How to end the war in Mexico, stop inner-city killings and cure depression in one easy step
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 5, 2022
America could end inner-city killings and the war in Mexico overnight, meanwhile solving the so-called epidemic of depression in America, merely by re-legalizing the coca leaf. But instead, Drug Warriors demonize coca based on rare but well-documented cases of cocaine addiction, failing to realize that the coca leaf is not cocaine , any more than peach juice is prussic acid.
This is the typical Drug Warrior MO. , as when Drug Warriors demonize opium based on cases of heroin 1 addiction, failing to mention that they are two different drugs. This is just guilt by association. But even if the coca leaf was the same as cocaine and opium 2 was the same as heroin, it's not clear why the Drug Warriors want to trash such substances based on their addictive qualities in a world in which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life on Big Pharma 34 meds, nor why the supposedly health-conscious American Drug Warrior is silent about the half a million Stateside deaths attributed each year to tobacco and liquor combined.
This is especially odd for those of us who deny that government ever had the right to criminalize plant medicine in the first place, at least in America, a country founded on Natural Law. Indeed, a few of us wept for our country when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 5 in broad daylight in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants, thereby giving the finger to Jeffersonian principles and our Lockean heritage. If you don't remember this outrage, that's probably because the media did not exactly treat it as earth-shattering news. But this was the mid-'80s, a time when the Drug War ideology of substance demonization was starting to be taught in grade schools and Ronald Reagan was exhorting god-fearing Americans to turn in their parents for using plant medicines of which botanically clueless politicians disapproved.
But then there's a lot of money on the line here. In the 1800s, some counties in England did pretty much without doctors because every household had laudanum on hand for sleepless nights, colds and bouts of depression (see Paul Johnson's 'The Birth of the Modern'). But that's a status quo that capitalism could never live with. Imagine, all those folks who could be insured and doctored and "billed up the wazoo" for conditions that they were currently treating with Mother Nature's medicine! capitalism made a Drug War inevitable, because there was no way that the well-to-do were going to pass up their chance to earn billions, even at the cost of disempowering and indeed infantilizing Americans when it came to the subject of "drugs."6 From these considerations we can conclude two things: That capitalism 7 requires a Drug War to exist, and that the Drug War naturally entails the creation of the modern healthcare state.
October 7, 2022
The coca leaf guided Peruvian Indian society like coffee guides ours. It gave them endurance and a cogenial spirit. At first, the Spanish saw the use of this substance as a threat to Christian social values, but they soon discovered that their slaves worked two or three times harder when free to chew the coca leaf and so stopped their own zealous efforts to wipe the plant from the surface of the Earth. To learn more:
When we outlaw drugs like cocaine , we are not just passing judgment on drugs: we are passing judgment on the value of mental concentration itself. Arthur Conan Doyle was clearly aware that cocaine could induce rapt mental states. The idea that such states are not worth adopting is not a medical opinion, it is a political one.
As for cocaine 910 being addictive, so what? To outlaw it on that basis makes no more sense than outlawing fire because it can be used for bad reasons.
Drug Warriors should be legally banned from watching or reading Sherlock Holmes stories, since in their world, it is a crime for such people as Sherlock Holmes to exist, i.e., people who use godsend medicines to improve their mind and mood. It is moreover completely childish to outlaw drugs because they can be misused by some people in some circumstances. The fact that Americans do not see this is testament to the sorry state of modern education -- and the lack of a focus on common-sense philosophy -- for even Rhodes Scholars like Bill Clinton are completely bamboozled on such topics11.
Author's Follow-up:
April 25, 2025
The idea that potentially addictive drugs cannot be used wisely is defeatism and racist and xenophobic. If a country cannot use such drugs wisely, then there is a problem with that country, and not with drugs. When we ban drugs merely because they can be misused by immature people in an immature country, we outlaw all sorts of sane use by responsible people -- including kids in hospice in India who go without morphine 12 because American politicians have demonized it and so rendered its use financially and bureaucratically impossible. This is insanity. America "protects" its white young people from drugs by outsourcing the downsides of prohibition to kids in hospice, to kids in violence-filled inner cities. They "save" the white young people whom they refuse to educate about drugs by enacting prohibitions that have destroyed the rule of law in Latin America. They "save" these uneducated white young people by outlawing religion. The Hindu religion was inspired by a drug that elated and inspired -- from which it follows that it is the outlawing of religion -- nay, of the religious impulse itself -- to outlaw substances that elate and inspire.
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.
Let's pass a constitutional amendment to remove Kansas from the Union, and any other state where the racist politicians leverage the drug war to crack down on minorities.
Most enemies of inner-city gun violence refuse to protest against the drug prohibition which caused the violence in the first place.
"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. The very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.
Outlawing drugs is outlawing obvious therapies for Alzheimer's and autism patients, therapies based on common sense and not on the passion-free behaviorism of modern scientists.
The proof that psychedelics work has always been extant. We are hoodwinked by scientists who convince us that efficacy has not been "proven." This is materialist denial of the obvious.
If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.
I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.
AI is like almost every subject under the sun: it takes on a very different and ominous meaning when we view it in light of the modern world's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine.
Amazing. Conservatives say they're against Big Government -- but they let bureaucrats decide what medicines they can use.
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.
