and everyone else who stands up to the drug war at the risk of losing their own freedom
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 16, 2024
Here is my response to an article entitled "FREE DULF. NO MORE DYING. NO MORE DRUG WAR 2024," published by the Drug User Solidarity Committee on the Drug War Decoded-Canada website.1
Thanks and best wishes to Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx... and to everyone else who stands up to the hateful Drug War at the risk of their own freedom.
The Drug War is anti-democratic. The proof is extant.
It has destroyed the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution (which used to bar unreasonable search). It outlaws religions that rely on entheogenic ritual. It is a makework program for law enforcement that throws millions of minorities in jail every year, thereby handing elections to tyrants. And Drug Warriors are not done yet with their assault on democratic freedoms. In early 2024, Oregon politicians floated a plan to outlaw free speech when it comes to drugs.
Drug warriors would prefer that drug users die than to provide them with regulated product. They would prefer nuclear Armageddon to a world in which people use entheogens to promote world peace.
America's Food & Drug Administration embraces the same warped priorities.
It disapproves of drugs that could prevent suicide and school shootings. Meanwhile it approves of Big Pharma "meds" whose side effects include death itself. This is the same FDA which approves of brain-damaging shock therapy, the same FDA which endorses the psychiatric pill mill and the same FDA which has no problem with the fact that 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent on antidepressants for life.
But the media and politicians keep running a full-court press against common sense and simple humanity.
Thank God for folks like Jeremy and Eris who dare to push back!
Author's Follow-up: October 16, 2024
Drug prohibition is a very strange puppy. First America decided to end liquor prohibition once and for all with the 21st amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But then those same Americans began outlawing every even potentially popular psychoactive alternative to liquor, many of them time-honored, some of them long considered panaceas, and none of them as dangerous as alcohol itself.
So Americans love prohibition -- they just want to make one big fat exception for liquor when it comes to prohibition enforcement.
Q: Where can you find almost-verbatim copies of the descriptions of religious experiences described by William James? A: In descriptions of user reports of "trips" on drugs ranging from coca to opium, from MDMA to laughing gas.
There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.
The "scheduling" system is completely anti-scientific and anti-patient. It tells us we can make a one-size-fits-all decision about psychoactive substances without regard for dosage, context of use, reason for use, etc. That's superstitious tyranny.
People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.
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.
That's my real problem with SSRIs: If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or truly scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.
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.
I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.
"Can I use poppies, coca, laughing gas, MDMA?" "NO," says the materialist, "We must be SCIENTIFIC! We must fry your brain and give you a lobotomy and make you a patient for life with the psychiatric pill mill! That's true SCIENCE!"
The sad fact is that America regularly arrests people whose only crime is that they are keeping performance anxiety at bay... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
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, Let's hear it for Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx: and everyone else who stands up to the drug war at the risk of losing their own freedom, published on October 16, 2024 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, Let's hear it for Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx: and everyone else who stands up to the drug war at the risk of losing their own freedom, published on October 16, 2024 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)