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Teenagers and Cannabis

an open letter to Clinical Professor Bobby Smyth at the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 12, 2022



With 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 1 , 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 2 3 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 4 . 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.











Notes:

1: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
4: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.

Doc to Franklin: "I'm sorry, Ben, but I see no benefits of opium use under my microscope. The idea that you are living a fulfilled life is clearly a mistake on your part. If you want to be scientific, stop using opium and be scientifically depressed like the rest of us."

Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.

America legalizes alcohol and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.

Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.

Who would have thought back in 1776 that Americans would eventually have to petition their government for the right to even possess a damn mushroom. The Drug War has destroyed America.

Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.

If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.

What are drug dealers doing, after all? They are merely selling substances that people want and have always had a right to, until racist politicians came along and decided government had the right to ration out pain relief and mystical experience.

We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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