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Eugene O'Neill and Drugs



by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher




December 12, 2024

read a short story last night entitled "Tomorrow" by Eugene O'Neill. As might be expected from that author, it was touching and yet extremely depressing. The title "Tomorrow," of course, refers to the eternally renewed resolution of the drunkard to reform tomorrow, which is, of course, a tomorrow that will never come.

If Americans truly felt that laws had to be concocted to protect Americans from substances, then the story would read as a clarion call for the outlawing of liquor. But it will never be read that way by Americans today, subject as they are to the media's constant whitewashing of liquor and their constant demonization of all of liquor's many less dangerous alternatives. How? By lies, half-truths and (above all) censorship, thanks to which one never sees a demonized drug used responsibly and efficaciously on TV or in the movies. Said use is always either portrayed as a dead-end street or a childish undertaking worthy of laughter and, ultimately, disdain, at least from the grown-ups of the world. Meanwhile, the very fact that drugs were used efficaciously by folks like Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius is routinely suppressed from biographies.

This negative attitude toward drugs is beginning to recede today when it comes to psychedelic substances. In fact, while I was writing this blog entry, I received a heads-up about a brand-new article in the New York Times entitled "The C.E.O.s Are Tripping. Can Psychedelics Help the C-Suite?".

But the penny still has not dropped for the western world. The real problem is prohibition itself, which advances the absurd and cruel proposition that a drug that can be used problematically by white American young people must not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason whatsoever. The world is full of silent and unnecessary suffering thanks to that anti-scientific postulate -- not just because of the withholding of existing protocols but because of the vast array of imaginative empathic/shamanic protocols that we dare not even imagine today thanks to the Drug War orthodoxy of substance demonization.

And so Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but the real headline is that drugs have never been evil at all, that the evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about them. And how do we talk about them today? With the superstitious and self-serving hypocrisy promoted by cynical politicians.




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Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.
Peyote advocates should be drug legalization advocates. Otherwise, they're involved in special pleading which is bound to result in absurd laws, such as "Plant A can be used in a religion but not plant B," or "Person A can belong to such a religion but person B cannot."
I wonder if Nixon knew what a favor he was doing medical capitalism when he outlawed psychedelics. Those drugs can actually cure things, and there's no money in that.
Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.
The media called out Trump for fearmongering about immigrants, but the media engages in fearmongering when it comes to drugs. The latest TV plot line: "white teenage girl forced to use fentanyl!" America loves to feel morally superior about "drugs."
As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.
Getting off antidepressants can make things worse for only one reason: because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help with the transition. Right now, getting off any drug basically means becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist. No wonder withdrawal is hard.
Drug warriors have harnessed the perfect storm. Prohibition caters to the interests of law enforcement, psychotherapy, Big Pharma, demagogues, puritans, and materialist scientists, who believe that consciousness is no big "whoop" and that spiritual states are just flukes.
Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
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You have been reading an article entitled, Eugene O'Neill and Drugs published on December 12, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)