by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
November 26, 2019
[standup]
Welcome back to the DEA Lounge.
[applause]
How many know that psychedelics are good for learning languages? Raise your hands?
[applaud]
Let's see, 24, carry the one...
Looks like nobody here knows that.
[drum]
No, seriously. That's just one of the millions of things that we don't know about Mother Nature's pharmacy thanks to our government's policy of placing her off-limits.
[boo]
Wake up, folks: that's as anti-scientific as it gets.
[boo]
Think about it: Why do kids learn languages? Surely, it has something to do with the flexibility of their brains. Whereas the adult brain has gotten into a rut. Am I right?
[murmur]
Look at the guy at the bar over there. He's like, "I can't speak for the rest of us here, but my own brain is certainly nothing to write home about."
[drum]
I know you didn't say anything, sir, but there is such a thing as telepathy, you know.
[drum]
No, seriously. Mark my words: someday language courses will require the consumption of a modest amount of psychedelics during certain crucial lessons.
[applaud]
You know, to let the vocabulary and grammar sink into that otherwise thick brain of ours.
[applaud]
Quiero presentarte a una amiga. Commo se llama? Se llama mushroom.
[laughter]
I kid you not, ese.
[drum]
{^Do you have what it takes to be a Drug Warrior? Only the most logic-challenged and nature-hating individuals need apply. Jackboots may be provided, however the ideal candidate will already be wearing jackboots as a matter of course.}{
Mind you, if we lived in a sane world, psychiatrists would be petitioning Congress to allow the use of psychedelics in therapy sessions too.
[applaud]
Seriously, psychedelics seem custom-designed to bring out the raw material with which psychiatry has hitherto wanted to deal.
[applaud]
It's like, some supreme being is serving this stuff up to us on a silver platter, absolutely for free, saying, "Here it is, I've grown it for you," and we're like, "Oh, no, not a plant! We couldn't possibly use a plant for mental healing!"
[boo]
And I'm like, since when did America adopt the religion of Christian Science with respect to psychological healing? I for one never signed off on the notion that we have some religious or patriotic obligation to scorn mother nature's freely offered therapies.
[applaud]
And yet the government is going to check my urine to make sure that I avoid the plants and fungi that grow at my very feet? Puh-lease.
[boo]
Hello? That's, um, like the enforcement of Christian Science, folks.
[boo]
Hello? It's the establishment of a religion.
[applaud]
You know, I've recently begun reading the complete essays of CS Lewis and they make me feel so small, philosophically speaking. I mean, that guy is smart, girlfriend, I am telling you.
[drum]
[laughter]
But just when I'm feeling that I don't know jack, I suddenly remember that I'm one of the only people in this country to realize all of the philosophical problems with the Drug War, and I suddenly feel smart again.
You know what they say about the one-eyed man in the country of the blind.
[drum]
No, seriously. My name is Ballard Quass and I'll be here ranting against the anti-scientific war on mother nature until further notice --
[applaud]
Or until the next "crack down" on drugs entails the silencing of critics -- which, I wouldn't put it past a government that has already had the unprecedented chutzpah to outlaw plants.
AFTERTHOUGHT:
I'm sure I'm not the only one who realizes that the Drug War is philosophically rotten to the core -- but I'm certainly one of the few to speak up. That said, I really can't blame most people for touting the party line. After all, you are literally kicked out of the job market (via drug testing) if you do not renounce your right to Mother Nature's plants. And given that harsh treatment, it's reasonable to fear that you could be discriminated against in hiring merely by making your anti-drug-war viewpoints known.
Incidentally, here's where American hypocrisy kicks in. It is considered a truism that rock and rap are anti-institutional forces in America, where our artists are willing to say anything to the establishment. But not so. There are precious few songs that seek to tweak the nose of the establishment for outlawing Mother Nature's plants. Oh, sure, there are plenty of songs about hedonistic drug use, but such songs only help to reinforce the Drug Warrior dogma that psychoactive plants are only used by hedonists, allowing the warrior to conveniently ignore the fact that many such plants improve human cognition and give the partaker a therapeutic sense of their place in the cosmos.
So even rock bands and rappers are cowered into staying mum about the true fascist state of affairs.
The DEA has been willfully withholding godsend medications from the American public for 40+ years now, yet that outrage has never been addressed by an American musician. Meanwhile, films like "Running with the Devil" continue to glorify the DEA and encourage us to accept its unconstitutional practices (including, according to the film, torture and cold-blooded murder of mere suspects), all in the name of keeping Americans from having access to naturally growing plants.
