Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
open letter to computer scientist George Mohler
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 10, 2021
George Mohler is the computer geek behind event prediction software that is currently 'helping' Santa Clara police (but minorities not so much). I sent the following email to George today in an attempt to persuade him to find a more worthy client for his software than police forces in the age of the Drug War.
Hi, George.
I just watched the documentary 'Eye on You' and I wanted to share with you my concern about your 'event prediction' program. Such an algorithm-based police tactic might make sense in a world where laws were fair, but we live in the age of a Christian Science Drug War, in which it is illegal to even study certain medicines of which politicians disapprove. Sigmund Freud considered cocaine to be a godsend for his depression, but your program helps police track down cocaine 1 2 users like dogs and treat them like scumbags before tossing them in overcrowded prisons. Opium enthusiasts have included Marco Polo, Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin, and yet your program helps police track down such people like dogs as well -- especially those who dare SELL plant medicine. Do you realize that Founding Father Thomas Jefferson grew the opium poppy at Monticello ? But now those who deal in opium are treated like Adolf Hitler -- this despite the fact that entire religions have been inspired by psychoactive plant medicine. The entire Vedic religion was founded to worship the cosmic insights of the Soma plant. The psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries3 gave cosmic insights for 2,000 consecutive years to a who's who of western luminaries, including Plato, Plutarch and Cicero. The Mesoamericans had plant-based religious rituals until Columbus and the Conquistadores showed up and demanded that they become Christians and drink liquor instead -- those that they did not kill, that is.
Your algorithms may stop the occasional old lady from being mugged, but if shows like 'Cops' mean anything, you can bet that what you're really doing is helping police to harass and crack down on minorities, throwing them into overcrowded prisons and removing them from the voting rolls by charging them with felonies -- thereby stealing American elections for racist conservatives.
?374?
If you study the Drug War, you will find that it causes all of the problems that it claims to be solving and then some. My mother suffers from dementia because the Drug War has outlawed all the drugs that show such great promise in treating it -- like ayahuasca that grows new neural pathways in the brain. Meanwhile, 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma meds because the Drug War outlaws all the less addictive plant medicine that could help the depressed immeasurably. Cocaine, opium , and even heroin 4 are less addictive than Big Pharma meds, because the latter change brain chemistry, which takes a long time (if ever) to revert to the normal baseline once Big Pharma 5 6 'meds' are withdrawn.
In short, the Drug War is hypocritical, anti-science, anti-nature, anti-minority, anti-patient, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, and a violation of Natural Law. Just ask the ghost of Thomas Jefferson that was spinning in its grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 7 in 1987 and confiscated the Founding Father's poppy plants.
In light of these facts, I urge you to consider withdrawing your product from use by police forces, at least until such time as America decides to start learning about plant medicine rather than demonizing it.
The Drug War represents a wrong way of thinking about the world, one that causes a civil war in Mexico and impowers a self-proclaimed Drug War Hitler in the Philippines.
Please don't be a party to this ongoing injustice. Find a more worthy client for your algorithms than law enforcement in the Age of the Drug War.
Abolishthedea.com
PS The 'Eye on You' documentary showed the Santa Clara Police following up on one of your algorithm 'leads.' Of course, the evildoer they encountered wasn't robbing a store or mugging an orphan or getting ready to take hostages -- No, they were, AS PER USUAL, merely possessing substances of which beer-swilling Christian Drug Warrior politicians disapprove. But then the Drug War is just a make-work program for law enforcement. Imagine what police would do without a Drug War: they would just have to sit back and wait for people to actually do something wrong. Hmm. Then there would be no Cops and Detective shows for folks to watch after they got home from a nice day of being drug tested, no movies about the US marching into Latin American countries to shoot Latinos because they use or sell plant medicine that has been used responsibly for millennia by non-western countries, no movies 8 9 about the DEA running roughshod over the US Constitution, torturing suspects and then shooting them at point-blank range in the age of our unprecedented war on substances.
Author's Follow-up: August 19, 2022
Looking back almost a year later, I ask myself if I wasn't a bit rough on George. After all, you catch more flies with honey, right? Of course, the irony is that I would be a much more patient fellow were I free to occasionally avail myself of opium 10 , coca, psilocybin and especially the empathogenic Ecstasy -- the very drugs that George's algorithms will help get me arrested for using. So if I'm the monster here, then George is the Dr. Frankenstein who made me.
