."

More to our purpose here is the modern connotation of the word "sharia" in the west, where it conjures images of a police state run by a theocratic government that will brook no dissent and whose laws are emphatically harsh. By thus describing the Drug War as "sharia" in this pejorative sense, I hope to highlight the highly ironic fact that Americans (and westerners in general) are living under the very form of government that they purport to detest, a kind of western "sharia," that subjects them to a set of ultra harsh drug laws (which may soon include the death penalty in America) should they choose to violate the Christian Science doctrine of renouncing Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines when it comes to treating "what ails them," psychologically speaking.

QED, the Drug War is really the enforcement of Christian Science Sharia.

If enough freedom-loving westerners can "get their head around this fact," then we can stop impotently shouting "End the Drug War!" to deaf politicians around the globe and start shouting "End Christian Science Sharia!" instead, thereby revealing to the Drug Warriors that we're "onto" their game and that we know all about their stealth efforts to make us conform with the anti-scientific moral philosophy of the religious reformer popularly known as Mary Baker Eddy.



Author's Follow-up: March 26, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




This is not some abstract concern. America will refuse to allow you to earn a living in the States if you are a Christian Science heretic. They do this through the extrajudicial punishment of drug testing 8 , which forbids you to work in America unless you foreswear the benefits of nature's bounty. Of course, these laws are only for the poor. The company owners can do what they will. But then one of the many anti-democratic effects of the Drug War is to emasculate the labor force. What better way to show labor who's in charge than requiring employees to urinate upon demand? Nor is this about uncovering impairment. Impairment need never be found. If drug labs merely find the least trace of a substance of which politicians disapprove, you are no longer allowed to work in the States -- until such time as you renounce your right to Mother Nature's medicines and of medicines based thereon.





Notes:

1: Glenn Close but no cigar (up)
2: Running with the torture loving DEA (up)
3: Blast-off for Planet Hypocrisy! (up)
4: Drug War Quotes in TV and Movies (up)
5: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
6: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis (up)
7: On Cocaine (up)
8: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition (up)


Christian Science




On a superficial level, Christian Science may be seen as a drug-hating religion and so its very existence tends to support the effort of drug warriors to outlaw godsend psychoactive medicines. On a deeper level, however, the religion's founder Mary Baker-Eddy was fighting not so much against drugs as against the failure of modern science to acknowledge the power of the human mind. In Mary's case, of course, this was the mind as influenced by Jesus Christ, but yet she recognized a principle with which even a non-believer can agree and which, moreover, is clearly true in light of drug user reports from the Vedic days to the present: namely, that the human mind has a great as-yet untapped power to control one's outlook on life and to therefore positively affect overall human health to some as-yet undetermined degree. Mary does seem to have overestimated the mind's ability to cure the body, of course, but it is worth noting in her defense that the government has outlawed the very research that would be required to determine exactly where the line should be drawn between the mind-curable condition and that which is beyond the help of this sort of holistic healing.

We would need to be able to use psychoactive medicines freely in order to generate the sort of user reports that could help us answer such questions adequately. And this would be research of the greatest philosophical importance, because it would essentially be a search into the true nature of mind-body dualism.

Mind-body dualism is like the weather when it comes to the field of philosophy: everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Well, here is a chance for philosophers to launch a first-hand investigation of the interaction between mind and body and to thereby determine the nature of each -- as well as the nature of the interactive whole which they in some sense comprise. Philosophers just have to decide: Do they want to perform the kind of hands-on philosophic research that William James advocated viz. altered states, or do they want to keep pretending that the drug war does not exist and that it has no downsides for philosophical research. For the opposite is so obviously true: namely, that drug prohibition forbids us from performing the kind of research that could blow the whole "mind-body" problem wide open from the western point of view and so inspire whole new fields of research.

For more on this subject, please see my essay entitled "Christian Science and Drugs: what Mary Baker-Eddy Got Right.



  • Addicted to Christianity
  • America's Puritan Obsession with Sobriety
  • Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Heroin versus Alcohol
  • How the DEA determines if a religion is true
  • How the Drug War Banned my Religion
  • Libertarians as Closet Christian Scientists
  • Meister Eckhart and Drugs
  • Psychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches: LSD, Cannabis, and Spiritual Sacraments in Underground America
  • Take this Drug Test
  • The Christian Presuppositions of the Drug War and Why They're Important
  • The Church of the Most Holy and Righteous Drug War
  • The Drug War = Christian Science
  • The Drug War as Religion
  • Using Ecstasy in Church
  • Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than a Religion
  • Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition
  • Eight Reasons to End Drug Testing
  • PROTEST DRUG TESTING NOW!
  • Surprise Drug Test!
  • Testing Employee Urine for Fun and Profit
  • The Joy of Drug Testing
  • Urine Testers Needed
  • Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia
  • America's Imperialist Christian Science War on Drugs
  • American Sharia
  • Boycott Singapore
  • Christian Science and Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab
  • Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition
  • Drug War Uber Alles
  • Even Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug War
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Our Short-Sighted Fears about Long-Term Drug Use
  • PROTEST DRUG TESTING NOW!
  • The Christian Science SWAT Teams of the Drug War
  • The Drug War = Christian Science
  • What You Can Do
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    It's rich when Americans outlaw drugs and then insist that those drugs did not have much to offer in any case. It's like I took away your car and then told you that car ownership was overrated.

    The line drawn between recreational and medical use is wishful thinking on the part of drug warriors. Recreation, according to Webster's, is "refreshment or diversion," and both have positive knock-on effects in the lives of real people.

    The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987.

    NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition. We need a National Institute on Drug Use, not a National Institute on Drug Abuse.

    If media were truly free in America, you'd see documentaries about people who use drugs safely, something that's completely unimaginable in the age of the drug war.

    Health is not a quality, it's a balance. To decide drug legality based on 'health' grounds thus opens a Pandora's box of different points of view.

    Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.

    In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.

    This is why "rock stars" use drugs: not just for performance anxiety (which, BTW, is a completely UNDERSTANDABLE reason for drug use), but because they want to fully experience the music, even tho' they may be currently short on money and being hassled by creditors, etc.

    The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.


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






    Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
    'Good Chemistry' is a good Covid read


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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