Anyone who thinks such vicious law enforcement is just a movie plot is unfamiliar with the amorality of our current president, Donald Trump. He's jealous of Filipino Duterte who gets to order the killing of mere drug suspects outright, without all that nonsense about due process and jury trials. Here we see problem 2,456-B (or is it 2,456-C?) with our war against plants: it plays into the hands of would-be tyrants, who will gladly use Drug War hysteria to bring about the kind of fascist bloodshed that they hunger for. What better way to dress up their blood-lust and their raw will to power in the colors of the American flag?
And America claims it's a scientifically oriented country? Stop me if you've heard this before but: puh-lease!
June 18, 2022
Okay, that was... quaint, shall we call it? But you've got to remember, these curious effusions were indited a full 2 1/2 long years ago, when Brian was still a lad (couldn't have been more than 62 years old at most), and he had only just started his task of upbraiding the establishment for its nonsensical drug-war pieties. He's connected a lot of philosophical dots since then. Like the fact that the Drug War is a makework program for law enforcement personnel which actually obliges them to become noxious busybodies.
It's like a movie I just saw in which a female drugs agent comes into town looking for medicines of which pharmalogically clueless politicians disapprove. You'll have to forgive my French, but I couldn't help but think of this self-righteous public servant as a... well, as a "panty sniffer," if you will, as she rushes about town drawing her gloved finger over any and all surfaces that appear to harbor the least amount of particulate of any kind. You could see she was just waiting for the moment that she could cry out: "Bingo!" or "Gotcha!"
She doesn't care about bank robberies, she doesn't care about nuclear war, she doesn't care about terrorism. She's just a prudish schoolmarm trying to find out if the locals have been naughty or nice.
LOCAL: "But we're good people here, Ma'am!"
OFFICER: "That's as shall appear, my pretty! Heh-heh-heh-heh! Say, do you mind if I sniff your jacket, young man?"
And then when you think of the thousands of her self-aggrandizing colleagues in the US alone who only have jobs because of this Big Brother fight against the "pre-crime" of substance possession, folks who, barring that, would be slopping together Whoppers at Burger King. Well, it's a boon for the glove industry at any rate. Somebody has to clad those busybody fingers of theirs as they poke about for a legal excuse to confiscate mansions and yachts on behalf of the local police.
America has come within a hair's breath of being nuked multiple times (accidentally and otherwise) in the last 50 years, including once in Arkansas, once in North Carolina, and once in Pearl Harbor. But it never seems to have occurred to strategically hysterical authorities that these thousands of "panty sniffers" that we're employing today in the name of the Drug War might be of more service to the Republic if they were looking for nuclear threats, not pharmacological ones.
I guess they figure that if we're blown to bits, we can all go to heaven secure in the knowledge that we have just said no to mother nature's godsends. Or if we survive the initial blast, we can stand up to the invader (the one who comes stateside after we do the dirty work for them by blowing up Arkansas) and cry: "Don't shoot, comrade, we're good people here, we have all just said no to godsend medicine!" To which the Russian sniper replies, "Just say no to THIS!"
I'm just sayin', let's get our priorities straight here!
More Essays Here
Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs
If the depressed patient laughs, that means nothing. Materialists have to see results under a microscopic or they will never sign off on a therapy.
But that's the whole problem with Robert Whitaker's otherwise wonderful critique of Big Pharma. Like almost all non-fiction authors today, he reckons without the drug war, which gave Big Pharma a monopoly in the first place.
At best, antidepressants make depression bearable. We need not settle for such drugs, especially when they are notorious for causing dependence. There are many drugs that elate and inspire. It is both cruel and criminal to outlaw them.
I might as well say that no one can ever be taught to ride a horse safely. I would argue as follows: "Look at Christopher Reeves. He was a responsible and knowledgeable equestrian. But he couldn't handle horses. The fact is, NO ONE can handle horses!"
Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.
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.
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.
The press is having a field day with the Matthew Perry story. They love to have a nice occasion to demonize drugs. I wonder how many decades must pass before they realize that people are killed by ignorance and a corrupted drug supply, not by the drugs themselves.
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.
More Tweets
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, Se Llama Mushrooms: Live from the DEA Lounge!, published on November 26, 2019 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)
