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Why CBS 19 should stop supporting the Drug War

an open letter to the CBS affiliate in Charlottesville, Virginia

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





May 17, 2022



2025 update



Hi there.

I just overheard your station promoting an upcoming concert that will be promoting the War on Drugs.

I urge you not to promote such concerts for the following reasons:

1) Americans should be educated about substances, not taught to fear them.
2) The Drug War killed almost 800 blacks in Chicago alone last year by gunfire. And 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"
3) The Drug War makes it criminal for scientists to do their work.
4) The Drug War outlaws the mere study of plants that could help cure Alzheimer's 3 disease and autism, not to mention end school shootings (as could the therapeutic use of the drug Ecstasy by folks prone to violence).
5) The Drug War led to the psychiatric pill mill 4 , which has addicted 1 in 4 American women to Big Pharma 5 6 meds, some of which are harder to kick than heroin 7.
6) The Drug War has forced American soldiers to go for almost 40 years now without MDMA , a super-safe medicine that is a godsend for fighting PTSD.
7) The Drug War, as we speak, is causing civil wars in South America and empowering a self-styled "Drug War Hitler" in the Philippines.
8) HG Wells and Jules Verne loved coca wine, Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius enjoyed opium . Plato's views of the afterlife were inspired by psychedelics (at Eleusis). And the entire Vedic-Hindu religion was inspired by the psychoactive effects of the Soma plant.

Drugs are not the enemy, ignorance is -- the ignorance that the Drug War encourages by teaching us to fear drugs rather than to understand them.

Closer to home, the DEA stomped onto Monticello 8 in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in the name of the Drug War, thereby overthrowing the natural law upon which Jefferson founded America. (Natural Law tells us that some rights cannot be justifiably abridged, like the right to what John Locke called "the use of the land and all that lies therein.)

By the way, the Drug War event that you were promoting was being sponsored by Bud Light. How ironic. Alcohol kills 95,000 a year in the US, and yet you want kids to say no to plant medicine that grows at their very feet. That's indoctrination, not patriotism. Sounds like Bud Light doesn't want competition for the shabby self-transcendence that its tasteless brew provides.

Facts not fear. Education not incarceration.

Please stop promoting the hateful Drug War, which has militarized police forces around the world and which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some.

Think of Thomas Jefferson, and stop promoting the anti-American War on Drugs. Just say no to the violence-causing Drug War ideology of substance demonization.


PS If we have to have a Drug War, let's focus on the biggest killers. Let's throw anyone in jail who has the least trace of tobacco or alcohol in their systems, drugs which, combined, kill a half a million people in the US every year. Let's deny such people jobs and government loans. Let's confiscate their houses. In other words, let's give the Drug Warriors a taste of their own racist medicine.



Author's Follow-up: February 4, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




I wrote the above letter to CBS after a visit to my elderly mother in hospice, where she was suffering unnecessarily thanks to the outlawing of godsend medicines.

Incidentally, isn't it the mother of all irony when the Budweiser corporation sponsors a "just say no" rally? The corporation's product results in 178,000 deaths per year9, and yet they want us to say no to substances that have inspired entire religions.

William Brereton would have appreciated that irony. He frequently contrasted opium with liquor in his treatise entitled 10," in answer to the Anti-Opium Society of England when they first started spreading extravagant lies about the smoking of opium in China.

Brereton pointed out that Chinese opium smokers did not beat their wives, that they were never kept from performing their occupations thanks to opium , nor was their health ravaged by the drug, despite English lies to the contrary.

But the very word "opium 11 " is used as a conjuring spell these days to summon up all that is evil about drugs. So let's think of phenethylamines instead like MDMA 12 . Alexander Shulgin synthesized hundreds of such drugs that inspired and elated without causing dependency or addiction13.

But Budweiser corp. would prefer that young people keep dying from alcohol -- while turning up their self-righteous snouts at the modern government-created boogieman called "drugs."

Here's a comedy routine that illustrates what's wrong with the Drug War -- and the hypocritical folks at CBS and Budweiser who support it. As for the Christian Science rallies mentioned above: I wonder how many young people have failed to show up at such events because they were killed en route by a drunk driver.

Click below for a short comedy routine 14 about the hateful hypocrisy of the War on Drugs.





