The ongoing failure of drug reformers to attack the DEA
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 24, 2020
Imagine there was a government agency that everybody agreed was telling lies. Not only that, but everyone knew that these lies had caused millions of depressed patients and wounded soldiers to go without godsend medicines for almost half a century. Now imagine that the agency in question was also known to have deliberately poisoned American citizens with weed killer, and that this weed killer was subsequently found to cause Parkinson's Disease1.
Now, imagine that this all occurred in a supposedly free democratic country and yet no one complained. To the contrary, movie studios cranked out propaganda in which this same lying and murderous agency was portrayed as a hero, a hero that clandestinely uses torture and murder to achieve its goals.
Sounds like fiction, huh?
Well, unfortunately, this is not an imaginary scenario. The agency described above is Richard Nixon's Drug Enforcement Agency, and even the most vocal drug policy reformers have been loath to criticize it. Sure, they may point out in passing that the agency is lying about psychoactive substances through their politically motivated drug scheduling system, but they never take the obvious next step and call loudly and clearly for the agency's abolition, let alone for a criminal trial that would hold its leaders responsible for the great unnecessary suffering that they have knowingly caused over the last four and a half decades.
That's the reason why I created the website AbolishTheDEA.com just over a year ago: to finally speak truth to power and tell the DEA in the words of Shakespeare's Laertes: 'Thus diddest thou!'
That's also why I fret over the MAPS' organizations approach of 'working through the system' to decriminalize psychedelics2, since it obliges them to cooperate with the DEA, thereby granting that agency a kind of moral street cred that it does not deserve. This, after all, is the agency that is fighting tooth and nail to keep godsend medications out of the hands of suffering Americans, and why? Merely in order to preserve its own jobs - which brings up another problem with the DEA about which Americans remain mostly silent: the fact that it has a glaringly obvious conflict of interest in establishing the legality of substances, since their whole raison d'etre is to crack down on illegal drugs. And they freely act on that interest, as was demonstrated in 1985 when the agency went against the advice of its own legal counsel and criminalized MDMA, thus throwing thousands of soldiers under the bus by denying them a godsend therapy for PTSD3.
For those who need more reasons to hate the DEA, consider that former DEA Chief John C. Lawn poisoned marijuana with paraquat back in the 1980s, a weed killer that has subsequently been shown to cause Parkinson's Disease. That's the moral equivalent of genocide to punish those who violate a controversial and unpopular law. This is a ruthless agency that has no one's interests at heart but their own, an absurd nature-hating agency that requires researchers to protect supplies of drugs like psilocybin as if they were fissionable nuclear material rather than Godsend plant medicines from Mother Nature.
Such an agency should be a laughable dinosaur in 21st-century America and treated accordingly. It's time for the United States to do the same, preferably replacing it with the Drug EDUCATION Agency, an organization tasked with presenting the objective statistical facts about all psychoactive substances, including alcohol and Big Pharma anti-depressants, including both their pros and cons.
But Goliath is still defiantly loitering in the Valley of Elah, taunting free-spirited Americans with his contempt for constitutional niceties and his disdain for human life, practically daring some modern David to come forth and topple him.
Are we going to rise to the challenge and set out, slingshot in hand, or is the DEA a modern-day Stasi that even rebel spirits are afraid to challenge head on?
Author's Follow-up:
May 17, 2025
There is something about substance prohibition that brings out the worst in human beings. Ronald Reagan and his DEA had no scruples about poisoning marijuana with the highly toxic weed killer called Paraquat, thereby bringing about heart, kidney, and/or liver failure in the smoker4. Neither did the bootleggers of yore have any scruples about "cutting" liquor with wood alcohol, thereby bringing about blindness and death in the drinker5. The Anti-Saloon League actually "insisted that industrial alcohol be made into an even more deadly compound by requiring that manufacturers add methanol, or wood alcohol, to it," under the criminally flawed assumption that liquor use would end if the government could poison the liquor supply. The latter outrage is explained as follows on the website "Prohibition: An Interactive History":
"Bootleggers started using denatured industrial alcohol disguised as whiskey - what would be called 'rotgut' for its effect on the drinker's internal organs - even in the months before Prohibition took effect. The magazine Literary Digest, in its January 10, 1920 issue, reported that scores of people had recently died, including 57 in Hartford, Connecticut, and hundreds of others blinded after drinking 'alleged whiskey' containing wood alcohol.6
Amazingly, however, most Americans have a nostalgic view of "rotgut" and just think of it as a kind of inferior liquor. Just search "rotgut liquor" online and see all the facetious references to the phrase, as if it's a joke. Modern liquor company's even incorporate the term in their brand names (like "Benny Boys Rotgut Whiskey"), so far is the word from evoking the pain, suffering, and death with which it was actually associated in the age of liquor Prohibition. This is a reminder that drug prohibition is all about the control of language. It is all about a branding campaign to convince us that alcohol is blessed while its endless psychoactive rivals are all cursed.
But then Americans live in a land of make-believe when it comes to substance prohibition. They actually believe that prohibition ended in 1933, when in reality prohibition has been in effect since 1914 and is still in effect to this very day. It is just that liquor has been given pride of place in America's psychoactive pantheon and shielded from all carping, while liquor's potential rivals have been demonized and criminalized via a multibillion-dollar crackdown.
America basically solved liquor prohibition by giving the liquor prohibitionists the biggest consolation prize of all time: namely, the right to demonize and outlaw every single one of alcohol's less dangerous competitors. Far from ending, then, prohibition is omnipresent today and is a way of life. It is considered a natural baseline for life in America, as can be seen from the fact that this wholesale outlawing of medicines is not even mentioned in science magazines (nor in the vast majority of non-fiction books on our library shelves), even though the effects of the outlawed drugs have obvious implications and ramifications in the study of a wide variety of fields, including religion, psychology, and the nature of human consciousness.
Americans have inherited the wind for this harebrained and superstitious approach to psychoactive substances. But they are in deep denial. That is why we never see the media connect the dots between inner-city violence and the Drug War which armed the 'hood to the teeth in the first place. That is why we never see the media connect the dots between suicide and the fact that we have outlawed all the drugs that could cheer the chronic depressive. That is why we never see the media connect the dots between the civil wars south of the border and the fact that the Drug War has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America.
Worse yet, this is not simply blindness, but it is imperialist blindness, because America insists that the entire world share its violence-causing jaundiced view about substances that inspire and elate -- failing to realize that this represents the outlawing of religion on their part, insofar as the Hindu religion exists today thanks to the power of psychoactive substances to inspire and elate.
How much more unnecessary suffering needs to occur before Goliath finally takes up the slingshot of inconvenient truths and sends the Philistines packing?
Answer? Things will never change until Americans stop blaming drugs for social problems and realize the following inconvenient truth:
namely, that saying things like "Fentanyl kills!" and "Crack kills!" makes no more sense than saying "Fire bad!" All such statements are based on the superstitious idea that we should fear potentially dangerous substances rather than learning how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of suffering humanity.
Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.
In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.
"My faith votes and strives to outlaw religions that use substances of which politicians disapprove."
The fact that some drugs can be addictive is no reason to outlaw drugs. It is a reason to teach safe use and to publicize all the ways that smart people have found to avoid unwanted pharmacological dependency -- and a reason to use drugs to fight drugs.
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.
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
People groan about "profiling," but why is profiling even a "thing"? There would be little or no profiling of blacks if the Drug War did not exist.
If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"
When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!
Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.