Today I sent the following e-mail to Republicans in the Virginia state legislature. I was both peeved and in a hurry when I wrote it, but I trust that I've made my basic points plainly enough. Don't laugh, Democrats, you're on my list too. I'm just following a hunch of mine that the right side of the aisle remains most in favor of intolerance and injustice when it comes to the Drug War -- or rather the war on plants -- or rather the war on the elderly. Take your pick: there's plenty of injustice to go around when it comes to the so-called Drug War.
Dear Representative:
Please stop fighting the wretched Drug War.
By doing so, you are preventing my 92-year-old mother from getting relief from the many natural godsends of mother nature, so many of which have been stupidly and unscientifically banned by the DEA even for simple research -- the DEA, a corrupt agency that has a HUGE conflict of interest in "scheduling" substances, since their jobs depend on those substances being illegal. The DEA acted against the advice of its own counsel and kept MDMA illegal for the last 35 years, and to hell with the thousands of soldiers that could have gotten relief from the substance.
Stop cracking down -- unless you're like Donald Trump and want to kill and torture folks who dare to use Mother Nature's plants -- or like Leslie Bibb in the movie "Running with the Devil," a DEA agent who murders and tortures drug suspects for using plants -- while SHE SMOKES A CIGARETTE containing tobacco, the worst drug on the planet!!!
If you really want a Drug War, let's arrest everybody that uses cigarettes -- or has so much as a cigarette stub on their person. Let's confiscate their houses. Let's remove them from the voting rolls. Let's confiscate any book profits that they may make by writing about their arrests.
Then let's do the same for alcohol use or possession.
That's a Drug War I could get behind because it exposes the hypocrisy of our approach against natural substances and gives the Drug Warrior a taste of his or her own medicine.
The unscientific Drug War is anti-patient because it forces physicians and psychotherapists to treat patients using a fraction of the therapeutic bounty that actually exists, outlawing almost all of the psychoactive plants of Mother Nature. Then we wonder why depression and PTSD flourish unchecked in America. Why? The American Drug Warrior wouldn't have it any other way. They must demonize Mother Nature's cures at all cost, so that Big Liquor and Law Enforcement may flourish.
Or, if you think this is wrong, then {^stop the anti-patient Drug War, this war on plants, that's depriving my suffering mother of natural and non-addictive godsends, shunting her off onto a handful of addictive drugs from Big Pharma doled out by today's psychiatric pill mill.}{
Please stop the war on mother nature's plants -- plants that we all have a right to use by natural law -- which should trump common law in America. Stop making substances a scapegoat for bad actors and bad social conditions.
As John Locke wrote in his Treatise on Government:
"The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being."
This is a right that cannot be usurped by common law, if America is to remain the America about which Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.
PS Tried to get medical marijuana today for my 92-year-old mother and found out that Virginia does not want my mother to have relief from anxiety -- except through addictive Big Pharma meds. What nonsense. Do you think Thomas Jefferson thought that some of the plants he grew should be banned??? Do you think he didn't spin in his grave when the jackbooted DEA barged onto his property in 1985 and stole his poppy plants???
Open Letters
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.
Scientists cannot tell us if psychoactive drugs are worth the risk any more than they can tell us if free climbing is worth the risk, or horseback riding or target practice or parkour.
"My faith votes and strives to outlaw religions that use substances of which politicians disapprove."
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.
The Drug War is the most important evil to protest, precisely because almost everybody is afraid to do so. That's a clear sign that it is a cancer on the body politic.
We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.
There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.
Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.
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, Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature: on behalf of my 92-year-old mother, published on February 7, 2020 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, Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature: on behalf of my 92-year-old mother, published on February 7, 2020 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)