How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Drug War
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 15, 2019
t all started in 1914 when bigoted politicians decided that lower-class Americans could not be trusted to use opium wisely. Suddenly Mother Nature went from being a gift-giving goddess to a common drug kingpin. Enter Richard Nixon in the sixties, who decided to further blaspheme Mother Nature by criminalizing a host of additional psychoactive substances that happened to be used by his political enemies.
It's always disappointed me that Americans have thus far hobbled together so little pushback against this denial of a birthright, this outlawing of the freely given gifts of Mother Nature, this unprecedented coup against the therapeutic goddess of humanity. The government took away our right to control our own pain and to control our own psychic condition and Americans seem to have merely sighed, asking their government, "Okay, so you want me to give up my natural birthright? Fair enough. Oh, and you want me to urinate on command to prove that I am faithful to my government? No problemo. Gee, isn't democracy just swell?"
Nowadays, when the DEA asks us to jump, Americans simply say "How high?"
For just one obvious example, browse some mycology pages online. You'll find that many mushroom hunters (professionals and hobbyists alike) want it to be known that they will have nothing to do with psychedelic mushrooms that they happen to come across. "Look at me," they seem to say, "I'm a professional mushroom hunter who is obediently ignoring the most interesting part of Mother Nature at the behest of the U.S. government. So don't expect me to write anything about your tawdry psychedelic shrooms!" Far from screaming bloody murder about their unprecedented loss of human rights, their forced separation from Mother Nature's bounty, many online mycologists pride themselves in pointing out that they study only those plants that their government will allow them to study. Thus they recast their own political timidity as patriotism.
But America's response to this usurpation has been even worse than that. We have rewritten history so that we do not have to confront the fact that we have criminalized Mother Nature in the first place. This can be seen by any regular viewer of the Great Courses program, a collection of videos presenting college courses taught by some of the most popular professors in the world.
Although I am a regular viewer of the Teaching Company's courses, I've yet to see one of their history professors so much as acknowledge the fact that the game-changing Elusinian mysteries of ancient Greece involved the use of a naturally occurring psychoactive substance similar to LSD. I've yet to see one of their biology professors allude to the psychoactive power of mushrooms. I've yet to see one of their anthropologists discuss the crucial role of natural psychedelic medicines in early South American ritual. Nor have I ever seen one of their political science professors ever mention the infamous DEA raid on Monticello in discussing the political legacy of Thomas Jefferson.
I guess this makes sense. It would be too painful for a supposedly free people to remember what we've given up, so we have rewritten history to help us pretend that Mother Nature's pharmacy was never particularly useful to us in the first place. "Humph! Mother Nature: who needs her? Let the government and Big Pharma decide what I need - and when - and at what price, too."
The good news is: modern research is showing us today how so many of the natural substances that our politicians have outlawed are proving to be godsends in therapeutic settings. My hope is that the penny will eventually drop and we'll draw the obvious conclusion from this research, namely that no naturally occurring plant is bad in and of itself, and that, as Terence McKenna once said, it is "ridiculous and obnoxious" to criminalize the freely offered medicines of Mother Nature. Perhaps someday we'll learn the ultimate lesson from today's anti-patient Drug War: that it is both scientifically stupid and a violation of basic human rights to turn Mother Nature into a drug kingpin.
Author's Follow-up: February 14, 2023
Perhaps most astonishing of all is the fact that botanists go along with the Drug War. Michael Pollan is one notable and disappointing example. Has he never stopped to consider that it's wrong for government to dictate which fauna he can legally study? If anyone should see the absurdity (and fascism) in this policy, it should be botanists. To be sure, Pollan is not himself prevented from using psychedelics despite the laws against it, so it's not clear why he thinks prohibition is effective in any case. He is not the only one who can ignore legislation. But the very idea that government could limit his studies of nature should, I maintain, be repellent to him as an American citizen. His motto should be "anything BUT prohibition," as it represents the censorship of science -- never mind the fact that it tells Americans that they cannot think and feel in certain ways. Women protest "Our bodies, ourselves," but surely the more important protest is "Our minds, ourselves," for everything starts with our perception of the world, and when government controls that, we are screwed indeed.
And why does Michael support prohibition? Because he wants to protect a vast minority of young people from themselves, young people whom we have failed to educate about substances but rather attempted to frighten them instead. And what is the result of helping this vast minority? It is that the vast majority of the depressed (and others who could benefit from mind medicine) go without medical godsends -- and those are stakeholders that Michael COMPLETELY IGNORES.
*For Michael's somewhat equivocal stance on prohibition, see page 405 of the hardback version of "How to Change Your Mind."
More Essays Here
Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
How would we even KNOW that outlawed drugs have no positive uses? We first have to incorporate them in a sane, empathic and creative way to find that out, and the drug war makes such a sensible approach absolutely impossible.
We've got to take the fight TO the drug warriors by starting to hold them legally responsible for having spread "Big Lies" about "drugs." Anyone involved in producing the "brain frying" PSA of the 1980s should be put on trial for willfully spreading a toxic lie.
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.
If America cannot exist without outlawing drugs, then there is something wrong with America, not with drugs.
The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!
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.
Everyone's biggest concern is the economy? Is nobody concerned that Trump has promised to pardon insurrectionists and get revenge on critics? Is no one concerned that Trump taught Americans to doubt democracy by questioning our election fairness before one single vote was cast?
More Tweets
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Drug War published on May 15, 2019 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)