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The Menace of the Drug War

open letter to Arab Naz, author of The Menace of Opiate

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 18, 2022



Another academic has missed the point. Here is my response to Arab Naz's paper on academia.edu entitled The Menace of Opiate: The socio-psychological and physiological impacts of opiate on addicts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

Dear Arab Naz,

I would encourage you to consider how the Drug War has created the opioid problem by outlawing godsend psychoactive medicine, discouraging honest talk about substances, and incentivizing dealers to sell the most available and addictive substances possible. Please consider that the Vedic-Hindu religion was inspired by the psychoactive effects of plant medicine1, and that drugs are therefore not the problem. Rather the desire for transcendence is universal, and when we make that transcendence illegal through drug laws, we empower criminals to sell the most dangerous substances possible.

Please consider also that the menace is not from opiates, Arab: the menace is from the Drug War, which for the first time in human history has told humanity that it has no right to the medical and religious bounty that grows at their very feet.

The desire for self-transcendence will never disappear. The desire for profit will never disappear. If we want less suffering in the world, what needs to disappear is the anti-scientific and anti-religious war on psychoactive plant medicine, aka the Drug War.

Author's Follow-up: June 21, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


This is the whole problem with the Drug War: it demonizes drugs. Well, guess what? All drugs have positive uses at some dose, in some circumstance. Even cyanide has potential positive uses.2











Notes:

1: One Thousand Names of Soma: Elements of Religious and Divine Ecstasy Kalomiris, James, Balboa Press, 2019 (up)
2: Cyanide ingredient could lead to new type 2 diabetes treatment Uncredited, diabetes.co.uk, 2016 (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Our tolerance for freedom wanes in proportion as we consider "drugs" to be demonic. This is the dark side behind the new ostensibly comic genre about Cocaine Bears and such. It shows that Americans are superstitious about drugs in a way that Neanderthals would have understood.

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.

Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy. It is based on the following crazy idea: that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.

Drug use is judged by different standards than any other risky activity in the western world. One death can lead to outrage, even though that death might be statistically insignificant.

If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.

The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.

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.

Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!

Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use drugs that speed up and sharpen mental processes.

"Like Christians burning mosques and temples to spread the word of Jesus, modem drugabuseologists burn crops to spread the use of alcohol." -- Ceremonial Chemistry, p. 48


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






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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP (up)