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Teenagers and Cannabis by the Drug War Philospher at AbolishTheDEA.com
Teenagers and Cannabis
an open letter to Clinical Professor Bobby Smyth at the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
November 12, 2022
ith respect to your recent Tweet, Bobby:
The reason that cannabis is omnipresent these days is because we have outlawed all of its natural competition. The answer is to re-legalize mother nature, which we had no right to outlaw in the first place. It's a clear violation of natural law for a government to tell its citizens what plants they can access. Depression could be solved overnight if we re-legalized the coca leaf, which was used in the form of coca wine by HG Wells, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen and Alexandre Dumas, to name a few. As for safety, it was used for millennia by the long-lived Peruvian Indians, until the Spanish enslaved them and started foisting alcohol upon them.
Criminalization is nonsense because people will always seek self-transcendence. That's never going to stop. Prohibition is therefore just a make-work program for law enforcement. The answer is education, not demonization. The prohibition that you champion has killed over 100,000 in Mexico since 2006. When we worry about the safety of kids, we should worry about the kids in Latin America, who continue to lose their lives and/or their parents thanks to the war on drugs, yes, including the war on cannabis. Why all this death? Because we have decided to "fight plants" instead of fighting ignorance and the prohibition which brings lopsided attention to substances like cannabis.
Author's Follow-up: November 12, 2022
This is why the go-slow approach to drug legalization is a mistake. Instead of acting on principle and denying government's right to criminalize plants and fungi in the first place, we have selected to legalize one single substance, chiefly (let's be honest) because it was the go-to drug for white Americans. The result? Cannabis use has now become the poster child for drug legalization, thereby giving the Neo Drug Warrior the ammunition that he or she needs to blast the whole idea of ending the war on drugs.
Still, if Bobby really wants to help young people, he would insist that the billions currently being spent on law enforcement in the name of the Drug War would henceforth be spent on substance education instead, which in practical terms would mean that the Drug Enforcement Agency would be replaced by the Drug EDUCATION Agency, and then we would all start being 100% honest about substances -- imagine that -- both as to their subjective and objective benefits and downsides as well as their historical use (as when psychedelics gave Plato a view of the afterlife or coca wine inspired the stories of HG Wells and Jules Verne). I can't speak for Bobby, but I'm afraid that most people in his position do not REALLY want such honesty, because it would force them to admit some inconvenient truths, like the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma meds for life -- proving that the Drug Warriors do not really want us to say no to drugs; rather they want us to say yes to the "right" drugs as judged by Wall Street.
Take me, for instance: Clinical professors protected ME from marijuana. How? By making me a lifetime ward of the healthcare state with tranquilizing "meds" like Effexor. Far from wanting to protect ME from this demoralizing status quo, today's clinical professors are telling me that I have a duty as a patient to "keep taking my meds!"
November 12, 2022
Note: The author writes of Bobby as "championing prohibition." By this, he does not mean that Bobby necessarily supports prohibition explicitly, but rather that the stand he takes on these topics certainly implies such support.
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.
Peyote advocates should be drug legalization advocates. Otherwise, they're involved in special pleading which is bound to result in absurd laws, such as "Plant A can be used in a religion but not plant B," or "Person A can belong to such a religion but person B cannot."
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
Hollywood presents cocaine as a drug of killers. In reality, strategic cocaine use by an educated person can lead to great mental power, especially as just one part of a pharmacologically balanced diet. That's why drug warriors want to outlaw free speech, to hide such facts.
Of course, prohibitionists will immediately remind me that we're all children when it comes to drugs, and can never -- but never -- use them wisely. That's like saying that we could never ride horses wisely. Or mountain climb. Or skateboard.
NOW is the time for entheogens -- not (as Strassman and Pollan seem to think) at some future date when materialists have finally wrapped their minds around the potential usefulness of drugs that experientially teach compassion.
America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.
We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for the losers who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.
To oppose the Drug War philosophically, one has to highlight its connections to both materialism and the psychiatric pill mill. And that's a problem, because almost everyone is either a Drug Warrior, a materialist, and/or has a vested interest in the psychiatric pill mill.
Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
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, Teenagers and Cannabis: an open letter to Clinical Professor Bobby Smyth at the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, published on November 12, 2022 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)
ith respect to your recent Tweet, Bobby: 
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You have been reading an article entitled, Teenagers and Cannabis: an open letter to Clinical Professor Bobby Smyth at the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, published on November 12, 2022 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)