How the Drug War Turns Kids' Lives into a Living Hell
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 13, 2022
I just ran across a 2011 publication called "Children of the Drug War," which tells how many countries outlaw morphine 1 for pain relief and palliative care, thus causing thousands of young children with fatal diseases to suffer unnecessary pain.
This is the kind of fact that the modern media studiously keeps from the public, because they see their job as enforcing the drug-war narrative that we must demonize substances rather than learn about them and use them wisely for humanity. Another such fact is that the military anti-drug operations we carry out overseas leave behind thousands of Drug War orphans -- but American politicians are so hellbent on demonizing inanimate and amoral medicines that they can sleep at night.
I have not yet read the work in question, partly because I have not yet had time and partly because reading such works for me is like listening to a school marm drag her nails across a chalkboard.
But I will do my best to "man up" and read the multi-author document as soon as possible, so that I can begin speaking truth to power over the outrages that I find revealed therein.
This is why I say that investigating the details of the Drug War is like peeling back a rotten onion. Just when you think you have discovered the worst possible effect of the Drug War, you find yet more: in this case, the fact that dogmatically heartless American politicians are advancing a policy that willfully denies godsend pain medicine to dying children.
Trump supports the drug war and Big Pharma: the two forces that have turned me into a patient for life with dependence-causing antidepressants. Big Pharma makes the pills, and the drug war outlaws all viable alternatives.
My consciousness, my choice.
No drug causes addiction after one use. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis.
The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.
Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.
If we can go overseas to burn poppy plants, then Islamic countries should be free to come to the United States to burn our grape vines.
The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.
The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.
Drug war pundits need to stop using the word "snorts" when it comes to cocaine. We "take" our "meds," and yet we "snort" cocaine, just like a pig. That is NOT neutral language, folks!
Drug Warriors should be legally banned from watching or reading Sherlock Holmes stories, since in their world, it is a crime for such people as Sherlock Holmes to exist, i.e., people who use medicines to improve their mind and mood.
Trump supports the drug war and Big Pharma: the two forces that have turned me into a patient for life with dependence-causing antidepressants. Big Pharma makes the pills, and the drug war outlaws all viable alternatives.
