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.)
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It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987.
Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!
All drugs have positive uses. It's absurd to prohibit using them because one demographic might misuse them.
Even the worst forms of "abuse" can be combatted with a wise use of a wide range of psychoactive drugs, to combat both physical and psychological cravings. But drug warriors NEED addiction to be a HUGE problem. That's their golden goose.
It is a truism to say that we cannot change the world and that therefore we have to change ourselves -- but the drug war outlaws even this latter option.
AI is like almost every subject under the sun: it takes on a very different and ominous meaning when we view it in light of the modern world's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine.
Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use the many drugs that improve and speed up mental processes.
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.
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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