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 "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.
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Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.
Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.
In his treatise on laws, Cicero reported that the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries gave the participants "not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope."
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault. The Drug War is the triumph of hypocritical idiocy.
I hated the show "The Apprentice," because it taught a cynical and hate-filled lesson about the proper way to "get ahead" in the world. I saw Trump as a menace back then, long before he started declaring that American elections were corrupt before the very first vote was cast!
We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).
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.
Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.
"Like Christians burning mosques and temples to spread the word of Jesus, modem drugabuseologists burn crops to spread the use of alcohol." -- Ceremonial Chemistry, p. 48
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.
Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.