How the Drug War Turns Kids' Lives into a Living Hell
by Brian 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 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.
I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.
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!
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 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.
As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.
The December Scientific American features a story called "The New Nuclear Age," about a trillion-dollar plan to add 100s of ICBM's to 5 states, which an SA editorial calls "kick me" signs. This Neanderthal plan comes from pols who think that compassion-boosting drugs are evil!
Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.
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."
Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy.
It is based on the following crazy idea:
that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
AI is inherently plagiaristic technology. It tells us: "Hey, guys, look what I can do!" -- when it should really be saying, "Hey, guys, look how I stole all your data and repackaged it in such a way as to make it appear that I am the genius, not you!"
I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.