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How Fretting Drug Warriors Block Medical Progress

while causing inner-city violence and creating drug cartels around the world

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 25, 2020



It's easy to slam law-and-order conservatives for their part in fomenting the anti-nature Drug War. They're hypocritical for starters.

Update: May 25, 2025

They want to keep the taps flowing at their local bar while they hand out life sentences for those who choose to relax using other naturally sourced substances, many of which have been used responsibly by other cultures for thousands of years. They're so bent on making alcohol the drug of choice, that they even have the nationalistic arrogance to send troops overseas and burn plants that pose a threat to the liquor industry. And then we wonder why the US is hated overseas. Imagine an Islamic country entering the United States with the express purpose of shutting down our alcohol producers and burning the plants that constitute their raw materials. That is precisely what the US does, morally speaking, when it enters other countries to shut down plants that process the coca leaf and the poppy.

But conservatives are only half the problem. The tyrannous Drug War is fomented equally by the worried parents of America, who fret that their children will become slaves to "drugs" should the Drug War be abandoned. This fear is so misplaced that one scarcely knows where to begin in addressing it. But address it we must, since the laws that are promulgated by these Chicken Little parents have a body count: starting with the thousands killed every day in the name of a brutal Drug War overseas, and the endless stream of innocent bystanders killed in inner cities -- all because America has elevated common law over natural law and criminalized plants, a step that would have made the garden-loving Thomas Jefferson spin in his grave, just as he surely did, in fact, in 1987 when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 1 and confiscated his poppy plants.

First of all, let's be honest and use the term "psychoactive plants" for "drugs," since {^"drugs" is really just a pejorative epithet for the medicinal bounty of Mother Nature.}{

Secondly, there was no epidemic of childhood addictions prior to the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. A law against opium 2 was enacted in that year, not because it would protect youngsters, but rather because it gave racist politicians a socially acceptable way to express their disdain for the Chinese with whom they associated the poppy plant, just as they associated Mexicans with marijuana and blacks with cocaine 3 4 . Both of those latter two stereotypes would motivate future disingenuous hand-wringing about "drugs" by sixties and seventies racists, culminating in the creation of Richard Nixon's corrupt DEA in 1973, by a president whose drug policy was overtly designed to punish his political opponents, Timothy Leary 5 6 7 first and foremost, and then anyone who might so much as give such a rebel the time of day.

And so Americans were expelled from the psychotherapeutic Garden of Eden in the twentieth century, as the American government claimed the unprecedented right to dole out or withhold the psychoactive plant medicines of Mother Nature as it saw fit, a power grab that even God Himself had never contemplated, being happy for his own part to outlaw only one solitary tree from among the myriad plants of his worldwide nursery.

The result is that we now childishly see threats everywhere we turn in Mother Nature, failing to realize that the problem -- to the extent that there is a problem other than in the scheming minds of racists -- is behavior, not plants.

Thirdly, it is enormously selfish, and even racist, to criminalize plants based on a merely theoretical threat that they pose to young people. Why? First, because it ignores the fate of those young people who are already being killed in inner cities around the world thanks to the violence that naturally arises under prohibition. Secondly because our draconian drug laws force millions of Americans (and billions worldwide) to go without powerful psychoactive plant medicines, given that such heavy-handed legislation outlaws mere research of cancer- and depression-fighting godsends, let alone the actual use of such medicine, all out of a fear that white young people might become addicted to some plant medicine or other.

Wake up, white America: 1 out of 4 women, mainly Caucasian, are addicted to Big Pharma 8 9 meds even as we speak. Why not wring your hands over that grim fact and re-legalize nature's bounty, none of which is more habit-forming than the SSRIs that are being popped like candy everywhere you look.

In the name of the sick and suffering around the world, and in the name of inner city minorities and racial justice, we must return to the days when we cracked down on bad behavior alone - rather than manufacturing violence out of whole cloth by punishing Americans for the pre-crime of merely possessing plant medicines of which our scheming politicians disapprove.




Author's Follow-up:

May 25, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




In looking back on this essay from five years ago, I am tempted to call it shallow. I seem to be merely speaking common sense above, after all, things that everybody knows. I have to remind myself that the essay is not what is shallow: it is America's concept of "drugs" that is shallow, thanks to which, anybody who speaks common sense is a regular Solomon by contrast.

I could perhaps go more directly to the jugular today by simply stating three truths:

1) Shouting "Fentanyl 10 kills!" makes no more sense than shouting "Fire bad!" They are both attempts to inspire us to fear and demonize dangerous substances, rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humankind.

2) Drug prohibition is based on the following anti-scientific idea: that a substance that can be dangerous for white young people when used at one dose for one reason, must not be used by anyone in the world at any dose for any reason.

3) Drug prohibition kills11, not drugs.

For more on this latter topic, see The Bill Clinton Fallacy.









Notes for essay entitled How Fretting Drug Warriors Block Medical Progress: while causing inner-city violence and creating drug cartels around the world:

1: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
2: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
3: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
4: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
5: “Full Text of ‘the Politics of Ecstasy.’” 2026. Archive.org. 2026. https://archive.org/stream/ecstaspoliticsof00learrich/ecstaspoliticsof00learrich_djvu.txt. (up)
6: The One Thing that Timothy Leary Got Wrong: a philosophical review of The Politics of Ecstasy DWP (up)
7: Timothy Leary was Right DWP (up)
8: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
9: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
10: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
11: Prohibition's Death Toll: Alcohol's Deadly Legacy (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




To say that taking SSRIs daily is better than using opium daily is a value judgement, not a scientific one.

Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."

We need a few brave folk to "act up" by shouting "It's the drug war!" whenever folks are discussing Mexican violence or inner city shootings. The media treat both topics as if the violence is inexplicable! We can't learn from mistakes if we're in denial.

The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.

The so-called "herbs" that witches used were drugs, in the same way that "meds" are drugs. If academics made that connection, the study of witchcraft would shed a lot of light on the fearmongering of modern prohibitionists.

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.

This just in on the drug scene: A new New York Times report shows that America has been flooding the world with antidepressants, alcohol and cigarettes!

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.

Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.

There will always be people who don't use drugs wisely, just as there are car drivers who don't drive wisely, and rock climbers who fall to their death. America needs to grow up and accept this, while ending prohibition and teaching safe use.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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