Author's Follow-up: March 6, 2025
I wish we had some computer code that would predict when racist politicians are going to create new laws designed to target minorities.
if ($suspect=='black' AND $location=='inner_city' AND $time_of_day=='night')
{
run $harassment_routine;
}
elseif ($suspect=='rich' AND $location=='suburbs' AND $average_salary>$100,000)
{
run $public_service_routine;
}
Notes:
1: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
2: On Cocaine Freud, Sigmund (up)
3: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
4: Lee Robins' studies of heroin use among US Vietnam veterans Hall, Wayne, National Library of Medicine, 2016 (up)
5: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science Seife, Charles, Scientific American, 2012 (up)
6: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? LaMartinna, John, Forbes, 2022 (up)
7: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
8: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
9: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
10: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
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.
America's Blind SpotCanadian Drug Warrior, I said Get AwayCommon Sense Drug WithdrawalDrug War MurderersDrugs are not the problemEnd the Drug War NowFeedback on my first legal psilocybin session in OregonFinally, a drug war opponent who checks all my boxesFreedom of Religion and the War on DrugsGetting off antidepressants in the age of the drug warGod and DrugsHello? MDMA works, already!How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug WarHow National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of cocaHow Scientific American reckons without the drug warHow the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in EnglandHow the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel KantHow the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big PharmaI'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma CactusIgnorance is the enemy, not FentanylIllusions with Professor Arthur ShapiroIn Defense of Religious Drug UseKeep Laughing Gas LegalMDMA for PsychotherapyMy Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implementNo drugs are bad in and of themselvesOpen Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor MateOpen Letter to Anthony GottliebOpen Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEAOpen Letter to Diane O'LearyOpen Letter to Erica ZelfandOpen Letter to Francis FukuyamaOpen letter to Kenneth SewellOpen Letter to Lisa LingOpen letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo UniversityOpen Letter to Richard HammersleyOpen Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland GriffithsOpen Letter to Roy Benaroch MDOpen Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and CrimeOpen Letter to the Virginia LegislatureOpen Letter to Variety Critic Owen GliebermanOpen Letter to Vincent Hurley, LecturerOpen Letter to Vincent RadoOpen letter to Wolfgang SmithPredictive Policing in the Age of the Drug WarProhibitionists Never LearnRegulate and EducateReplacing antidepressants with entheogensReview of When Plants DreamScience News Continues to Ignore the Drug WarScience News magazine continues to pretend that there is no war on drugsSolquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invitedSpeaking Truth to Big PharmaTeenagers and CannabisThe common sense way to get off of antidepressantsThe Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing MatterThe Depressing Truth About SSRIsThe Invisible Mass ShootingsThe Menace of the Drug WarThe problem with Modern Drug Reform EffortsThe Pseudoscience of Mental Health TreatmentThere is nothing to debate: the drug war is wrong, root and branchTime for News Outlets to stop promoting drug war liesTop 10 Problems with the Drug WarUnscientific AmericanUsing plants and fungi to get off of antidepressantsVancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe UseWeed Bashing at WTOP.COMWhitehead and PsychedelicsWhy DARE should stop telling kids to say noWhy Rick Doblin is Ghosting MeWhy the Drug War is Worse than you can ImagineWhy the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
It's really an insurance concern, however, disguised as a concern for public health. Because of America's distrust of "drugs," a company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.
We should place prohibitionists on trial for destroying inner cities.
The whole drug war is based on the anti-American idea that the way to avoid problems is to lie and prevaricate and persuade people not to ask questions.
Drug Prohibition Downside #1,529:
aviation accidents caused by pilots who failed to use mind-sharpening drugs to improve their situational awareness. (See, for instance, Comair flight 5191)
We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.
America is insane: it makes liquor officially legal and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.
Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.
Drug warriors abuse the English language.
Mayo Clinic is peddling junk. They are still promoting Venlafaxine, a drug that is harder to kick than heroin. The drug is only a problem, though, because of prohibition. It would be easy to get off of with the help of other drugs!!! WAKE UP, MAYO!
Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us
How the Drug War gave the 2016 election to Donald Trump
In Response to Laurence Vance
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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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