Se Llama Mushrooms
Live from the DEA Lounge!
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
November 26, 2019
[standup]
Welcome back to the DEA Lounge.
[applause]
How many know that psychedelics are good for learning languages? Raise your hands?
[applaud]
Let's see, 24, carry the one...
Looks like nobody here knows that.
[drum]
No, seriously. That's just one of the millions of things that we don't know about Mother Nature's pharmacy thanks to our government's policy of placing her off-limits.
[boo]
Wake up, folks: that's as anti-scientific as it gets.
[boo]
Think about it: Why do kids learn languages? Surely, it has something to do with the flexibility of their brains. Whereas the adult brain has gotten into a rut. Am I right?
[murmur]
Look at the guy at the bar over there. He's like, "I can't speak for the rest of us here, but my own brain is certainly nothing to write home about."
[drum]
I know you didn't say anything, sir, but there is such a thing as telepathy, you know.
[drum]
No, seriously. Mark my words: someday language courses will require the consumption of a modest amount of psychedelics during certain crucial lessons.
[applaud]
You know, to let the vocabulary and grammar sink into that otherwise thick brain of ours.
[applaud]
Quiero presentarte a una amiga. Commo se llama? Se llama mushroom.
[laughter]
I kid you not, ese.
[drum]
{^Do you have what it takes to be a Drug Warrior? Only the most logic-challenged and nature-hating individuals need apply. Jackboots may be provided, however the ideal candidate will already be wearing jackboots as a matter of course.}{
Mind you, if we lived in a sane world, psychiatrists would be petitioning Congress to allow the use of psychedelics in therapy sessions too.
[applaud]
Seriously, psychedelics seem custom-designed to bring out the raw material with which psychiatry has hitherto wanted to deal.
[applaud]
It's like, some supreme being is serving this stuff up to us on a silver platter, absolutely for free, saying, "Here it is, I've grown it for you," and we're like, "Oh, no, not a plant! We couldn't possibly use a plant for mental healing!"
[boo]
And I'm like, since when did America adopt the religion of Christian Science with respect to psychological healing? I for one never signed off on the notion that we have some religious or patriotic obligation to scorn Mother Nature's freely offered therapies.
[applaud]
And yet the government is going to check my urine to make sure that I avoid the plants and fungi that grow at my very feet? Puh-lease.
[boo]
Hello? That's, um, like the enforcement of Christian Science, folks.
[boo]
Hello? It's the establishment of a religion.
[applaud]
You know, I've recently begun reading the complete essays of CS Lewis and they make me feel so small, philosophically speaking. I mean, that guy is smart, girlfriend, I am telling you.
[drum]
[laughter]
But just when I'm feeling that I don't know jack, I suddenly remember that I'm one of the only people in this country to realize all of the philosophical problems with the Drug War, and I suddenly feel smart again.
You know what they say about the one-eyed man in the country of the blind.
[drum]
No, seriously. My name is Ballard Quass and I'll be here ranting against the anti-scientific war on Mother Nature until further notice --
[applaud]
Or until the next "crack down" on drugs entails the silencing of critics -- which, I wouldn't put it past a government that has already had the unprecedented chutzpah to outlaw plants.
AFTERTHOUGHT:
I'm sure I'm not the only one who realizes that the Drug War is philosophically rotten to the core -- but I'm certainly one of the few to speak up. That said, I really can't blame most people for touting the party line. After all, you are literally kicked out of the job market (via drug testing 1 ) if you do not renounce your right to Mother Nature's plants. And given that harsh treatment, it's reasonable to fear that you could be discriminated against in hiring merely by making your anti-drug-war viewpoints known.
Incidentally, here's where American hypocrisy kicks in. It is considered a truism that rock and rap are anti-institutional forces in America, where our artists are willing to say anything to the establishment. But not so. There are precious few songs that seek to tweak the nose of the establishment for outlawing Mother Nature's plants. Oh, sure, there are plenty of songs about hedonistic drug use, but such songs only help to reinforce the Drug Warrior dogma that psychoactive plants are only used by hedonists, allowing the warrior to conveniently ignore the fact that many such plants improve human cognition and give the partaker a therapeutic sense of their place in the cosmos.
So even rock bands and rappers are cowered into staying mum about the true fascist state of affairs.
