How the Drug War gave the 2016 election to Donald Trump
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 21, 2021
In 2016, more than six million Americans were disenfranchised according to the Sentencing Project, most of them minorities and most of them for "drug offenses." That's six million Americans who were purged from the voting rolls. Six million. That's why Donald Trump won the presidency, not because of Russian interference, gerrymandering or vote buying, but because of a Drug War that was instituted for the very purpose of disenfranchising minorities. And yet our best and brightest minds don't get it.
Take George R. Tyler, author of "Billionaire Democracy." Tyler's 2018 book is all about the marginalizing of minority voting power in the age of the Roberts court, and yet he says not one single word about the Drug War! Not one! What could be more pertinent to his topic than the fact that six million Americans were removed from the voting rolls?
This is why the Drug War lingers, because authors like Tyler completely ignore its long list of negative effects on the body politic and on the world at large.
What negative effects?
The Drug War ideology of substance demonization has:
1) caused a civil war in Mexico
2) empowered a self-styled "Drug War Hitler" in the Philippines
3) created armed cartels overseas
4) created armed gangs in American ghettos
5) militarized police forces
6) popularized movies 12 in which the good guys are DEA agents who torture and murder at will
7) stopped scientists from pursuing legitimate research that could treat or even cure Alzheimer's, Autism and cancer
and 8) led to the election of a racist populist as President of the United States.
Yes, Tyler is right: pay-to-play politics is a problem and so is outrageous republican gerrymandering and Russian interference in American elections. But it is the Drug War that has turned America into a prison camp for minorities and a breeding ground for racist populists.
And now Trump wants to leverage the Drug War to do even more damage to American democracy: he is proposing a "final solution" to the politician-created drug problem, namely executing those minorities whom the Drug Warrior used to be satisfied with merely locking up.
AFTERTHOUGHT (February 22, 22):
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Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.
Most people think that drugs like cocaine, MDMA, LSD and amphetamines can only be used recreationally. WRONG ! This represents a very naive understanding of human psychology. We deny common sense in order to cater to the drug war orthodoxy that "drugs have no benefits."
Drugs like opium and cocaine should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
It's just plain totalitarian nonsense to outlaw mother nature and to outlaw moods and mental states thru drug law. These truths can't be said enough by us "little people" because the people in power are simply not saying them.
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.
Why does no one talk about empathogens for preventing atrocities? Because they'd rather hate drugs than use them for the benefit of humanity. They don't want to solve problems, they prefer hatred.
Drug warriors aren't just deciding for us about drugs. They're telling us that we no longer need Coleridge poems, Lovecraft stories, Robin Williams, Sherlock Holmes, or the soma-inspired Hindu religion.
Two of the biggest promoters of the psychedelic renaissance shuffle their feet when you ask them about substance prohibition. Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman just don't get it: prohibition kills.
Psychiatrists prescribe drugs that muck about with a patient's biochemical baseline, making them chemically dependent and turning them into patients for life.
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