Five Ways that the drug war causes the problems that it claims to solve
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
July 20, 2020
The Drug War creates an enormous interest in "drugs" (aka Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines) by constantly harping on them as the root of all evil, in a way that no other society has ever done since the beginning of time.
The Drug War creates drug cartels in the same way that liquor prohibition created the mob.
The Drug War outlaws thousands of godsend psychoactive plant medicines that are far less addictive than Big Pharma meds, while incentivizing unscrupulous black marketeers to sell the most addictive synthetic substances possible.
The Drug War creates violence: including the Mexican Drug War that killed 85 Mexican civilians per day in 2018.
The Drug War guarantees impurity of drug supplies, and not just because unscrupulous dealers "cut" their product with toxic substances either: the DEA itself deliberately poisoned marijuana crops in the 1980s by spraying them with paraquat, a weed killer that has since been shown to cause Parkinson's Disease.
Conclusion: "drugs" are the modern boogeyman and scapegoat: it is what we talk about when we want to demonize bad behavior without having to discuss the social problems that created it, such as lack of education, not simply about drugs but about common sense and personal responsibility. It is also what we talk about when we want to remove a population from the voting rolls by tossing them in jail and removing their voting rights. The Drug War is thus simply a political ploy which helps the hypocritical beer-swilling Drug Warrior steal elections in order to keep the mendacious and anti-scientific Drug War mentality in full force. Why? In order to benefit the special interests who profit from it: including Big Pharma, the American Psychiatric Association, Big Liquor, Law Enforcement, and the Corrections Industry.
Author's Follow-up: October 14, 2022
And these five points only scratch the surface. The Drug War's ideology of substance demonization has forced children in hospice to experience unnecessary pain because some hospitals refuse to administer morphine, for the unscientific reason that they think the drug is evil in and of itself. Yes, the Drug Warrior would rather have children suffer than to re-legalize plant medicine. And then there are the depressed who have to undergo shock therapy because we have outlawed all the godsend medicines that might have helped them. In fact, the truth is exactly opposite from the lies of the Partnership for a Drug Free America. It is the Drug War that literally fries brains thanks to the ECT that it makes necessary by outlawing medical godsends. The Drug Warrior would rather have school shootings and nuclear war than to legalize godsend medicine. MDMA could turn the world peaceful, but the Drug Warrior does not want peace. Ecstasy brought peace and love to the multi-ethnic dance floor in 1990s Britain, but Drug Warriors cracked down on the safe drug "E," all because of a handful of deaths which were caused by the Drug Warriors refusal to develop safe use guidelines. The result? The dance floor devolved into liquor-fueled violence and rave safety had to be enforced by special forces troops!
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
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."
Someday the world will realize that Freud's real achievement was his discovery of the depression-busting power of cocaine.
"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau
Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.
Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.
Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.
Two of the biggest promoters of the psychedelic renaissance shuffle their feet when you ask them about substance prohibition. Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman just don't get it: prohibition kills.
Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.
And these five points only scratch the surface. The Drug War's ideology of substance demonization has forced children in hospice to experience unnecessary pain because some hospitals refuse to administer morphine, for the unscientific reason that they think the drug is evil in and of itself. Yes, the Drug Warrior would rather have children suffer than to re-legalize plant medicine. And then there are the depressed who have to undergo shock therapy because we have outlawed all the godsend medicines that might have helped them. In fact, the truth is exactly opposite from the lies of the Partnership for a Drug Free America. It is the Drug War that literally fries brains thanks to the ECT that it makes necessary by outlawing medical godsends. The Drug Warrior would rather have school shootings and nuclear war than to legalize godsend medicine. MDMA could turn the world peaceful, but the Drug Warrior does not want peace. Ecstasy brought peace and love to the multi-ethnic dance floor in 1990s Britain, but Drug Warriors cracked down on the safe drug "E," all because of a handful of deaths which were caused by the Drug Warriors refusal to develop safe use guidelines. The result? The dance floor devolved into liquor-fueled violence and rave safety had to be enforced by special forces troops!
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."