The new American Conquistadores: using flame throwers to keep the world safe for Big Liquor
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 21, 2020
If you ever want to understand how absurd the Drug War is, just substitute the word "plants" for "drugs" in your mind the next time politicians start blaming "drugs" for something.
"Today," says Donald Trump, "I am calling for the execution of those who deal in drugs."
TRANSLATION:
"Today, I am calling for the execution of those who deal in Mother Nature's plants."
For that's what the Drug War really is: A WAR ON PLANTS, and as such it is every bit as superstitious and idiotic as the war on plant-using females of the witch-hunt days, to which the Drug War is philosophically linked. For witch hunting never died out in America: it is alive and well. The Cotton Mathers of the 21st century have just replaced the word "witch" with the term "drug user" and gone on their merry way persecuting Americans whom they don't understand. What was the witch's crime, after all, but the fact that she achieved "forbidden knowledge" through the ritualistic use of psychoactive plants?
To put this another way: The Drug War is just a Christian Science crack down on those who use Mother Nature's medicines for psychological healing and to achieve higher states of consciousness.
Christian Scientists, as you know, believe that we should be able to cure ourselves physically without resorting to drugs. Likewise the Christian Science Drug Warrior believes we should be able to control our mood and our conscious states in general without resorting to plant medicine. I need hardly add that this latter Christian Science is hypocritical, since the Drug Warriors have no problem with tobacco or alcohol - or even with synthetic drugs from Big Pharma 12 to which 1 in 8 American males and 1 in 4 American females are addicted even as I type this - with many SSRI antidepressants 3 being harder to "kick" than heroin 4.
But Drug Warriors will never use the word "plants" for "drugs" because they know it will make them sound every bit as silly, stupid, and intolerant as they actually are.
Substitute "plants" for "drugs" and then think about so-called "drug testing 5 ." That all-American business practice suddenly turns into the extrajudicial enforcement of Christian Science Sharia.
This, my friends, is why the Drug War needs to end: not because "it does not work," as my fellow liberals are fond of saying, but because it should not work, it MUST NOT work in a free society, least of all in a country that was founded on natural law: i.e., the idea that there are some rights that the government cannot take away, even under the guise of protecting its citizens from themselves: and the most obvious natural right in the world is what John Locke called our right to the earth "and all that lies therein."
This is not rocket science. It is obviously absurd and unconstitutional to criminalize plants. But tyrants and worrywarts still get away with it. How? By strategically using the word "drugs" in place of "plants."
The above arguably interesting reflections were posted an entire 2 1/2 years ago, when Brian was still a kid, scarcely more than 61 years old at most. Oh, he knew that the Drug War was wrong back then too, of course, but he had yet to fathom the full extent of its negative impact on such diverse socio-cultural categories as academic freedom, civil rights, and religious liberty -- and how it has inspired what Thomas Szasz calls the "language of loathing" and turned the American moviegoer into a fascist who cheers on DEA agents as they plant evidence and shoot unarmed Latino suspects at point-blank range. Had Brian indited this broadside today, in the full wisdom of his years (he's now 64 if he's a day!), he would have surely adverted to Dawn Paley's insights in "Drug War capitalism 6 ," that 2014 must-read wherein we learn how the Drug Warrior dubs the time-honored Indigenous villages of Latin America as 'narco-communities' in order to justify their mass displacement and literally pave the way for Walmart and co. (Don't take it to heart, Brian, old boy, we were all young once -- some of us twice, even, with the help of godsend plant medicine and fungi!)
"The right to chew or smoke a plant that grows wild in nature, such as hemp (marijuana), is anterior to and more basic than the right to vote."
--Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p xvi7
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.
Talking about being in denial: drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.
Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote:
"The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."
The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war.
America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own pain by making opium illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.
Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.
"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
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.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!