Exposing the anti-patient drug-war lobby in Washington
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
December 29, 2019
The DEA is the enemy of depressed individuals worldwide because it has blocked the research (let alone the use) of godsend antidepressant medications now for over four decades. Technically, it has only done this in America, but Drug War colonialism has spread this anti-scientific policy worldwide, as America financially blackmails its trading partners into touting the anti-patient party line about so-called drugs.
MDMA 1 was legal in 1984 and ready to treat soldiers with PTSD. However, in 1985, the DEA acted against the advice of its own regulatory judge and criminalized the substance. The result: American soldiers have been without a godsend medication for PTSD during the last three and a half decades, during their fight with al-Qaida and the Taliban. While our forces were living through hell overseas, the DEA was hunkering down in its comfy Washington offices, determined to keep its jobs at any cost, even at the expense of soldiers' lives and well-being. Meanwhile, psychedelics (such as ayahuasca, psilocybin, and ibogaine) which showed profound potential for virtually curing alcoholism in the '50s, have been listed by the DEA as schedule I drugs since the DEA's inception (based purely on politics, not on science) ensuring that the depressed must continue to rely on Big Pharma meds that create chemical dependence.
But the DEA is not the only group that's determined to keep valuable medications from those who need them. To figure out who else is anti-patient in this way, just ask yourself: who stands to lose money if the Drug War is finally terminated? A partial list of such groups follows. Those who oppose America's anti-patient Drug War would do well to monitor the political advocacy of these groups who have a vested interest in the ongoing arrest of minorities for mere possession of Mother Nature's plants and fungi:
WHO'S KEEPING THE DRUG WAR GOING?
FOLLOW THE MONEY.
GROUPS THAT PROSPER FINANCIALLY FROM THE DRUG WAR:
Prison guards -- whose jobs proliferate as the prison population swells to record numbers
Sheriffs -- whose departmental income skyrockets thanks to the lucrative confiscation of "drug" property (think of the Drug War as a make-work program for law enforcement)
Big Pharma -- whose bottom line skyrockets thanks to their monopoly on the treatment of depression using medicines that foster chemical dependency in the user
Psychiatry -- whose clientele grows enormously since psychiatrists are the only legal distributor of Big Pharma 23 's addictive nostrums
Alcohol producers -- who profit handsomely by the world-wide war that the American government wages against opium 4 on their behalf, putting an end in a few generations to a millennia-old practice in the east, primping themselves up as the health-conscious good guys for this drug-war colonialism
-- and all the subsidiary businesses that profit indirectly from doing business with the above anti-patient cartel.
It's not enough to abolish the DEA and hold it responsible for its decades of patient-harming lies: those who advocate a patient-friendly drug policy must identify these sorts of natural enemies of a free market and call them to account any time they are caught attempting to buy politicians.
AFTERTHOUGHT:
Of course, the whole idea of "drugs" is absurd, insofar as that word connotes a substance that is thought to be evil in and of itself. Any sane person knows that substances are only good or bad in relation to the way that they are used. When Neil Patrick Harris snorts cocaine 56 off of the eagerly proffered tush of a naked pole dancer in "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," we might want to call it evil (especially if we're busybody prudes of the protestant old school), but when smart cookies use a similar substance to sharpen their analytic minds (think Sherlock Holmes in fiction or Robin Williams in reality) it is by no means clear that the substances that they thus employ are evil - unless 1) we who make that judgment are jealous psychiatrists, who would have preferred that these famous clarity-seekers fog their minds with modern antidepressants 7 -- or 2) we are Christian Scientists, who hold the metaphysical notion that there is something wrong with improving mental states with the help of Mother Nature's pharmacy, in which case we should state our metaphysical presuppositions forthrightly and thus admit that the Drug War is religiously motivated. This would accord with the facts, too, since the first Drug Warrior in the west was Emperor Theodosius, the founder of Catholicism, who shut down the psychedelic Eleusinian mysteries in 392 BC because he considered that ritual to be a threat to Christianity8.
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
When is the Holocaust Museum going to recognize that the Drug War has Nazified American life? Probably, on the same day that the Jefferson Foundation finally admits to having sold out Jefferson by inviting the DEA onto his estate in 1987 to confiscate his poppy plants.
Here's the first step in the FDA process for evaluating a psychoactive drug:
Ignore all glaringly obvious benefits
Besides, why should I listen to the views of a microbe?
Drug testing should flag impairment only. Any other use is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Prohibition is wrong root and branch. It seeks to justify the colonial disdain for indigenous healing practices through fearmongering.
The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
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