You'd think that American botanists would be the first to see through the lies of the Drug Warrior, since the Drug War places legal restrictions on which plants they are even allowed to study. Surely, such academics would take umbrage at this government interference and push back, loudly and clearly, in the name of free scientific research.
Not necessarily. When I visit the home pages of certain mycologists, for instance, I get the feeling that they are DEA agents first and mycologists second. These "scientists" make it very clear that they will have nothing to do with the psychoactive mushrooms of which their government disapproves and even imply that it is a civic duty to report such plants to the DEA should they be encountered in one's work-related perambulations (this in keeping with the government viewpoint that Mother Nature is a drug kingpin rather than a source of godsend medications).
In reality, of course, botanists can become just as bamboozled by Drug War propaganda as anybody else, and there is, alas, little online evidence to suggest that they are taking the lead, as a group, in denouncing America's jaundiced attitude toward psychoactive plant medicines. I encountered the latest evidence of this sad fact when browsing the Web to discover the psychoactive properties of ergot, aka Claviceps purpurea, a fungus affecting the rye plant. It is known to human beings mainly as an agricultural poison, but it is also the substance from which LSD was isolated -- and may have even had a role in creating the psychedelic potion employed during the yearly rites at Eleusis, rites which lasted almost 2,000 consecutive years and proved philosophically enlightening to such western luminaries as Plato, Aristotle and Plutarch.
This evidence of "bamboozled thinking" appears on an online study page for a course entitled Botany 135 at the University of Hawaii Manoa, wherein the anonymous professor/author states that LSD "was eventually made illegal due to abuse."
Of course, this is just a Drug Warrior lie. LSD was criminalized simply because it was the drug of choice for the political opponents of Richard M. Nixon. But since the uncredited study page appears dated and seems to have no functioning hyperlinks, I could not point this fact out to the original professor-author, being unable to identify that no-doubt-distinguished botanist. I therefore addressed the following "gentle remonstrance" to Dr. Kasey Barton, Chair of the Department of Botany at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. My goal in so doing was not simply to urge the Department Chair to correct a misleading Web page, but to encourage his whole department to start doing its part to denounce the anti-scientific viewpoints upon which the entire Drug War is based.
Hello, Professor Barton.
I hope you do not mind if I point out an error in a botanical course syllabus at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.
In the page entitled "Ergot of Rye History," the author states that LSD was outlawed because it was being abused. This is simply false. President Richard Nixon outlawed LSD because it was the drug of choice of his political opponents. If he had outlawed LSD for public health reasons, he would have also outlawed cigarettes and alcohol. Instead, he outlawed a whole raft of psychedelic plants, about which he knew ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. He simply wanted to make sure that he criminalized every possible substance that his opponents might use in order to help them "think outside the box," politically speaking. In the 50 years since LSD was outlawed, there have been tens of thousands of deaths due to alcohol and cigarettes, with only a handful of deaths reported that might have been due (albeit indirectly) to LSD use.
Alcohol was certainly being abused in the late '60s and '70s, leading to daily deaths. But that was an abuse that the Richard Nixons of the world did not want the world to acknowledge and therefore it was never highlighted in lurid TV news stories.
If Nixon had been truly interested in the health of young people, he would not have made LSD use a felony. Rather, he would have educated these "drug users" and sent them on their way. But Nixon's goal was not education: his goal was to remove his opponents from the voting rolls: that's why he made drug use a felony: because felons could be prohibited from voting in US elections. Nixon's enemies were not drug abusers: they were vote abusers, young people who routinely failed to cast votes for Richard Nixon and his fellow narrow-minded political cronies.
