How the Drug War Turns Kids' Lives into a Living Hell
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 13, 2022
I just ran across a 2011 publication called "Children of the Drug War," which tells how many countries outlaw morphine 1 for pain relief and palliative care, thus causing thousands of young children with fatal diseases to suffer unnecessary pain.
This is the kind of fact that the modern media studiously keeps from the public, because they see their job as enforcing the drug-war narrative that we must demonize substances rather than learn about them and use them wisely for humanity. Another such fact is that the military anti-drug operations we carry out overseas leave behind thousands of Drug War orphans -- but American politicians are so hellbent on demonizing inanimate and amoral medicines that they can sleep at night.
I have not yet read the work in question, partly because I have not yet had time and partly because reading such works for me is like listening to a school marm drag her nails across a chalkboard.
But I will do my best to "man up" and read the multi-author document as soon as possible, so that I can begin speaking truth to power over the outrages that I find revealed therein.
This is why I say that investigating the details of the Drug War is like peeling back a rotten onion. Just when you think you have discovered the worst possible effect of the Drug War, you find yet more: in this case, the fact that dogmatically heartless American politicians are advancing a policy that willfully denies godsend pain medicine to dying children.
Drug war pundits need to stop using the word "snorts" when it comes to cocaine. We "take" our "meds," and yet we "snort" cocaine, just like a pig. That is NOT neutral language, folks!
I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.
In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.
If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol massacres. The problem is drug prohibition, not drugs.
It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
Psychiatrists never acknowledge the biggest downside to modern antidepressants: the fact that they turn you into a patient for life. That's demoralizing, especially since the best drugs for depression are outlawed by the government.
The Drug War is the ultimate example of strategic fearmongering by self-interested politicians.
I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.
Drug war pundits need to stop using the word "snorts" when it comes to cocaine. We "take" our "meds," and yet we "snort" cocaine, just like a pig. That is NOT neutral language, folks!
