whose documentary about Chicago violence does not even mention the Drug War!!!
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 13, 2022
Lisa Ling never once mentioned the Drug War during her documentary about violence in Chicago. Not once. Surely she knows that it is the Drug War that creates HUGE incentives for drug dealing, thereby facilitating the creation of armed gangs and the violence that comes with it in the form of turf wars. This violence (which killed almost 800 blacks in Chicago in 2021 alone) will never end if we fail to identify the obvious cause.
By failing to identify the true cause of the violence -- namely, substance prohibition -- Lisa is empowering fascists like Trump to start executing black Chicagoans in the name of the hateful Drug War.
Please, Lisa: as liquor prohibition created the Mafia, so substance prohibition has created the modern inner-city gangs. Please say so in your future reportage! As Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014: "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 1 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist.2"
Lisa missed a real opportunity to get to the truth about the hate-filled drug-war, which gives police carte blanche to treat suspects like scum. That's why the cop who killed George Floyd told the crowd to "just say no to drugs," because it was the Drug War which first gave racist cops like himself the green light to treat suspects like dirt.
Forgotten Stakeholders in the drug debate
The depressed and anxious who are denied godsend medicines thanks to prohibition.
The academic community, which is censored by drug law and told they can only research substances of which their government approves.
Mexican children who lose their parents to the War on Drugs
Patients (including children in hospice) experiencing pain who cannot get adequate relief, thanks to America's demonization of pain medicine.
Residents of inner cities who live in violent "no-go" zones like Southeast Washington, D.C., where bullets fly thanks to the fact that substance prohibition armed these communities to the teeth.
Formerly free Americans who now live in a semi-police state thanks to the militarization of local police forces in the name of "fighting drugs."
Author's Follow-up:
May 18, 2025
America is in complete denial about the downsides of drug prohibition, and Lisa Ling is the poster child for that denial. But she is not alone in ignoring the endless downsides to drug prohibition. Most of today's scientific articles on things like depression and human consciousness only make sense if you assume with the author that drugs do not exist. Take the claim that depression is hard to beat. That statement is true only if you assume that psychoactive substances do not exist, many of which could end depression in real-time, as for instance laughing gas 3 , phenethylamines, and even opium 4 , the drug that Americans love to hate.
But Americans have been brain-wiped when it comes to drug prohibition. They refuse to admit that drug prohibition exists. They refuse to even recognize the existence of the endless substances that we have outlawed in the name of fearmongering and racial and ethnic prejudices.
Even our history books ignore the Drug War. The progressive historian Howard Zinn never mentions the Drug War once in "A People's History of the United States of America"; neither does the conservative historian Paul Johnson in "Birth of the Modern."
How will the Drug War ever end when we refuse to recognize that it even exists? How will it end when we give it a giant "Mulligan" for all the harm that it causes, and instead cast about for other culprits, like global warming and job availability.
I try to be optimistic, but my comments on these topics are increasingly being blocked by algorithms, so confident are America's techies in their childish and disastrous view of "drugs." I am finding it very hard to believe that the truth will eventually be recognized as such, which is a belief that even the great pessimist Schopenhauer entertained, i.e., that the truth would eventually "out." I wonder rather if billionaires and their heavily censored media can ever be stopped from controlling the narrative and so deep-sixing any attempts at regaining religious and psychological liberty in America and hence in the world at large.
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
The existence of a handful of bad outcomes of drug use does not justify substance prohibition... any more than the existence of drunkards justifies a call for liquor prohibition.
In America, they save the depressed from cocaine and opium by turning them into patients for life with dependence-causing "meds." Now 30-year-old doctors get to treat 67-year-olds like children, with new visits every damn three months.
"Can I use poppies, coca, laughing gas, MDMA?" "NO," says the materialist, "We must be SCIENTIFIC! We must fry your brain and give you a lobotomy and make you a patient for life with the psychiatric pill mill! That's true SCIENCE!"
If NIDA covered all drugs (not just politically ostracized drugs), they'd produce articles like this: "Aspirin continues to kill hundreds." "Penicillin misuse approaching crisis levels." "More bad news about Tylenol and liver damage." "Study revives cancer fears from caffeine."
The DEA is still saying that psilocybin has no medical uses and is addictive. They should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for using such lies to keep people from using the gifts of Mother Nature.
There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.
The line drawn between recreational and medical use is wishful thinking on the part of drug warriors. Recreation, according to Webster's, is "refreshment or diversion," and both have positive knock-on effects in the lives of real people.
Someone should stand outside Jefferson's estate and hand out leaflets describing the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello to confiscate poppy plants. That raid was against everything Jefferson stood for. The TJ Foundation DISHONORED JEFFERSON and their visitors should know that!
Drug warriors are full of hate for "users." Many of them make it clear that they want users to die (like Gates and Bennett...). The drug war has weaponized inhumanity.
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