I hope you will correct this and any similar errors in your botanical websites, since errors like these help promulgate America's disastrous Drug War thanks to which, even as I speak, hundreds are dying daily in Mexico alone. I can't even keep up with the list of grade-schoolers being killed by drug-war-related gunfire in America's inner cities: on today's WTOP website alone I see that a 4-year-old girl has been killed by errant gunfire in Washington, D.C., and an 8-year-old boy has met the same fate in San Francisco, both killed by errant gunfire from urban zones that became militarized as a natural consequence of Drug War prohibition. Do these urban victims have to be white before America's hypocritical Drug Warriors will reconsider their disastrous policy of criminalizing Mother Nature's plant medicines?
Why are these grade-schoolers dying? Because the United States, unlike any country in the past history of the world, has decided that botanical substances should be held responsible for evil and therefore criminalized, thereby creating a violent black market to be run by drug cartels around the world, cartels that were created, as it were, out of whole cloth by the Drug War itself. Not only does this unprecedented attitude toward plants violate the natural law on which America was founded (by denying Americans the right to the botanical bounty that grows unbidden at their very feet) but it allows politicians to ignore the real cause of bad behavior (whether that bad behavior takes the form of substance abuse or not), and that is a lack of proper education and a lack of access to the full range of medicinal cures that Mother Nature offers, forcing citizens to rely instead on a small range of highly addictive synthesized substances, most of them far more addictive than anything Mother Nature has ever grown. (Even as I type, 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma 12 antidepressants 3, many of which are harder to "kick" than heroin 4.)
In an ideal world, botanical experts would be making these points loudly and clearly to the laity while calling for an end to all governmental strictures regarding which plants can and cannot be studied. Indeed, all academics would be doing this ideally, since the government control of research should be anathema to a supposedly free people. Unfortunately, Drug War propaganda has been so successful in quashing dissent (with flat-out lies like the "frying pan" ad) that the laity is forced to remind the experts of the fact that they are living under the thumb of the DEA and that they practice their science only to the extent that scheming politicians will allow them to do so.
And so, as a botanical expert yourself, I urge you to join the fight against America's unprecedented war on plants by reminding America of what Paracelsus stated explicitly over 500 years ago:
Sola dosis facit venenum.
Only the dose makes the poison.
In other words, there are no bad substances. Substances are morally neutral.
This is a truth that wise men and women have understood implicitly for over two millennia. That's why there was no drug problem in Ancient Egypt, Greece, Persia, Rome or even in the Mongol Empire. Those societies punished actual bad behavior, not the pre-crime of substance consumption. For there were no such things as bad plant substances. True, substances could be misused, but the blame for that has, in the past, always rested entirely with the substance user and/or with the society that he or she lived in, never with the substance itself - until scheming American politicians realized in 1914 that they could marginalize their political opponents by outlawing their drugs of choice.
Sincerely Yours,
Ballard Quass
Abolishthedea.com
Follow-up: Professor Kasey wrote back, essentially saying my email was too long for him to read and that I should contact the author of the text to which I took exception. Here was my response to that latter email:
Dear Professor Kasey:
The page is not credited and the links are invalid. But I'll investigate and see if I can deduce who might have written the text in question. Thanks.
My email is lengthy because I'm trying to combat the wrong-headed thinking of an anti-scientific Drug War that keeps botanists from doing their job.
Sorry if I overwhelmed you.
If you're ever open to persuasion on this topic -- and the need for American botanists to protest governmental restrictions on what they can and cannot research -- I invite you to visit my website devoted to such topics at abolishthedea.com.
June 2, 2022
Why is it that no professors want to talk to me about the Drug War? Dang it, no fair! They clam up the minute I mention it. They pull in their shop sign, pull down the window blinds and metaphorically slam a door in my face. For those who think I exaggerate, I adduce the following two additional essays, which (or so I'm told) "will do your heart good to read": and .
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.
Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity.
The DEA is gaslighting Americans, telling them that drugs with obvious benefits have no benefits whatsoever. Scientists collude in this lie thanks to their adherence to the emotion-scorning principles of behaviorism.
Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."
Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.
The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.
That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
Who would have thought back in 1776 that Americans would eventually have to petition their government for the right to even possess a damn mushroom. The Drug War has destroyed America.
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.