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'll never understand Americans. Most of them HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control how and how much they can think and feel in this life. Talk about warped priorities.
The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.
The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.
The prohibitionist motto is: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."
Almost every mainstream article about psychology and consciousness is nonsense these days because it ignores the way that drug prohibition has stymied our investigation of such subjects.
The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.
It also bothers me that gun fanatics support the drug war. If I have no rights to mother nature, then they have no rights to guns. If the Fourth Amendment can be ignored based on lies and ignorance, then so can the Second.
And we should not insist it's a problem if someone decides to use opium, for instance, daily. We certainly don't blame "patients" for using antidepressants daily. And getting off opium is easier than getting off many antidepressants -- see Julia Holland.
People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.
Freud's real discovery was that drugs like cocaine could make psychiatry UNNECESSARY for the vast majority of people. The medical establishment hated the idea -- so they judged the drug based on its worst possible use!
Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us
Drugs: the great American scapegoat
Saying Yes to Drugs
Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass
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