America's Juvenile Attitude Toward Drugs
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 27, 2020
Juvenile delinquents decide drug policy in America. If so much as one juvenile delinquent can figure out a way to die from using a substance, then that substance must not be available for artists to increase creativity, nor for the elderly to fight depression, nor for musicians to improve performance, nor for the religious to use in mystical rites. That's the testing standard that Americans accept in this (ahem) "scientific" country of ours. No need for lab rats or careful statistical analysis: just dig up one scrawny poorly educated waster and see how he or she handles the drug under study. If they can't handle the drug, we must ban it, not simply for Americans but for all humanity and for all time. Why? Because "one swallow makes a summer" in the minds of the statistically challenged Drug Warrior. Compared to that standard, the Monty Python "duck test" for identifying witches smacks of scientific rigor.
Author's Follow-up: May 1, 2023
Philosophically speaking, there is a telling similarity between the mindset that causes kids to titter at "nude" artwork and the mindset that causes Puritans to denounce "drugs," in proof of which admittedly eye-opening asseveration, behold! (Well, go on: behold.)
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.
I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.
All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.
For most drugs, dependency is a bug. For Big Pharma antidepressants, it is a feature.
If media were free in America, you'd see documentaries about people using drugs wisely for a wide variety of praiseworthy purposes.
Americans were always free to take care of their own health -- until drug warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine.
When we place the FDA in charge of deciding whether a psychoactive drug should be re-legalized or not, we are asking them to decide on things like the relative importance of appreciating a sunset, a task for which the FDA has no expertise whatsoever.
Two of the biggest promoters of the psychedelic renaissance shuffle their feet when you ask them about substance prohibition. Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman just don't get it: prohibition kills.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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