How the Drug War Banned my Religion
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 4, 2021
Not only is the Drug War the establishment of a religion (namely, that of Christian Science), but it bars me from practicing my own religion, for my religion holds that the mind can gain metaphysical insight through the use of psychoactive plant medicines and that it is my responsibility as a human being to pursue that insight. Why? Because I believe with Plato that the unexamined life is not worth living. The Drug War, however, prevents me from living this examined life by denying me access to precisely those plant medicines that I hold to be sacred and inspiring in this regard, plant medicines that have inspired entire religions in the past and been the source of metaphysical inspiration for such western icons as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plutarch.
The Drug War is therefore intolerable to those who believe in freedom of religion 1, not to mention the Natural Law upon which America was founded. For if anything is truly a natural law as defined by Jefferson and Locke it is an individual's right to access the plant medicines that grow at their very feet.
Notes:
1: Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
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We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.
If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol slaughters. Drug prohibition is the real killer.
"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.
Most enemies of inner-city gun violence refuse to protest against the drug prohibition which caused the violence in the first place.
Had the DEA been active in the Punjab and 1500 BCE, there would be no Hindu religion today.
Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs.
Using the billions now spent on caging users, we could end the whole phenomena of both physical and psychological addiction by using "drugs to fight drugs." But drug warriors do not want to end addiction, they want to keep using it as an excuse to ban drugs.
Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.
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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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