and why I cannot understand how enemies of the drug war could do otherwise
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 29, 2024
This election to me is not about the issues. I do not want to fix the economy (or ruin it, for that matter) if it means putting a man in office who does not believe in the American democratic process and who has done everything he can to make us distrust the mainstay of democracy itself: the voting process. Nor is this election about the propriety of alternate lifestyles or of Confederate war memorials or even Roe v Wade (about all of which I believe that people can rationally disagree). This election is about fundamental democratic principles: the basic principles upon which America was founded, most notably the voting process in which all political parties have historically participated in order to ensure not just fairness, but the all-important perception of fairness, which alone can guarantee the survival of any democratic country by giving a measure of recognizable legitimacy to anyone who enters the Oval Office as Commander-in-Chief.
As a young person, I often volunteered to work at polling stations for presidential and state elections, and it was always inspiring for me. I saw people on both sides of the political divide working together to ensure accuracy, transparency and fairness. This is why a shiver went down my spine when Donald Trump made it clear in his September 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton that he did not trust the voting process and was already reserving the right to declare himself the winner if the votes did not go in his favor -- this after Al Gore in 2000 conceded an election result that he could have justifiably challenged, and why? Because he did not want to put America through a divisive and time-consuming recount process. How utterly different from the self-serving instinct of Donald Trump, who would happily put the country through any and all levels of unrest provided only that he be declared the winner.
I state this publicly here in answer to the cowardice of Jeff Bezos, who, for obvious financial reasons, has told his editors at the Washington Post (one week before election day, no less) that they cannot endorse Kamala Harris for president. Of course, I have slightly less "reach" than Bezos, but since this is a matter of principle, even we little people need to take a stand.
I am surely flattering myself to think that this essay of mine will either gain or lose followers for an online non-entity such as myself. That said, I assume that those few who do read my essays are, at very least, against the War on Drugs, and I cannot understand how someone with such views could support Donald Trump, a man who embodies the Drug War strategy of the "Big Lie." Say that American elections are unfair often enough and loudly enough and people will begin to believe it. And may Trump be cursed for all time for using that strategy to damage, and perhaps destroy, American democracy.
I know, I know: Kamala Harris, at best, represents "Drug War Lite," and will obviously have to be goaded by progressive state laws and public pressure to end her oppressive D.A. mentality when it comes to drug use. But she does appear to be open to common sense and not actuated merely by the desire to appear "tough on drugs." Meanwhile, Donald Trump has called for the execution of drug dealers and for the bombing of Mexico to stop the flow of drugs into the States. In other words, Donald Trump is determined to take the colonialist intolerance of the Drug War to its natural catastrophic conclusion: gleefully destroying the lives of minorities and foreigners in the process, like his fascist populist buddy, former Mexican President Obrador. You remember Andres. He was the guy who labeled the press "necrophiliacs" for attempting to determine the fate of the 60,000 Mexicans who have been "disappeared" as a result of Mexico's U.S.-sponsored War on Drugs1.
This populist madness is all about leveraging hatred for political gain and needs to be snuffed out at the polls, while we still have polls - something that Donald Trump appears to feel is unnecessary since he is, of course, always right and must of necessity be the eternal victor. (Trump is the epitome of the pathologically cocksure 'right man' discussed in The New Inquisition by Robert Anton Wilson.2)
The irony is that Donald Trump is right when he says that the election process is unfair, but he is right for the wrong reasons. The election process is unfair because millions of minorities have been removed from the voting rolls and thrown in jail thanks to drug laws that were written precisely for that purpose.
In a sane world, we would learn to strategically fight drugs with drugs.
Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.
"Chemical means of peering into the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine exordia in man’s quest for the beyond... before the coarseness of utilitarian minds reduced them to the status of 'dope'." -- Eric Hendrickson
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.
That's so "drug war" of Rick: If a psychoactive substance has a bad use at some dose, for somebody, then it must not be used at any dose by anybody. It's hard to imagine a less scientific proposition, or one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.
That's why I created the satirical Partnership for a Death Free America. It demonstrates clearly that drug warriors aren't worried about our health, otherwise they'd outlaw shopping carts, etc. The question then becomes: what are they REALLY afraid of? Answer: Free thinkers.
We've all been taught since grade school that human beings cannot use psychoactive medicines wisely. That is just a big fat lie. It's criminal to keep substances illegal that can awaken the mind and remind us of our full potential in life.
In a sane world, we would learn to strategically fight drugs with drugs.
