Response to: 95% of Americans Favor Legalizing Drugs
Reddit post on Libertarian page: 95% of American Favor Legalizing Drugs
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 2, 2019
The focus should be on legalizing the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet. We call ourselves a free and scientific country, but neither boast makes sense as long as we're criminalizing Mother Nature. We wring our hands about the past, when researchers had to worry about Church oversight. But scientists today are under DEA oversight whenever they attempt to so much as research natural plant cures that can reverse depression and alcoholism.
Today's drug situation sounds like a sci-fi book by Ray Bradbury, like Fahrenheit 451, in which a tyrannical government of the future burns books in order to control what we think. Today's situation is even more despotic, for our government burns plants in order to dictate how -- and how much -- we can think.
Just as the DEA stomped onto Monticello in jackboots in 1987 to confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants.
The government will tell us that they're trying to protect us by making psychedelics illegal. This is a flat-out lie -- given the fact that America is more addicted than ever today to LEGAL DRUGS -- and that this addiction is caused by SSRI anti-depressants. The anti-depressant Effexor, for instance, has been found to have a 95% recidivism rate for those who try to get off it.
1/6 to 1/10th of the American public addicted to SSRIS -- and yet we're told that non-addictive psychedelic plants that grow at our very feet cannot even be STUDIED?
The government has no problem with screwing up America's health, as is seen in the fact that it is in denial about the statistics of anti-depressant addiction. They just want to make sure that the government, the shrinks, and Big Pharma get their cut when it comes to the drugs that we use.
We need to RE-legalize plants -- for every reason imaginable: to stop the DEA's abuse of power, to return property rights to property owners, to allow Earthlings their natural birthright to the healing plants of Mother Nature that grow all around them.
Liberals are as bad as conservatives in blocking this outcome. They fret that legalization will cause more problems. But I contend that no government has the ethical right to outlaw natural plants in the first place.
So we have no need to prove how re-legalization of plants can be accomplished without problems. If the freedom of the press were outlawed 50 years ago, those who advocated that freedom today would be under no obligation to say how that freedom can be re-instituted without trouble. That freedom simply needs to be returned to the people -- and if the change itself causes problems, they are to be blamed on those who took away America's freedom in the first place.
My prescription: RE-legalize plants and then have the police get tough -- NOT on drug possession, but on bad behavior. By all means, let's have severe punishment for bad behavior that can be tied to drug MISUSE, since such misuse threatens the usage rights of the responsible majority by inflaming opinion. Crack down on misbehavior, not on plants.
Author's Follow-up:
April 30, 2025
I do not often read my old essays and cringe. In fact, I have never done so until today. That was when I re-discovered this dusty old post of mine from 2019, written when I was first beginning my philosophical exploration of the Drug War -- and I was shocked to see that I was declaiming against Libertarians for championing the re-legalization of synthetic medicines. My idea seems to have been that we should focus on the relegalization of plants and fungi and that our right to synthetic drugs was less obvious and therefore more fraught with difficulties, at least when it comes to convincing others. I wrote this, however, before I had read the extraordinary accounts of phenethylamine users in "Pihkal" by Alexander Shulgin, such as...
"Excellent feelings, tremendous opening of insight and understanding, a real awakening."
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."
I wrote this before I had learned how the synthetic drug called Ecstasy had brought unprecedented peace and love to the British dance floors, as noted by the following DJs in the documentary "One Nation" by concert promoter Terry "Turbo" Smith.
"It was the first time that black-and-white people had integrated on a level... and everybody was one." -- DJ Ray Keith.
"It was black and white, Asian, Chinese, all up in one building," -- MC GQ.
"Everyone's loving each other, man, they're not hating." - DJ Mampi Swift.
I wrote this before I had realized that LSD and Ecstasy, both synthetic drugs, were in fact responsible for creating a Summer of Love on both sides of the Atlantic, LSD in 1960s America and Ecstasy in the 1990s UK. I wrote this before I realized that Drug Warriors hate nothing so much as peace, love and understanding.
I now see clearly that it is the outlawing of the religious impulse to outlaw any and all drugs that inspire and elate. This is clear from the fact that the Hindu religion owes its existence to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. I now see clearly that it is the ultimate tyranny to decide how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in life, which is what we do when we outlaw psychoactive medicines of any kind. I now see that this is the ultimate power grab by government -- to literally get under your skin and decide which chemicals belong there and therefore to which emotions and feelings we can have access.
By the way: If the above essay does not seem to have the biases mentioned, it is because I have cleaned it up to remove any references that could be construed as synthetics bashing. The fact is, our human minds have clearly been created in such a way as to benefit from psychoactive medicine. Our Christian Drug Warriors should stop second-guessing God and allow human beings to benefit from the way they have been made -- the way that medicines have been made -- such that we go together like peas in a chemical bond. The trick is to find the safest and wisest uses -- and that comes from education and free common-sense research of the drugs in question, like that undertaken in "Pihkal" (as opposed to the purblind research of the passion-scorning behaviorists, who are dogmatically blind to all glaringly obvious benefits of drug use). When we fight against life as it is -- when we fight against the search for human transcendence -- we are asking for trouble -- just as the liquor prohibitionists brought about machine-gun-fire in the streets in their attempt to save us from the fact that the world contains grapes.
The world is full of psychoactive substances. Get over it. We need to start learning how to use them as safely and wisely as possible for the benefit of humankind and stop childishly denouncing them a priori, thereby withholding them from everybody based on our fears for the white suburban young Americans whom we refuse to educate about safe use. Meanwhile, phrases like "Fentanyl kills" and "Oxy kills" and "ICE kills" and "Crack kills" are philosophically identical to prehistoric phrases like "Fire bad!" All such phrases are idiotic attempts to blame substances for humanity's refusal to learn how to use them wisely.
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against the hateful war on US
In 1886, coca enthusiast JJ Tschudi referred to prohibitionists as 'kickers.' He wrote: "If we were to listen to these kickers, most of us would die of hunger, for the reason that nearly everything we eat or drink has fallen under their ban."
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
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."
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
Most prohibitionists think that they merely have to use the word "drugs" to win an argument. Like: "Oh, so you're in favor of DRUGS then, are you?" You can just see them sneering as they type. That's because the word "drugs" is like the word "scab": it's a loaded political term.
The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.
John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!
Philip Jenkins reports that Rophynol had positive uses for treating mental disorders until the media called it the "date rape drug." We thus punished those who were benefitting from the drug, tho' the biggest drug culprit in date rape is alcohol. Oprah spread the fear virally.
In 1886, coca enthusiast JJ Tschudi referred to prohibitionists as 'kickers.' He wrote: "If we were to listen to these kickers, most of us would die of hunger, for the reason that nearly everything we eat or drink has fallen under their ban."