How the Drug War Makes Americans Stupid
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 20, 2022
he Drug War makes otherwise great thinkers stupid because they take the idea of substance prohibition as a natural baseline when they write about subjects ranging from religion to euthanasia, from war to suicide.
Take suicide, for example. That topic cannot be meaningfully discussed without at least acknowledging that America has knowingly outlawed the use of naturally occurring substances which can make life feel worth living.
So just as there are two very different ways to talk about American economics -- one that takes into account the role of China and one that does not -- there are two very different ways to talk about a subject like suicide -- one that takes into account the Drug War and one that does not.
Coca leaf could almost single-handedly end depression in America, but the know-nothing Drug Warrior conflates it with the alkaloid cocaine, which is a different drug altogether. (Even cocaine could be used safely if we educated folks rather than terrifying them about psychoactive meds.) MDMA could make psychotherapy actually work!
Sadly, this is too great a truth for America to understand. I pray that the world will survive long enough for human beings to wrap their minds around the fact that the Drug War warps our ability to deal with and understand almost every button-pushing issue under the sun.
But the ideology of substance demonization has convinced the vast majority of smart and dumb alike that banned substances cannot be used for good reasons. That's a lie, of course, but also a self-fulfilling prophecy. We only look at the bad and analyze the bad and promote the bad -- and so we reap no benefits. But that's what the Drug War is all about: demonization and criminalization over education and a search for safe and psychosocially beneficial uses -- of the plant medicines that we have outlawed in violation of the natural law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America (the same Jefferson whose estate at Monticello was raided by the feds in 1987 during Reagan's unchallenged daylight coup against natural law).
Extra Credit
September 22, 2022
Browse through the titles of the non-fiction books you own and count how many authors have reckoned without the Drug War. Examples: a book about the problem of war and violence that fails to mention that America has outlawed all the medicines (like MDMA, the coca leaf and psilocybin) that could convince folks to actually care about their neighbors; or a book about depression that fails to mention that we've outlawed all the medical godsends that could actually eliminate sadness without rendering millions chemically dependent on big pharma meds; or a book about optimism that fails to mention how the use and anticipation of use of godsend meds can cheer folks up.
For American authors are in denial: they pretend that the Drug War does not exist. So, like the wolf of fable who couldn't reach the sour grapes, we diss what we are not allowed to access, pretending that it's not important in life. Guess it's just too hard for Americans to admit that they live in an age of censorship, in which the government is free to tell us what plant medicines we can use.
More Essays Here
The latest hits from Drug War Records, featuring Freddie and the Fearmongers!
Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The drug war tells us that certain drugs have no potential uses and then turns that into a self-fulfilling prophecy by outlawing these drugs. This is insanely anti-scientific and anti-progress. We should never give up on looking for positive uses for ANY substance.
Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."
Critics tell me that drugs have nothing to offer us. What? Not only are they being psychologically naive and completely ahistorical, but they are forgetting that the term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they connote.
Democratic societies need to outlaw prohibition for many reasons, the first being the fact that prohibition removes millions of minorities from the voting rolls, thereby handing elections to fascists and insurrectionists.
We live in a make-believe world in the US. We created it by outlawing all potentially helpful psychological meds, after which the number-one cause of arrest soon became "drugs." We then made movies to enjoy our crackdown on TV... after a tough day of being drug tested at work.
If we let "science" decide about drugs, i.e. base freedom on health concerns, then tea can be as easily outlawed as beer. The fact that horses are not illegal shows that prohibition is not about health. It's about the power to outlaw certain "ways of being in the world."
The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses and is known to cause death and destruction.
Meanwhile, no imaginable downside could persuade westerners that guns and alcohol were too dangerous. Yet the DEA lies about almost all psychoactive drugs, saying there are no good uses. That's a lie! Then they pass laws that keep us from disproving their puritanical conclusion.
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 the Drug War Makes Americans Stupid published on March 20, 2022 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)