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Dirty Minded Drug Warriors

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





September 18, 2020



A 1988 court ruling gave Native Americans the right to use peyote in worship. Native Americans only, mind, not Caucasians, nor African-Americans, nor Hispanics, nor Jews. Why not? (Wait for it, folks...) Because these latter groups do not have a history of religious peyote use.

Huh? Elizabeth, I'm comin' to join ya!

Only imagine: a court telling you that you cannot engage in a religious practice because your ancestors never found it necessary to do so. Pope Leo X should have rolled out a papal bull to that effect back in 1521 and he could have forestalled the entire Reformation. "Sorry, Martin Luther, but your descendants have no history of being saved by grace, so you must continue to find your salvation in DEEDS just like the rest of us, thank you very much."

The Conquistadores certainly never required that the Aztecs demonstrate a family history of Christian worship before welcoming them into the faith. To the contrary, the Spanish warriors downright insisted on the heathens becoming Christian or else.

This, of course, is all par for the tyrannical course.

The surprising part of this story is that many Native Americans agree with the judicial ruling mentioned above (though not necessarily with the "reasoning" behind it), contending that non-native Americans do not have the correct mind set to use peyote with due reverence.

Now, I loathe both the court ruling and the racial prejudice that informs it, and yet the Native Americans in question have a valid and a very telling point.

Non-native Americans are like little children when it comes to "drugs." They have been taught to consider the use of Mother Nature's psychoactive medicines as prima facie evidence of hedonism and "getting high." And so when they see a Native American using a "drug" for religious purposes, the non-native is kind of like a little kid in an art museum pointing at the statue of David and saying: "Aww, he's nekkid, dude!" - only in our case, the childish little kid is saying: "Aww! He's getting high, dude!! Tee-hee-hee!"

I encounter this childish attitude when a fellow Caucasian finds out inadvertently that I'm publishing a website called "Abolish the DEA dot com." They usually respond in a kind of awed and conspiratorial voice, as if to tell me: "Oh, yeah, dude, drugs! You're all about partying hearty and gettin' it on! I gotcha! Wink, wink, wink!"

And I'm thinking to myself: "No, dude. I am all about the restoration of natural law, the re-legalization 1 of plants, and the overthrow of America's State Religion, i.e. Christian Science."

But America is under the spell of Drug War propaganda which insists that Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines can only be used for "getting high." And that mindset is constantly re-enforced by books, magazines, news, TV shows 2 , and movies 3 4 , all of which studiously ban the positive depiction of illegal "drug use" and simply remove from the history books any references to, say, Freud's use of cocaine 5 6 , or Benjamin Franklin's use of opium , or Plato's use of psychedelics in the Eleusinian Mysteries7. (Of course, JFK's use of "speed," as Monty Python would put it, is "right out.")

This propaganda of omission has turned Americans into little children with respect to psychoactive substances, and in two ways:

First, by convincing us that we could never possibly learn to use such substances wisely, that we are children for life as far as that is concerned; and second, by convincing us that banned psychoactive substances can only be used for naughty purposes.

If the latter proposition is true, then we non-natives can, indeed, only sit back and snicker at the profound ceremonies of the First Americans, thinking to ourselves, "Religion, indeed! Ha ha!"

In short, we are dirty minded, just like the child tittering foolishly in front of Michelangelo's masterpiece.

Given this state of affairs, one can almost say that the judicial ruling mentioned above was actually right, though certainly not for the absurd reasons that were adduced by the blatantly racist judge in the case. Non-natives cannot be allowed to use peyote in religious ceremonies. Why not? Because they are simply too immature to do so reverently. Drug War propaganda has seen to that.

Of course, there's an even bigger threat to the respectful use of sacred substances such as peyote, and that is capitalism 8 itself. If non-natives can use peyote, then the substance could presumably be marketed freely, in which case irreverent advertising would not be far behind. But that's a topic for another essay.



Author's Follow-up: October 29, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




This situation is one of endless absurdities that naturally result when we outlaw Mother Nature. We simply cannot take that absurd step without absurd consequences following. The answer to this situation, one that respects both individual freedom and tribal rights, is to re-legalize Mother Nature while prohibiting commercial exploitation of sacred medicines - prohibiting their exploitation but NOT their use. For let's be freedom-loving adults with common sense for a moment: It is palpably ABSURD for the government to outlaw Mother Nature -- and a clear violation of our right to the pursuit of happiness -- and a violation of everything that the opium 9 -loving Thomas Jefferson stood for in writing the Declaration of Independence. Imagine, the silly and idiotic DEA stomping onto Monticello 10 in 1987 and confiscating the founding father's poppy plants. Is it not just childish madness and the height of injustice? Where in the Bible are we told that God created plant and fungi for governments? It's mad and blasphemous to think so, and yet most Drug Warriors I've known claim to be devout Christians. It's all just insanity -- and till it ends, we will run into crazy consequences like the above, with government telling us that we can only belong to religions that were practiced by our forebears! Madness, madness, madness!





Notes:

1: National Coalition for Drug Legalization (up)
2: The Dead Man (up)
3: Glenn Close but no cigar (up)
4: Running with the torture loving DEA (up)
5: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis (up)
6: On Cocaine (up)
7: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
8: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism (up)
9: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
10: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation (up)


Drug War Ghouls




The Drug War Ghouls get busy any time a well-known figure dies prematurely, especially when the figure in question is a rock star or actor. You can just hear them whispering childishly: "Aww! Were they on any drugs? Were they on any drugs?" The presumption behind such tittering is that drugs are evil and can only lead to death and destruction. Of course, those who hold this viewpoint always forget that the drug war does everything it can to make such outcomes of drug use a self-fulfilling prophecy by discouraging education about safe use and by ensuring corrupt and uncertain drug supply with their eternal kneejerk prohibition. This is all completely inexcusable. The drug warriors cause death. They are the villains. They are the criminals. Take the so-called opiate crisis. Young people were not dying en masse from opioids when such drugs were legal in the United States. It took prohibition to bring that about.

  • Attention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propaganda
  • Childish Drug Warriors
  • Dirty Minded Drug Warriors
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Fentanyl does not kill! Prohibition does!
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
  • How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb
  • How the Drug War killed Leah Betts
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
  • Matthew Perry and the Drug War Ghouls
  • The Lopsided Focus on the Misuse and Abuse of Drugs
  • The Problem is Prohibition, not Fentanyl
  • There are no such things as 'killer drugs'





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.

    Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.

    It's "convenient" for scientists that their "REAL" cures happen to be the ones that racist politicians will allow. Scientists thus normalize prohibition by pretending that outlawed substances have no therapeutic value. It's materialism collaborating with the drug war.

    The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.

    The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.

    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.

    William James knew that there were substances that could elate. However, it never occurred to him that we should use such substances to prevent suicide. It seems James was blinded to this possibility by his puritanical assumptions.

    The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."

    Countless millions suffer needlessly in silence because of America's fearmongering about drugs.

    There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."


    Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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    The Philosophy of Drug Use


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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