four Tweets to Vincent Rado after he unfollowed me
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 29, 2023
y Twitter engagement died almost completely after Vincent unfollowed me. That'll teach me to disagree with Vincent Rado! Anyway, to show that I'm more about truth than I am about popularity, let's take a critical look at Vincent's most recent Tweet about drugs, one which, I admit, has left me scratching my head.
VINCENT RADO'S TWEET:
In 10-20 years, the psychedelic boom thats (sic) occurring right now is gonna look an awful lot like the Rx opioid boom of the '90s and 2000s
I'm not sure what Vincent means by that. In 2016, a user was dying every 16 minutes from opioid overdoses brought about by Drug War prohibition which incentivized the sale of the most ready-to-hand and addictive medicine possible. Does Rado mean that psychedelics will be killing one user every 16 minutes in 2043? If so, psychedelics have a lot of catching up to do, considering that they have been implicated in only a handful of deaths since the beginning of time, and strictly speaking, they have "caused" no deaths at all.
Here are some additional responses that I posted to Rado's curiously alarmist Tweet.
1) Again, I don't understand the obsession with bashing psychedelic enthusiasm. You're still throwing the baby out with the bath water. Hopefully in 20 years, substance prohibition will look to us like liquor prohibition. That's what I'm hoping and fighting for.
2) You probably think it's okay to bash psychedelics because you have not gone an entire lifetime being deprived of godsend meds for your depression and being shunted off onto mind-numbing antidepressants instead.
3) My one psychedelic experience as a teen was the most enlightening experience of my life. It taught me that the antidepressants I was taking were tranquilizing me, not helping me to live large. Let's stop bashing psychedelics, even if the sales hype is irritating.
4) Still to this day, researchers are discouraged and otherwise barred from researching benefits of psychedelics and other "drugs." In 20 years, I hope that that government censorship of science will be at an end.
These are my views in spite of THE GREAT UNFOLLOWING! Agree with me at your own risk!
EPILOGuE:
Vincent subsequently said that I'm shilling for substances:
My response: Yes, I'm shilling for the hundreds of substances that America has outlawed over the years -- to the point that the only recourse for the depressed is shock therapy or antidepressants, which are lobotomy on the instalment plan.
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987. They have refused to talk about that ever since.
The Drug War is the ultimate example of strategic fearmongering by self-interested politicians.
Prohibition turned habituation into addiction by creating a wide variety of problems for users, including potential arrest, tainted or absent drug supply, and extreme stigmatization.
The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.
The idea that "drugs" have no medical benefits is not science, it is philosophy, and bad philosophy at that. It is based on the idea that benefits must be molecularly demonstratable and not created from mere knock-on psychological effects of drug use, time-honored tho' they be.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
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.
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
What are drug dealers doing, after all? Only 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.
I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.
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 Great Unfollowing: four Tweets to Vincent Rado after he unfollowed me, published on January 29, 2023 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)
y Twitter engagement died almost completely after Vincent unfollowed me. That'll teach me to disagree with Vincent Rado! Anyway, to show that I'm more about truth than I am about popularity, let's take a critical look at Vincent's most recent Tweet about drugs, one which, I admit, has left me scratching my head.
You have been reading an article entitled, The Great Unfollowing: four Tweets to Vincent Rado after he unfollowed me, published on January 29, 2023 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)
