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Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no

open letter to the Christian Science propaganda organization called DARE

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





June 10, 2022



2025 update



It's wrong to tell kids to say no to drugs. That's Christian Science. That's religious indoctrination. Why do you assume that mind medicine is evil? You surely don't think that physical medicine is evil. Some of the drugs that you tell kids to say "No" to have inspired entire religions. So stop the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE indoctrination.

It's fine to teach kids not to accept drugs from kids and strangers, but it's wrong to teach them to despise the politically defined boogieman called "drugs."

Organizations like DARE increase substance abuse because you're always reminding kids about "DRUGS DRUGS DRUGS!" You never let them forget about it. Well, guess what:

that just gives kids ideas. If they want to rebel, they know what to do: take those dirty evil awful drugs that the parents are always trying to frighten them about.

Check out the research: the drugs that you demonize could be godsends for the depressed and lonely. But organizations like yours have forced depressed folks like myself to go an entire lifetime without the godsend medicine that grows at my very feet, all so that you can demonize Mother Nature's plant medicine -- after racist politicians have given alcohol and tobacco a great big MULLIGAN, even though those drugs kill half a million Americans every year!

If you're going to tell kids to say no to drugs, then stop being hypocritical. Tell them to say no to Big Pharma 1 2 antidepressants 3 -- upon which ONE IN FOUR AMERICAN WOMEN ARE HOOKED FOR LIFE. Tell them to say no to coffee. Tell them to say no to sugar. Tell them to say no to Pepto-Bismol, aspirin and heart medicine.

Or better yet, tell them the unvarnished truth about ALL drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, not just those spectacular but rare anecdotes of abuse that drug-haters cite whenever the drugs that they hate have proven to be extraordinarily safe, statistically speaking.

Speaking of which...

SCHOOL SHOOTINGS could be ended by the therapeutic use of the drug Ecstasy, a drug that teaches folks to care about their fellow human being, but you guys are so caught up in a frenzy of knee-jerk drug demonization that you can't even imagine this glaringly obvious solution to this enormous problem of our time.

In short, DARE promotes an unscientific view of plant medicine. It is a jaundiced drug-war view that has censored American scientists, caused civil wars overseas, empowered a self-styled Drug War Hitler in the Philippines, and caused almost 800 black deaths in Chicago alone last year thanks to the guns and violence that naturally follow from prohibition. For as Heath Ann Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014: "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 4 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."


September 24, 2022
DARE's superstitious demonization of drugs hurts children in hospices. Yes, there are hospices that refuse to give dying children morphine 5 to ease their pain because of the drug-warrior lie that substances like morphine 6 are evil in and of themselves, without regard for how, why or when they are used. If DARE wants to help children, they would disband, or devote their efforts to promoting full-on honesty about ALL drugs (including alcohol and anti-depressants) -- the honesty to which America has been so firmly opposed for a variety of political and economic motivations too obvious to require mentioning here.


Author's Follow-up: February 7, 2023

And what about those signs that read DRUG FREE ZONE? Posting signs like that around schools makes as much sense as posting signs that read: SEX FREE ZONE. You're only giving kids ideas about something about which they need to make up their minds as adults. For it's not education's role to teach kids the doctrine of Mary Baker Eddy with respect to psychoactive medicine. Kids have to make up their own minds: is psychoactive medicine a blessing sent from God or is it a curse sent from the devil, as the Drug Warrior seems to think? That's a decision for educated adults to make: neither DARE nor anybody else should try to influence their decisions in grade school, of all places, nor constantly nag them on the subject and thereby put unhelpful thoughts in youngsters' heads.

?270?



Author's Follow-up: January 19, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




The Drug Warriors know what they're doing. Get to them while they're young, teach them to fear drugs rather than to understand them. That way they'll grow up into fearful citizens, ready to accept any loss of freedom in the name of fighting a phantom, thereby keeping their minds off of real problems. Hysterical Drug Warriors like Marci Hamilton liken drug use to child abuse7 -- but the real child abuse occurs when we indoctrinate children in grade school in the drug-hating tenets of the Christian Science religion. We thereby encourage a drug prohibition which brings totally unnecessary torture and violence into the world while denying us a host of potential godsends that common sense and creativity could leverage as powerful psychological benefactors for individuals and communities alike.

But the Drug Warrior prefers that our children be proselytized about drugs, not educated about them.

It is a disgrace, and groups like DARE should be disbanded and held accountable for their brainwashing of our children in the idiotic know-nothing ideology of substance demonization.




Notes:

1: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science (up)
2: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? (up)
3: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs (up)
4: Firearm Violence in the United States (up)
5: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School (up)
6: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School (up)
7: Marci Hamilton Equates Drug Use with Child Abuse (up)


Christian Science




On a superficial level, Christian Science may be seen as a drug-hating religion and so its very existence tends to support the effort of drug warriors to outlaw godsend psychoactive medicines. On a deeper level, however, the religion's founder Mary Baker-Eddy was fighting not so much against drugs as against the failure of modern science to acknowledge the power of the human mind. In Mary's case, of course, this was the mind as influenced by Jesus Christ, but yet she recognized a principle with which even a non-believer can agree and which, moreover, is clearly true in light of drug user reports from the Vedic days to the present: namely, that the human mind has a great as-yet untapped power to control one's outlook on life and to therefore positively affect overall human health to some as-yet undetermined degree. Mary does seem to have overestimated the mind's ability to cure the body, of course, but it is worth noting in her defense that the government has outlawed the very research that would be required to determine exactly where the line should be drawn between the mind-curable condition and that which is beyond the help of this sort of holistic healing.

We would need to be able to use psychoactive medicines freely in order to generate the sort of user reports that could help us answer such questions adequately. And this would be research of the greatest philosophical importance, because it would essentially be a search into the true nature of mind-body dualism.

Mind-body dualism is like the weather when it comes to the field of philosophy: everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Well, here is a chance for philosophers to launch a first-hand investigation of the interaction between mind and body and to thereby determine the nature of each -- as well as the nature of the interactive whole which they in some sense comprise. Philosophers just have to decide: Do they want to perform the kind of hands-on philosophic research that William James advocated viz. altered states, or do they want to keep pretending that the drug war does not exist and that it has no downsides for philosophical research. For the opposite is so obviously true: namely, that drug prohibition forbids us from performing the kind of research that could blow the whole "mind-body" problem wide open from the western point of view and so inspire whole new fields of research.

For more on this subject, please see my essay entitled "Christian Science and Drugs: what Mary Baker-Eddy Got Right.



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    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.

    Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.

    Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."

    Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.

    The Partnership for a Drug Free America should be put on trial for having blatantly lied to Americans in the 1980s about drugs, and using our taxpayer money to do so!

    There is an absurd safety standard for "drugs." The cost/benefit analysis of the FDA & co. never takes into account the costs of NOT prescribing nor the benefits of a productive life well lived. The "users" are not considered stakeholders.

    Drug Warriors rail against drugs as if they were one specific thing. They may as well rail against penicillin because cyanide can kill.

    Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?

    A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Performers can lose their livelihood if they become too self-conscious. We only call such use "recreational" because we are oblivious to the common-sense psychology.

    I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing "Howl!" while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like "Howl!"


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






    The Drug War as a Litmus Test for Philosophical Wisdom
    Time to ACT UP about the racist drug war


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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