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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 antidepressants -- 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 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 to ease their pain because of the drug-warrior lie that substances like morphine 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 abuse1 -- 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.

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.



  • America's Blind Spot
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Drugs are not the problem
  • End the Drug War Now
  • Feedback on my first legal psilocybin session in Oregon
  • Finally, a Drug War opponent who checks all my boxes
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • God and Drugs
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca
  • How Scientific American reckons without the Drug War
  • How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant
  • How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987
  • How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big Pharma
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
  • Illusions with Professor Arthur Shapiro
  • In Defense of Religious Drug Use
  • Keep Laughing Gas Legal
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • No drugs are bad in and of themselves
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Anthony Gottlieb
  • Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
  • Open Letter to Diane O'Leary
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama
  • Open letter to Kenneth Sewell
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Open Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland Griffiths
  • Open Letter to Roy Benaroch MD
  • Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
  • Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer
  • Open Letter to Vincent Rado
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
  • Prohibitionists Never Learn
  • Regulate and Educate
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Review of When Plants Dream
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no War on Drugs
  • Solquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invited
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Teenagers and Cannabis
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Invisible Mass Shootings
  • The Menace of the Drug War
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts
  • The Pseudoscience of Mental Health Treatment
  • There is nothing to debate: the Drug War is wrong, root and branch
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting Drug War lies
  • Top 10 Problems with the Drug War
  • Unscientific American
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM
  • Whitehead and Psychedelics
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than you can Imagine
  • Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine
  • America's Imperialist Christian Science War on Drugs
  • American Sharia
  • Boycott Singapore
  • Christian Science and Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab
  • Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition
  • Drug War Uber Alles
  • Even Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug War
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Our Short-Sighted Fears about Long-Term Drug Use
  • PROTEST DRUG TESTING NOW!
  • The Christian Science SWAT Teams of the Drug War
  • The Drug War = Christian Science
  • What You Can Do
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia

  • Open Letters




    Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.

    I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.

    Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.



  • America's Blind Spot
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Drugs are not the problem
  • End the Drug War Now
  • Feedback on my first legal psilocybin session in Oregon
  • Finally, a Drug War opponent who checks all my boxes
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • God and Drugs
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca
  • How Scientific American reckons without the Drug War
  • How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant
  • How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987
  • How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big Pharma
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
  • Illusions with Professor Arthur Shapiro
  • In Defense of Religious Drug Use
  • Keep Laughing Gas Legal
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • No drugs are bad in and of themselves
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Anthony Gottlieb
  • Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
  • Open Letter to Diane O'Leary
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama
  • Open letter to Kenneth Sewell
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Open Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland Griffiths
  • Open Letter to Roy Benaroch MD
  • Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
  • Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer
  • Open Letter to Vincent Rado
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
  • Prohibitionists Never Learn
  • Regulate and Educate
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Review of When Plants Dream
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no War on Drugs
  • Solquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invited
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Teenagers and Cannabis
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Invisible Mass Shootings
  • The Menace of the Drug War
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts
  • The Pseudoscience of Mental Health Treatment
  • There is nothing to debate: the Drug War is wrong, root and branch
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting Drug War lies
  • Top 10 Problems with the Drug War
  • Unscientific American
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM
  • Whitehead and Psychedelics
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than you can Imagine
  • Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine


  • Notes:

    1: Marci Hamilton Equates Drug Use with Child Abuse (up)







    Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    The outlawing of opium eventually resulted in an "opioid crisis"? The message is clear: people want self-transcendence. If we don't let them find it safely, they will find it dangerously.

    If the depressed patient laughs, that means nothing. Materialists have to see results under a microscopic or they will never sign off on a therapy.

    When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!

    When psychiatrists write about heroin, they characterize dependency as enslavement. When they write about antidepressants, they characterize dependency as a medical duty.

    The scheduling system is a huge lie designed to give an aura of "science" to America's colonialist disdain for indigenous medicines, from opium, to coca, to shrooms.

    The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.

    Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.

    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.

    We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.

    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.


    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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