The Christian Presuppositions of the Drug War and Why They're Important
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 18, 2024
There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than afterwards to offer them their prescriptions for making life easier -- their Christianity, for example. -- Nietzsche1
I keep getting Tweets along the lines of: "Well, that's all well and good, but the Drug War is REALLY about A, B, or C..."
I'm told by one that it's all about militarization, by another that it's all about money, by still another that it's all about racism. If you ask me, it is all about materialism as well (a connection that I appear to be the only one to have noticed so far, however, which has turned me into the Ignaz Semmelweis of the Drug War2).
Of course, they're all correct. The Drug War is "about" a lot of things. But the real question, philosophically speaking, is how a program that is dramatically failing even on its own supposed terms, that of saving lives, can be not only tolerated by Americans of all political stripes, but actually promoted by them. (The Washington Post recently reported that the shipment of opioid pills dropped 45% between 2011 and 2019 thanks to law enforcement crackdowns. During the same time, the deaths by overdose skyrocketed!3)
This stubborn illogical embrace of drug-war ideology cannot be explained by militarization, greed or racism. It has something to do with the very psyche of westerners, which, as Nietzsche warned us, has maintained the puritan notions of Christianity while discarding the religion4. It has something to do with our historical disdain for the tribal people that we have conquered and their belief in drug cures. It has something to do with our puritanical distrust of laughter and unfettered self-expression. It has something to do with America's ongoing need for sin, redemption, and the existence of a devil. It has something to do with America's concoction of a faux morality whereby we can resurrect a world where there is a clear good and bad: drug dealers bad, prohibitionists good. The sinner is the "user" who comes home to a 12-step group and recognizes a thinly disguised Christian god known as a "higher power." These 12-step groups, of course, teach the "addicts" that they are powerless5. (Of course, the reason they are powerless is because the drug law has made them so, just as a flu victim might be powerless to overcome the flu were we to outlaw all antibiotics.)
Otherwise the Drug War would be inexplicable. For it is not common sense to hate drugs. That is something one must learn. And even in order to learn that, you must be predisposed to that belief by the history of your people. Certainly such anti-drug attitudes never occurred to tribal peoples, all of whom used drugs for various psychosocial purposes, as ethnobotanist Richard Schultes reports6. The Drug War, in fact, can be seen as the west's final step in destroying these aboriginal peoples: we first destroyed them physically, and now we are bent on destroying their nature-friendly view of life, their metaphysic about what life is all about, and replacing their shamans with our materialist doctors, doctors who are so obsessed with looking down their microscopes that they cannot acknowledge that drugs like laughing gas and MDMA could help the depressed.
Those who ignore this background story cut the ground out from under the legalization movement (or rather the RE-legalization movement). For the strongest argument that can (and should) be made against the Drug War is the fact that it is the unconstitutional enforcement of a religion: namely, the religion of Christian Science, which tells us that using drugs is morally wrong, that the moral state of mind is the "drug free" state of mind7.
With this argument, we can (and should) make a strong and undeniable case that the Drug War must end NOW, declaring that it is SELF-EVIDENTLY wrong to tell people how and how much they are allowed to think and feel in life, and that is exactly what we do when we outlaw psychoactive medicines. This is government overreach of unprecedented proportions, and it is supported by hypocrisy of equally unprecedented proportions, insofar as the most rabid Drug Warriors fiercely defend their right to guns, which kill 50,000 a year in America alone8.
They'll say, of course, that guns do not kill people - but then turn around and tell us that drugs do indeed kill people. It's such enormous hypocrisy that such gun worshipers should be photographed and placed in the Webster's Illustrated Dictionary under the term "hypocrite."
Author's Follow-up: January 18, 2024
As you philosopher types should already know, nothing that I've written above need be construed as Christianity bashing, or even Christian Science bashing. If you believe that drugs are bad, then more power to you. All I ask is that you keep that belief to yourself and do not insist that the rest of the world live by your theology. For I personally believe that life is all about becoming all you can be and that psychoactive medicine has been provided to human beings for a reason. Again, if you're a materialist, you will disagree. But again, all I ask is that you keep that belief to yourself and not insist that the rest of the world live by your faith in reductive materialism as the sole method whereby truth may be known.
Religion
The Drug War violates religious freedom by putting bureaucrats in charge of deciding if a religion is 'sincere' or not. That is so absurd that one does not know whether to laugh or cry. No one in government is capable of determining whether the inner states that I achieve with psychoactive medicine are religious or not. This is why Milton Friedman was so wrong when he said in 1972 that there are good people on both sides of the drug war debate. WRONG! There are those who are more than ready to take away my religious liberty and those who are not. If the former wish to be called 'good,' they will first need a refresher course in American democracy and religious freedom. They need to renounce their Christian Science theocracy and let folks like myself worship using the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions in the past. Until they do that, do not expect me to praise the very people who have launched an inquisition against my form of experiencing the divine.
We've all been taught since grade school that human beings cannot use psychoactive medicines wisely. That is just a big fat lie. It's criminal to keep substances illegal that can awaken the mind and remind us of our full potential in life.
America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.
"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud
Someday, the First Lady or Man will tell kids to "just say no to prohibition." Kids who refuse will be required to watch hours' worth of films depicting gun violence, banned religions, civil wars, and adults committing suicide for want of medicine that grows at their very feet.
It's rich when Americans outlaw drugs and then insist that those drugs did not have much to offer in any case. It's like I took away your car and then told you that car ownership was overrated.
This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.
Check out the 2021 article in Forbes in which a materialist doctor professes to doubt whether laughing gas could help the depressed. Materialists are committed to seeing the world from the POV of Spock from Star Trek.
The scheduling system is a huge lie designed to give an aura of "science" to America's colonialist disdain for indigenous medicines, from opium, to coca, to shrooms.
We know that anticipation and mental focus and relaxation have positive benefits -- but if these traits ae facilitated by "drugs," then we pretend that these same benefits somehow are no longer "real." This is a metaphysical bias, not a logical deduction.
Until prohibition ends, rehab is all about enforcing a Christian Science attitude toward psychoactive medicines (with the occasional hypocritical exception of Big Pharma meds).
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, The Christian Presuppositions of the Drug War and Why They're Important published on January 18, 2024 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, The Christian Presuppositions of the Drug War and Why They're Important published on January 18, 2024 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)