collect nature's godsend medicines while protesting the War on Drugs!
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 11, 2023
Corner on Coca is more than a fun game: it's a creative new way to protest America's hateful War on Drugs, which has outlawed godsend medicines in violation of Natural Law. Just ask Thomas Jefferson, who rolled over in his grave back in 1987 when the DEA stomped onto his Monticello 1 estate and confiscated his poppy plants!
The game is as easy as stomping down the doors of minorities and poor people or shooting socialists in Central America under the pretense of "fighting drugs." In fact, if you've played the game called Pit, you already know the rules. There are six different sets of cards, each featuring a different godsend of Mother Nature: cannabis, coca, peyote, poppies, shrooms and ibogaine. (For those who don't know, ibogaine is the dual-purpose African drug that helps folks talk with their ancestors while also curing them of any unwanted addictions!)
Game is in the design phase!
Watch this Space
Game available in Spring 2023
Author's Follow-up: November 18, 2023
Well, it's Summer 2023 now and the game in question has not yet materialized. [sigh]
What happened, you asked? Ask rather what DIDN'T happen. I mean, don't get me started! For I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy presumably young blood, make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, thy presumably knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end -- kind of like those what-cha-call-'em quills on the fretful porpentine (whatever that is).
But I'll spare you the blood and guts. Suffice it to say that a poorly conceived and ambiguous Microsoft OneDrive icon on my PC led me to accidentally erase half of my hard drive six months ago. How was I to know that when I deleted files in my OneDrive FOLDER that I was simultaneously deleting the original versions of those files in OTHER folders???
But as Shakespeare was wont to say: omittance is no quittance.
So how about watching this space for another year or so -- say, checking back in July of 2024, inshallah.
I kid you not: the folder "OneDrive" is not to be messed with. You delete a file there and it is history. And could Microsoft help me? No. All the king's horses and all the king's techs could not put my hard drive back together again.
Author's Follow-up: April 3, 2025
It has been a year and a half since a deceptively designed One Drive interface caused me to erase half my hard drive, and with it the painstakingly designed assets for my Corner on Coca game. I could only salvage a handful of graphics, including the following mockup of the product's box.
+88+
I may as well be honest here and aver that my completion of this game is unlikely now barring a small miracle, such as the arrival of a forward-thinking venture capitalist at my door. When I debuted online 30 years ago, I thought such eventualities were highly probable occurrences, whereas today I would be stunned if I were to receive so much as an email of any kind, favorable or otherwise, with regard to any of my online efforts, let alone an offer of palpable assistance on this particular game. But then you can call me Onion Head. You can keep unraveling forever and one never seems to come to the end of my charming naivete. It's really quite precious, when you think about it.
But have no fear, you silent and anonymous supporter of mine who may or may not exist! I now plan to impose on my techie nephew for his help in learning C++, so that I can eventually make a virtual version of Corner on Coca -- and other games designed to bring the idiocy of drug prohibition front and center in the mind of the game-playing North American.
I picture a parody of the Game of Life. It will also be called LIFE... er... but with a sort of subtitle. The game will be called "LIFE... (in prison?)"
No, seriously, JB, you're gonna love it!
Here's the idea: you tool along in your plastic car toward the Pearly Gates, right? trying not to have your life ruined by unconstitutional and inhumane drug laws. But watch out for those LIFE cards, JB!
"Daughter commits suicide 2 thanks to the outlawing of godsend substances that could have cheered her up instantly. Remove one pink child from your plastic car!"
And watch out for the Christian Science Heretic Card!
"Busybody lab techs discover traces of godsend medicines in your body. Return salary card to bank!"
May I digress for a moment? Who on earth decided that One Drive should imitate a regular drive precisely -- and yet be so designed that all delete operations applied to identically named files everywhere on your computer? That is obviously NOT how a normal drive behaves. Is it not incredibly easy to inadvertently erase files entirely in such a setup? There should be digital fireworks displayed every time one goes to erase a file on their One Drive: a full-screen display reading: "Warning: When you delete these files, they will be deleted EVERYWHERE!!!"
One Drive is a sort of anti-backup program -- at least that is the way that it functioned in 2023 when one single delete operation in one directory on my computer (which happened to be the One Drive directory) deleted files in multiple directories across my computer -- completely removing those files forever and without hope of recovery.
"Can I use poppies, coca, laughing gas, MDMA?" "NO," says the materialist, "We must be SCIENTIFIC! We must fry your brain and give you a lobotomy and make you a patient for life with the psychiatric pill mill! That's true SCIENCE!"
I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.
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.
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
Almost every article about suicide is shallow because it takes drug prohibition as a natural baseline, even though drug prohibition outlaws substances that could so clearly elevate mood.
The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.
Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.
Mad in America solicits personal stories about people trying to get off of antidepressants, but they will not publish your story if you want to use entheogenic medicines to help you. They're afraid their readers can't handle the truth.
NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition. We need a National Institute on Drug Use, not a National Institute on Drug Abuse.
What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.