Notes:

1: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
2: Inner-City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration Thompson, Heather Ann, The Atlantic, 2014 (up)
3: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
4: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
5: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science Seife, Charles, Scientific American, 2012 (up)
6: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? LaMartinna, John, Forbes, 2022 (up)
7: Lee Robins' studies of heroin use among US Vietnam veterans Hall, Wayne, National Library of Medicine, 2016 (up)
8: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
9: Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use in the United States CDC, 2022 (up)
10: Scribd: The Truth About Opium Brereton, William, Anna Ruggieri, India, 2017 (up)
11: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
12: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
13: Scribd.com: PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story Shulgin, Alexander, Transform Press, New York, 1991 (up)
14: COPS PRESENTS the top 10 traffic stops of 2023 DWP (up)


Mass Media and Drugs




Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice. The media has played its role with movies like "Running with the DEA," "The Crisis" and "The Runner." In the first of these three, the DEA are the "good guys" for murdering a suspect in cold blood. In the second, the DEA plants evidence to cover up the murder of a drug suspect by an indignant mother. And in the third, a white detective stages a raid that kills a young Black teenager that said detective refers to as "a waste of space."

The Drug War is all about making us hate -- making us hate anybody except for the folks that brought about the violence and drug problems in the first place: the damned prohibitionists who, having failed to outlaw liquor, turned their scapegoating on every less dangerous substance in the world.

Meanwhile, the media have done all they can to support this drug war by holding the use of outlawed substances to safety standards that are never applied to any other risky activity on earth, meanwhile ignoring the fact that prohibition encourages ignorance and leads to contaminated drug supply. Thousands of American young people die each month because of unregulated supply and ignorance, not from drugs themselves.

The media also supports the drug war by failing to hold it accountable for all the problems that it causes. Just read any article on inner-city shootings -- today's journalists will trace the problem to a lack of jobs or to global warming, to anything but the drug war which incentivized violence in the first place. As for violence overseas, we're told that it's caused by evil rotten drug cartels -- without any acknowledgement that it was American drug policy that created those cartels out of whole cloth, just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia here in the States.

Meanwhile, the media have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's fentanyl... It's all part of the DEA's tried-and-true formula to stay relevant, as academic Philip Jenkins clearly demonstrates in "Synthetic Panics": Take a local drug problem and publicize it so that it goes national. Then work with a film crew at "48 Hours" to show that the drug in question threatens the white American middle class. Then go to Congress, hat in hand, and accept billions to 'solve' the latest drug problem.

And Americans fall for it every time. In fact, their gullibility seems to be increasing over time. They love to hate drugs, so much so that drugs have become the new horror trope. Recent movies have taken to personifying "evil" drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. It's sad that America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs -- and the media can take much of the blame.

  • Attention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propaganda
  • Colorado plane crash caused by milk!
  • Common Nonsense from Common Sense Media
  • Cop shows as drug war propaganda
  • COPS PRESENTS the top 10 traffic stops of 2023
  • COPS: TV Show for Racist Drug Warriors
  • Drug War Agitprop
  • Drug War Hysteria and the Opioid Crisis
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Drug War Quotes in TV and Movies
  • Fabricate at Will: editors give journalists free rein to lie about psychedelics
  • Fentanyl does not kill! Prohibition does!
  • Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide
  • Glenn Close but no cigar
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca
  • How Scientific American reckons without the drug war
  • How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War
  • How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War Part II
  • Jim Beam and Drugs
  • Matthew Perry and the Drug War Ghouls
  • More Weed Bashing at the Washington Post
  • Movie Warnings from Uncommon Sense
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
  • Potty-Mouth Drug Warriors
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no war on drugs
  • Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II
  • Stigmatize THIS
  • The Award for most biased reporting on psychedelic drugs in an online newspaper goes to…
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
  • The Runner: Racist Drug War Agitprop
  • The Unpeople of Southeast Washington, D.C.
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting drug war lies
  • Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM
  • Why CBS 19 should stop supporting the Drug War





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    Now the folks who helped Matthew get Ketamine must be sacrificed on the altar of the Drug War, lest people start thinking that the Drug War itself was at fault.y

    Drug prohibition began as a racist attempt to prevent so-called "miscegenation." The racist's fear was not that a white woman would use opium or marijuana or cocaine, but that she might actually fall in love with a Chinese, Hispanic or Black person respectively.

    Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.

    When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia: OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think. POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!

    They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."

    Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."

    The best harm reduction strategy would be to re-legalize opium and cocaine. We would thereby end depression in America and free Americans from their abject reliance on the healthcare industry.

    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.

    Mayo Clinic is peddling junk. They are still promoting Venlafaxine, a drug that is harder to kick than heroin. The drug is only a problem, though, because of prohibition. It would be easy to get off of with the help of other drugs!!! WAKE UP, MAYO!

    I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.


    Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






    Materialism and the Drug War
    The Ketamine Mirage


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    Thanks for visiting The Drug War Philosopher at abolishthedea.com, featuring essays against America's disgraceful drug war. Updated daily.

    Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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