Site Intro to AbolishTheDEA.com
Most websites attack the drug war by means of inductive argument, citing endless statistics and anecdotal evidence about how it corrupts democratic institutions, turns America into a police state, and empowers organized crime, etc. And inductive argument has its place. Indeed, this site adds to the list of such arguments by pointing out how the drug war blocks the research and introduction of godsend medicines, causing needless psychological suffering in the world. (Psychedelics were all but curing alcoholics in the 1950's before the Drug War, and eventually the DEA, rendered it impossible even to study them, let alone use them for therapy.) We also note the hitherto overlooked fact that conservatives are stealing American elections by jailing a million minorities a year, most of whom would vote against the drug war, had they not been charged with drug war offenses that removed them from America's voting rolls.
But the most powerful argument against the drug war is a deductive one. Namely:
1) American government is founded on the inviolability of natural law
2) Natural law grants every human being a right to the use of what John Locke called "the earth and all therein"
Conclusion:
3) The drug war represents the unconstitutional triumph of common law over natural law
So the question is not, as liberals often assume: "Can the drug war work?" The fact is that the drug war SHOULD NOT work, because it represents a violation of natural law. (
Of course, the drug war is also America's state religion, aka Christian Science, since it denies Americans the transcendence that has been historically fostered by psychoactive plants, by making the metaphysical claim that it is somehow wrong to avail oneself of mother nature's bounty to improve and heighten consciousess. This state religion is then ruthlessly enforced by drug law sharia, according to which we evict Americans from the job market itself -- via extrajudicial drug-testing -- if they dare violate America's Christian Science ban on Mother Nature's medicines.
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But if natural law protects anything, it protects our right to access the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet and to use them for our own purposes. Moreover, by blaming Mother Nature, we are ignoring the true societal causes of problems, which is understandable since, without such a scapegoat we would have to admit that the Opium War, for instance, was really caused by immoral capitalism (not some "devil plant") and that inner-city drug use (insofar as it is self-destructive) can be traced to poverty, lack of opportunity, as well as to drug laws themselves: those drug laws which, by banning natural non-addictive plant substances, forces the emotional solace seeker (or those seeking transcendence) to access "hard" drugs instead, merely because they are the only powerful medicines available (thanks to the financial motives that keep mainly addictive substances in stock at the local dropoff sites).
So, enjoy this site, and prepare to learn a host of reasons why the drug war -- and hence the DEA -- is despotic, backward-thinking and just plain wrong. Yet as you're reading these inductive arguments, please remember that they are really beside the point, in a way. The government had no right to outlaw plants and fungi in the first place, so the advocate for legalization need not adduce any such arguments. They need only point out that the criminalization of natural substances was a common-law power grab by government and hence something that must be rolled back, so that the natural law can continue to prevail above the common law in America.
For that is what it means to be American, to live in a country where there are natural fundamental laws that the government cannot supersede in the name of political expediency.
Ballard Quass
January 2020
quass@quass.com
AbolishTheDEA.com
PS: Yes, this is a completely ad-free site. Amazing, huh? All that I ask is that you link to it in as many online venues as you can -- especially on university websites. That way I can boost my Google rankings, not to earn money but in order to have the privilege of placing this site's listings on the same page as that of the DEA website itself, where it will serve as a sort of standing reproach to that anti-democratic, anti-patient, and anti-minority agency.
I have half a mind to have this site sponsored by hardware stores, however, who can no doubt make a fortune by selling replacement doors for the thousands that the DEA has unnecessarily kicked down as part of their propaganda campaign to bully Americans into giving up their right to Mother Nature's plants and to the myriad psychological medicines that those plants contain.