The DEA has been willfully withholding godsend medications from the American public for 40+ years now, yet that outrage has never been addressed by an American musician. Meanwhile, films like "Running with the Devil" continue to glorify the DEA and encourage us to accept its unconstitutional practices (including, according to the film, torture and cold-blooded murder of mere suspects), all in the name of keeping Americans from having access to naturally growing plants.
Anyone who thinks such vicious law enforcement is just a movie plot is unfamiliar with the amorality of our current president, Donald Trump. He's jealous of Filipino Duterte who gets to order the killing of mere drug suspects outright, without all that nonsense about due process and jury trials. Here we see problem 2,456-B (or is it 2,456-C?) with our war against plants: it plays into the hands of would-be tyrants, who will gladly use Drug War hysteria to bring about the kind of fascist bloodshed that they hunger for. What better way to dress up their blood-lust and their raw will to power in the colors of the American flag?
And America claims it's a scientifically oriented country? Stop me if you've heard this before but: puh-lease!
June 18, 2022
Okay, that was... quaint, shall we call it? But you've got to remember, these curious effusions were indited a full 2 1/2 long years ago, when Brian was still a lad (couldn't have been more than 62 years old at most), and he had only just started his task of upbraiding the establishment for its nonsensical drug-war pieties. He's connected a lot of philosophical dots since then. Like the fact that the Drug War is a makework program for law enforcement personnel which actually obliges them to become noxious busybodies.
It's like a movie I just saw in which a female drugs agent comes into town looking for medicines of which pharmalogically clueless politicians disapprove. You'll have to forgive my French, but I couldn't help but think of this self-righteous public servant as a... well, as a "panty sniffer," if you will, as she rushes about town drawing her gloved finger over any and all surfaces that appear to harbor the least amount of particulate of any kind. You could see she was just waiting for the moment that she could cry out: "Bingo!" or "Gotcha!"
She doesn't care about bank robberies, she doesn't care about nuclear war 2 3 4 , she doesn't care about terrorism. She's just a prudish schoolmarm trying to find out if the locals have been naughty or nice.
LOCAL: "But we're good people here, Ma'am!"
OFFICER: "That's as shall appear, my pretty! Heh-heh-heh-heh! Say, do you mind if I sniff your jacket, young man?"
And then when you think of the thousands of her self-aggrandizing colleagues in the US alone who only have jobs because of this Big Brother fight against the "pre-crime" of substance possession, folks who, barring that, would be slopping together Whoppers at Burger King. Well, it's a boon for the glove industry at any rate. Somebody has to clad those busybody fingers of theirs as they poke about for a legal excuse to confiscate mansions and yachts on behalf of the local police.
America has come within a hair's breath of being nuked multiple times (accidentally and otherwise) in the last 50 years, including once in Arkansas, once in North Carolina, and once in Pearl Harbor. But it never seems to have occurred to strategically hysterical authorities that these thousands of "panty sniffers" that we're employing today in the name of the Drug War might be of more service to the Republic if they were looking for nuclear threats, not pharmacological ones.
I guess they figure that if we're blown to bits, we can all go to heaven secure in the knowledge that we have just said no to Mother Nature's godsends. Or if we survive the initial blast, we can stand up to the invader (the one who comes stateside after we do the dirty work for them by blowing up Arkansas) and cry: "Don't shoot, comrade, we're good people here, we have all just said no to godsend medicine!" To which the Russian sniper replies, "Just say no to THIS!"
I'm just sayin', let's get our priorities straight here!
Notes:
1: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition (up)
2: 8 Nuclear Close Calls that Nearly Spelled Disaster (up)
3: Global Nuclear Warhead Stockpiles (1945-2024) (up)
4: Nuclear Near-Misses: The Close Calls That Almost Changed the World (up)
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Drug warriors aren't just deciding for us about drugs. They're telling us that we no longer need Coleridge poems, Lovecraft stories, Robin Williams, Sherlock Holmes, or the soma-inspired Hindu religion.
If media were truly free in America, you'd see documentaries about people who use drugs safely, something that's completely unimaginable in the age of the drug war.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.
When Americans "obtain their majority" and wish to partake of drugs safely, they should be paired with older adults who have done just that. Instead, we introduce them to "drug abusers" in prerecorded morality plays to reinforce our biased notions that drug use is wrong.
Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?
Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
William James knew that there were substances that could elate. However, it never occurred to him that we should use such substances to prevent suicide. It seems James was blinded to this possibility by his puritanical assumptions.
Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.
Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us
Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk
Let's burn some plants!
Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass
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