The question that speaks volumes about drug war hypocrisy
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 10, 2022
It's odd that folks in a supposedly drug-hating country like America keep asking the question: "Have you taken your meds?"
This one phrase speaks bundles about the disingenuous nature of the hypocritically defined War on Drugs. It tells us that we don't really want folks to say no to drugs, but we want them to say YES to what we consider to be the RIGHT drugs. We want people to trudge around moping so that they don't bother us, but we don't want them living large, exuberantly fulfilling their dreams in life, and thus potentially annoying us.
When we ask someone if they have taken their meds, we are really asking them if they have taken their tranquilizers. As a rule, the "meds" in question are billed as anti-depressants, but the key outcome of use, in the minds of the question poser, is the tranquilizing effect that such substances have on irritating friends and acquaintances..
But then psychiatry has a long history of creating "cures," not for the benefit of the drug takers, but for the benefit of those who have to deal with them on a daily basis. That's why the procedure of lobotomy garnered a Nobel Prize, not because the victims of that mind-numbing procedure were raving about the way that it improved their lives, but rather because the caretakers and the nurses were happy that they could get on with their work without listening to the constant blather of a noisy patient population.
This politically created distinction between "meds" and "drugs" allows us to sneer at substances that have inspired entire religions (they're just "drugs" after all) while happily signing off on noxious Big Pharma 12 "meds" that have turned 1 in 4 American women into patients for life, while yet not "curing" the depression for which the drug was supposedly being taken.
This is why we need a philosophy of the Drug War, because until these basic drug-war premises are identified and challenged, America is always going to be on the brink of criminalizing or re-criminalizing godsend medicine, thereby ignoring not only logic and science, but also the history of humanity, in which entire religions have been inspired by the very substances that we dogmatically demonize today as "drugs."
Author's Follow-up: October 23, 2023
As ethnobotanist Richard Schultes reminds us: all tribal people have used psychoactive substances for inspiration and healing. It's interesting that America has no sooner decimated such people, when it launches a campaign to criminalize their outlook on life. Do you agree with them that Mother Nature is good? If you act on your belief, beware, for then Cro-Magnons like Daryl Gates and William Bennett will seek to have you shot or beheaded, without so much as blushing at the inherent barbarity of that advice. This insanity is explicable only under the assumption that the Drug War is a kind of negative religion, which, of course, is exactly what Nietzsche would be saying right now if he were on the scene to behold the demagogue blather of the Drug Warrior. Nietzsche knew, after all, that the death of God would entail the adoption of a stricter Christian morality than ever, albeit at a deep enough subconscious level so that our modern zealots could live with themselves, unconscious of the fact that they were just manifesting the intolerance of a full-scale religious inquisition in opposition to the perennial holistic philosophy of humankind.
The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?
Materialist scientists are drug war collaborators. They are more than happy to have their fight against idealism rigged by drug law, which outlaws precisely those substances whose use serves to cast their materialism into question.
Drug testing labs should give high marks for those who manage to use drugs responsibly, notwithstanding the efforts of law enforcement to ruin their lives. The lab guy would be like: "Wow, you are using opium wisely, my friend! Congratulations! Your boss is lucky to have you!"
Countless millions suffer needlessly in silence because of America's fearmongering about drugs.
The drug war tells us that certain drugs have no potential uses and then turns that into a self-fulfilling prophecy by outlawing these drugs. This is insanely anti-scientific and anti-progress. We should never give up on looking for positive uses for ANY substance.
Attention People's magazine editorial staff:
Matthew Perry was a big boy who made his own decisions. He didn't die because of ketamine or because of evil rotten drug dealers, he died because of America's enforced ignorance about psychoactive drugs.
In the age of the Drug War, the Hippocratic Oath has become "First, do no good."
We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.
It is folly to put bureaucrats in charge of second-guessing drug prescriptions: what such bureaucrats are really doing is second-guessing the various philosophies of life which are presupposed by the way we use psychoactive drugs.
Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.
As ethnobotanist Richard Schultes reminds us: all tribal people have used psychoactive substances for inspiration and healing. It's interesting that America has no sooner decimated such people, when it launches a campaign to criminalize their outlook on life. Do you agree with them that Mother Nature is good? If you act on your belief, beware, for then Cro-Magnons like Daryl Gates and William Bennett will seek to have you shot or beheaded, without so much as blushing at the inherent barbarity of that advice. This insanity is explicable only under the assumption that the Drug War is a kind of negative religion, which, of course, is exactly what Nietzsche would be saying right now if he were on the scene to behold the demagogue blather of the Drug Warrior. Nietzsche knew, after all, that the death of God would entail the adoption of a stricter Christian morality than ever, albeit at a deep enough subconscious level so that our modern zealots could live with themselves, unconscious of the fact that they were just manifesting the intolerance of a full-scale religious inquisition in opposition to the perennial holistic philosophy of humankind.
The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?