The Essence of Quackery- 1929 Quote

from Strategic Suicide: The Birth of the Modern American Drug War by Dan Russell   p 86

[Within the U.S.A.] Tobacco kills 400,000 Americans a year. Alcohol kills 150,000.  Cars kill 20,000.  All illegal drugs combined kill 6,000 [0 due to MJ], and almost all of these deaths are due not to pharmacology, but to the effects of Prohibition, such as poisonous adulteration, ignorance, combination with alcohol or the unavailability of whole herbs.  The hysteria about "drugs" is completely artificial, politico-economic.  Tobacco leaf, another traditional shamanic herb, is far more dangerous than coca leaf, opium sap or marijuana leaves and flowers, and yet I can smoke it till I drop.

Commercial medicine, as opposed to compassionate medicine, is willing to torture all of Peru, and all of Los Angeles, forever, rather than admit that coca leaf is a safe, healthful chew and tea.  ... Instead we got The Saturday Evening Post, in 1929, joyfully reporting that:

"Seventy five [75] years ago, there were no drugs to relieve headaches and similar pains, except dangerous dangerous, habit-forming opiates.  Now, there are a wide rage of relatively harmless drugs, such as coal-tar derivatives."

Since isolated coal tar derivatives can't be grown in anyone's garden, their permutations can be patented.  Thats why they're "safe"

This is but the tip of the iceberg of the human costs of the legislative-medical quackery that denies Genesis 'use the herbs of the earth' in favor of the mental sorcery of fear blinding us to how we have created our very problems, by for instance viewing cocaine so differently than caffeine and nicotine.

That's some medical profession;
and some U.S. Congress in 1914

... there are tens of thousands of people in the United States who die every year from the excessive use of cigarettes;    and yet I find Senators still pulling away at the cigarette as though t were a perfectly harmless thing. I believe the Senator will agree with me that there are many thousands of people who die from what is called tobacco cancer, a cancerous growth affecting the throat from overuse of cigars; and we find perhaps 60 percent of the Senators pulling away at the cigar as unconcerned as though no one were dying as a result of these cigars... U.S. Congress, Senator Porter James McCumber (R) North Dakota, August 15, 1914

Cigarette upturns cir. the U.S. 1906, 1914 & 1937 unconstitutional infringements upon freedom of medicine and diet

http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2011/04/coca-as-tobacco-habit-cure.html

http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-evil-prohibition-to-promote.html

http://southmallblogger.blogspot.com/2012/07/standing-for-drug-policy-reform-at.html