How the Drug War gave the 2016 election to Donald Trump
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 21, 2021
In 2016, more than six million Americans were disenfranchised according to the Sentencing Project, most of them minorities and most of them for "drug offenses." That's six million Americans who were purged from the voting rolls. Six million. That's why Donald Trump won the presidency, not because of Russian interference, gerrymandering or vote buying, but because of a Drug War that was instituted for the very purpose of disenfranchising minorities. And yet our best and brightest minds don't get it.
Take George R. Tyler, author of "Billionaire Democracy." Tyler's 2018 book is all about the marginalizing of minority voting power in the age of the Roberts court, and yet he says not one single word about the Drug War! Not one! What could be more pertinent to his topic than the fact that six million Americans were removed from the voting rolls?
This is why the Drug War lingers, because authors like Tyler completely ignore its long list of negative effects on the body politic and on the world at large.
What negative effects?
The Drug War ideology of substance demonization has:
1) caused a civil war in Mexico
2) empowered a self-styled "Drug War Hitler" in the Philippines
3) created armed cartels overseas
4) created armed gangs in American ghettos
5) militarized police forces
6) popularized movies 12 in which the good guys are DEA agents who torture and murder at will
7) stopped scientists from pursuing legitimate research that could treat or even cure Alzheimer's, Autism and cancer
and 8) led to the election of a racist populist as President of the United States.
Yes, Tyler is right: pay-to-play politics is a problem and so is outrageous republican gerrymandering and Russian interference in American elections. But it is the Drug War that has turned America into a prison camp for minorities and a breeding ground for racist populists.
And now Trump wants to leverage the Drug War to do even more damage to American democracy: he is proposing a "final solution" to the politician-created drug problem, namely executing those minorities whom the Drug Warrior used to be satisfied with merely locking up.
AFTERTHOUGHT (February 22, 22):
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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.
There are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
The proof that psychedelics work has always been extant. We are hoodwinked by scientists who convince us that efficacy has not been "proven." This is materialist denial of the obvious.
Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
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).
We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for the losers who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.
Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The war on drugs is has destroyed America's faith in the power of education. In fact, it has made us think of education as WRONG in and of itself. It has made us prefer censorship and fear-filled ignorance to education!
Musk vies with his fellow materialists in his attempt to diss humans as insignificant. But we are not insignificant. The very term "insignificant" is a human creation. Consciousness rules. Indeed, consciousness makes the rules. Without us, there would only be inchoate particles.
The Drug War is a crime against humanity.