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Open letter to Kenneth Sewell

author of Red Star Rogue

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 19, 2022



Dear Mr. Sewell:

Regarding the epilogue to Red Star Rogue:

I was sorry to see that you equated the use of submarines for drug dealing with the use of submarines for launching nuclear weapons, as if there's any relationship whatsoever.

Drug prohibition causes thousands of deaths in inner cities every year (almost 800 in Chicago alone in 2021) because prohibition has created drug gangs out of whole cloth in poor neighborhoods. The Drug War has caused civil wars overseas ab nihilo and emboldened a self-described Drug War Hitler in the Philippines. It has disfranchised millions of minorities, thereby ensuring the election of fascists. Nor has it stopped people from using drugs. America is now the most drug-using country in the world. One in 4 American women are chemically dependent upon Big Pharma 1 2 meds for their entire life, the biggest addiction crisis in world history, many times more than were ever habituated to opium 3 (like Benjamin Franklin) before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 turned them from "habitues" into "addicts" overnight. The Drug War also caused the opioid crisis because its crackdown on less harmful medicines naturally encouraged drug dealers to deal the most readily available controlled substances (like legally prescribed pain killers). On a personal note, as a chronically depressed 64-year-old, I have gone my whole life now without godsend medicines that grow at my feet, all because America violated natural law by criminalizing plants and fungi. (Jefferson was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 4 in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants.)

The nuclear risk is so high today precisely because our presidents were focusing on catching people who were selling godsend plant medicine rather than using the money to fight nuclear proliferation and increase world understanding.

What did Nixon do almost immediately after the Red Star Rogue incident (the near thermonuclear obliteration of Pearl Harbor)? He launched a "War on Drugs," in which he outlawed naturally occurring medicines that had inspired entire religions in the past. What did Reagan do almost immediately after the Air Force almost destroyed half the country in "The Damascus Incident"? He cracked down on psychoactive plant medicine, much of which could help human beings become less belligerent and less reliant on military solutions to world problems, and called on children to turn in their parents for using plant medicine of which he disapproved.

You surely have to admit that the only hope for humanity, considering the facts on the ground that you enumerate, is to have a change of heart - and there is only one way for that to happen: for people to begin USING entheogens and empathogens: substances like MDMA 5 and psilocybin that can actually teach an individual how to love their fellow human beings.

In light of these facts, I found it jarring for you to end your book on the Red Star incident by implying that drug dealing was on a par with blowing up Pearl Harbor or any other city.

"Drugs" is a political term, a scapegoat invention of conservatives that allows them to ignore real social problems and blame all trouble on inanimate substances (while intervening overseas at will, of course, on the pretense of eradicating "drugs"). Until 1914, all intelligent people knew that substances were only good or bad with reference to how they were actually used. But the Drug War tells us that such substances are evil in and of themselves, which is a point of view which has blinded us to endless life-affirming therapies, even preventing us from helping Alzheimer's patients and those with autism, let alone those who are depressed.

If the world is in precarious shape today and under a nuclear sword of Damocles, it is in large part because our leaders (like Nixon and Reagan) have sought to deflect attention from that issue and focus the American mind instead on the political boogieman called "drugs."

So I submit to you that drug dealers with submarines are not the problem.

I just hope America realizes this before my published warnings on this topic become an extant reproof to a future generation that ends up scrounging through the ruins of a burnt-out American city.

I'd personally rather have a flotilla of submarines dealing psychoactive plant medicines hand over fist in every port on earth - than to have even one populous city obliterated by a nuclear weapon.

America has to choose: do we want world peace, or do we want a war on the strategically created boogieman called "drugs"?

Let's hope we make a better choice than the Brits, who shut down the unprecedentedly peaceful rave scene in the 1990s because a "drug" helped inspire the harmony. The result: peace, love and understanding disappeared overnight, as empathogenic Ecstasy was replaced by anger-facilitating alcohol and special forces troops had to be hired to keep the peace. Another "victory" for the addle-brained "War on Drugs."



Notes:

1: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science (up)
2: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? (up)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
4: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation (up)
5: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts (up)


Open Letters




Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.

I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.

Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.



  • America's Blind Spot
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Drugs are not the problem
  • End the Drug War Now
  • Feedback on my first legal psilocybin session in Oregon
  • Finally, a drug war opponent who checks all my boxes
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war
  • God and Drugs
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca
  • How Scientific American reckons without the drug war
  • How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant
  • How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987
  • How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big Pharma
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
  • Illusions with Professor Arthur Shapiro
  • In Defense of Religious Drug Use
  • Keep Laughing Gas Legal
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • No drugs are bad in and of themselves
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Anthony Gottlieb
  • Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
  • Open Letter to Diane O'Leary
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama
  • Open letter to Kenneth Sewell
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Open Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland Griffiths
  • Open Letter to Roy Benaroch MD
  • Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
  • Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer
  • Open Letter to Vincent Rado
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
  • Prohibitionists Never Learn
  • Regulate and Educate
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Review of When Plants Dream
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no war on drugs
  • Solquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invited
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Teenagers and Cannabis
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Invisible Mass Shootings
  • The Menace of the Drug War
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts
  • The Pseudoscience of Mental Health Treatment
  • There is nothing to debate: the drug war is wrong, root and branch
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting drug war lies
  • Top 10 Problems with the Drug War
  • Unscientific American
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM
  • Whitehead and Psychedelics
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than you can Imagine
  • Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine





  • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    "Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.

    Q: Where can you find almost-verbatim copies of the descriptions of religious experiences described by William James? A: In descriptions of user reports of "trips" on drugs ranging from coca to opium, from MDMA to laughing gas.

    The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.

    Americans were always free to take care of their own health -- until drug warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine. Instead of denouncing this attack on our healthcare autonomy, doctors began demonizing self-care as a mortal sin.

    Anyone who has read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin knows that the drug warriors have it exactly backwards. Drugs are our friends. We need to find safe ways to use them to improve ourselves psychologically, spiritually and mentally.

    I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.

    Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!

    Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.

    If politicians wanted to outlaw coffee, a bunch of Kevin Sabets would come forward and start writing books designed to scare us off the drink by cherry-picking negative facts from scientific studies.

    Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.


    Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






    Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology
    Smart Uses for Opium and Coca


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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