Five Ways that the drug war causes the problems that it claims to solve
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
July 20, 2020
The Drug War creates an enormous interest in "drugs" (aka Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines) by constantly harping on them as the root of all evil, in a way that no other society has ever done since the beginning of time.
The Drug War creates drug cartels in the same way that liquor prohibition created the mob.
The Drug War outlaws thousands of godsend psychoactive plant medicines that are far less addictive than Big Pharma meds, while incentivizing unscrupulous black marketeers to sell the most addictive synthetic substances possible.
The Drug War creates violence: including the Mexican Drug War that killed 85 Mexican civilians per day in 2018.
The Drug War guarantees impurity of drug supplies, and not just because unscrupulous dealers "cut" their product with toxic substances either: the DEA itself deliberately poisoned marijuana crops in the 1980s by spraying them with paraquat, a weed killer that has since been shown to cause Parkinson's Disease.
Conclusion: "drugs" are the modern boogeyman and scapegoat: it is what we talk about when we want to demonize bad behavior without having to discuss the social problems that created it, such as lack of education, not simply about drugs but about common sense and personal responsibility. It is also what we talk about when we want to remove a population from the voting rolls by tossing them in jail and removing their voting rights. The Drug War is thus simply a political ploy which helps the hypocritical beer-swilling Drug Warrior steal elections in order to keep the mendacious and anti-scientific Drug War mentality in full force. Why? In order to benefit the special interests who profit from it: including Big Pharma 12 , the American Psychiatric Association, Big Liquor, Law Enforcement, and the Corrections Industry.
Author's Follow-up: October 14, 2022
And these five points only scratch the surface. The Drug War's ideology of substance demonization has forced children in hospice to experience unnecessary pain because some hospitals refuse to administer morphine 3 , for the unscientific reason that they think the drug is evil in and of itself. Yes, the Drug Warrior would rather have children suffer than to re-legalize plant medicine. And then there are the depressed who have to undergo shock therapy because we have outlawed all the godsend medicines that might have helped them. In fact, the truth is exactly opposite from the lies of the Partnership for a Drug Free America 4. It is the Drug War that literally fries brains thanks to the ECT that it makes necessary by outlawing medical godsends. The Drug Warrior would rather have school shootings and nuclear war 567 than to legalize godsend medicine. MDMA 8 could turn the world peaceful, but the Drug Warrior does not want peace. Ecstasy brought peace and love to the multi-ethnic dance floor in 1990s Britain, but Drug Warriors cracked down on the safe drug "E," all because of a handful of deaths which were caused by the Drug Warriors refusal to develop safe use guidelines. The result? The dance floor devolved into liquor-fueled violence and rave safety had to be enforced by special forces troops!
High suicide rates? What a poser! Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the US has outlawed all substances that elate and inspire???
Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).
In the age of the Drug War, the Hippocratic Oath has become "First, do no good."
The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.
Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.
Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.
Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.
"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.
American businesses judge people, not by the color of their skin but by the contents of their digestive systems.
We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.