Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
open letter to computer scientist George Mohler
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 10, 2021
George Mohler is the computer geek behind event prediction software that is currently 'helping' Santa Clara police (but minorities not so much). I sent the following email to George today in an attempt to persuade him to find a more worthy client for his software than police forces in the age of the Drug War.
Hi, George.
I just watched the documentary 'Eye on You' and I wanted to share with you my concern about your 'event prediction' program. Such an algorithm-based police tactic might make sense in a world where laws were fair, but we live in the age of a Christian Science Drug War, in which it is illegal to even study certain medicines of which politicians disapprove. Sigmund Freud considered cocaine to be a godsend for his depression, but your program helps police track down cocaine users like dogs and treat them like scumbags before tossing them in overcrowded prisons. Opium enthusiasts have included Marco Polo, Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin, and yet your program helps police track down such people like dogs as well -- especially those who dare SELL plant medicine. Do you realize that Founding Father Thomas Jefferson grew the opium poppy at Monticello? But now those who deal in opium are treated like Adolf Hitler -- this despite the fact that entire religions have been inspired by psychoactive plant medicine. The entire Vedic religion was founded to worship the cosmic insights of the Soma plant. The psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries1 gave cosmic insights for 2,000 consecutive years to a who's who of western luminaries, including Plato, Plutarch and Cicero. The Mesoamericans had plant-based religious rituals until Columbus and the Conquistadores showed up and demanded that they become Christians and drink liquor instead -- those that they did not kill, that is.
Your algorithms may stop the occasional old lady from being mugged, but if shows like 'Cops' mean anything, you can bet that what you're really doing is helping police to harass and crack down on minorities, throwing them into overcrowded prisons and removing them from the voting rolls by charging them with felonies -- thereby stealing American elections for racist conservatives.
?374?
If you study the Drug War, you will find that it causes all of the problems that it claims to be solving and then some. My mother suffers from dementia because the Drug War has outlawed all the drugs that show such great promise in treating it -- like ayahuasca that grows new neural pathways in the brain. Meanwhile, 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma meds because the Drug War outlaws all the less addictive plant medicine that could help the depressed immeasurably. Cocaine, opium, and even heroin are less addictive than Big Pharma meds, because the latter change brain chemistry, which takes a long time (if ever) to revert to the normal baseline once Big Pharma 'meds' are withdrawn.
In short, the Drug War is hypocritical, anti-science, anti-nature, anti-minority, anti-patient, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, and a violation of Natural Law. Just ask the ghost of Thomas Jefferson that was spinning in its grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the Founding Father's poppy plants.
In light of these facts, I urge you to consider withdrawing your product from use by police forces, at least until such time as America decides to start learning about plant medicine rather than demonizing it.
The Drug War represents a wrong way of thinking about the world, one that causes a civil war in Mexico and impowers a self-proclaimed Drug War Hitler in the Philippines.
Please don't be a party to this ongoing injustice. Find a more worthy client for your algorithms than law enforcement in the Age of the Drug War.
Abolishthedea.com
PS The 'Eye on You' documentary showed the Santa Clara Police following up on one of your algorithm 'leads.' Of course, the evildoer they encountered wasn't robbing a store or mugging an orphan or getting ready to take hostages -- No, they were, AS PER USUAL, merely possessing substances of which beer-swilling Christian Drug Warrior politicians disapprove. But then the Drug War is just a make-work program for law enforcement. Imagine what police would do without a Drug War: they would just have to sit back and wait for people to actually do something wrong. Hmm. Then there would be no Cops and Detective shows for folks to watch after they got home from a nice day of being drug tested, no movies about the US marching into Latin American countries to shoot Latinos because they use or sell plant medicine that has been used responsibly for millennia by non-western countries, no movies about the DEA running roughshod over the US Constitution, torturing suspects and then shooting them at point-blank range in the age of our unprecedented war on substances.
Author's Follow-up: August 19, 2022
Looking back almost a year later, I ask myself if I wasn't a bit rough on George. After all, you catch more flies with honey, right? Of course, the irony is that I would be a much more patient fellow were I free to occasionally avail myself of opium, coca, psilocybin and especially the empathogenic Ecstasy -- the very drugs that George's algorithms will help get me arrested for using. So if I'm the monster here, then George is the Dr. Frankenstein who made me.
Author's Follow-up: March 6, 2025
I wish we had some computer code that would predict when racist politicians are going to create new laws designed to target minorities.
if ($suspect=='black' AND $location=='inner_city' AND $time_of_day=='night')
{
run $harassment_routine;
}
elseif ($suspect=='rich' AND $location=='suburbs' AND $average_salary>$100,000)
{
run $public_service_routine;
}
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 SpotCanadian Drug Warrior, I said Get AwayCommon Sense Drug WithdrawalDrug War MurderersDrugs are not the problemEnd the Drug War NowFeedback on my first legal psilocybin session in OregonFinally, a Drug War opponent who checks all my boxesFreedom of Religion and the War on DrugsGetting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug WarGod and DrugsHello? MDMA works, already!How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug WarHow National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of cocaHow Scientific American reckons without the Drug WarHow the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in EnglandHow the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel KantHow the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big PharmaI'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma CactusIgnorance is the enemy, not FentanylIllusions with Professor Arthur ShapiroIn Defense of Religious Drug UseKeep Laughing Gas LegalMDMA for PsychotherapyMy Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implementNo drugs are bad in and of themselvesOpen Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor MateOpen Letter to Anthony GottliebOpen Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEAOpen Letter to Diane O'LearyOpen Letter to Erica ZelfandOpen Letter to Francis FukuyamaOpen letter to Kenneth SewellOpen Letter to Lisa LingOpen letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo UniversityOpen Letter to Richard HammersleyOpen Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland GriffithsOpen Letter to Roy Benaroch MDOpen Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and CrimeOpen Letter to the Virginia LegislatureOpen Letter to Variety Critic Owen GliebermanOpen Letter to Vincent Hurley, LecturerOpen Letter to Vincent RadoOpen letter to Wolfgang SmithPredictive Policing in the Age of the Drug WarProhibitionists Never LearnRegulate and EducateReplacing antidepressants with entheogensReview of When Plants DreamScience News Continues to Ignore the Drug WarScience News magazine continues to pretend that there is no War on DrugsSolquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invitedSpeaking Truth to Big PharmaTeenagers and CannabisThe common sense way to get off of antidepressantsThe Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing MatterThe Depressing Truth About SSRIsThe Invisible Mass ShootingsThe Menace of the Drug WarThe problem with Modern Drug Reform EffortsThe Pseudoscience of Mental Health TreatmentThere is nothing to debate: the Drug War is wrong, root and branchTime for News Outlets to stop promoting Drug War liesTop 10 Problems with the Drug WarUnscientific AmericanUsing plants and fungi to get off of antidepressantsVancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe UseWeed Bashing at WTOP.COMWhitehead and PsychedelicsWhy DARE should stop telling kids to say noWhy Rick Doblin is Ghosting MeWhy the Drug War is Worse than you can ImagineWhy the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine
Notes:
1: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
Think you can handle a horse? So did Christopher Reeves. The fact is, NOBODY can handle a horse. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!
In fact, there are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!
The Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. It is therefore a crime against religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.
Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us
How the Drug War gave the 2016 election to Donald Trump
In Response to Laurence Vance
Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass
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