I watched a clip on Sky News last night in which the wide-eyed tech pundit told us that the AI behemoth known as Anthropic had its own philosopher on staff. Its own philosopher! This was supposed to shock the viewer. A company the size of Coca-Cola has its own philosopher on staff! But what shocked me was the fact that Anthropic did not have DOZENS of philosophers on staff -- or that it did not subject the implicit philosophical point of view of its algorithms to multiple critiques from the general public. If such companies are going to leverage Big Data to give us the apparent final word on everything, then it is hugely important upon which philosophies their answers are based, and that philosophy should not be invented by one single company-appointed philosopher. Sure, 2 + 2 is always going to be equal to 4 in abstract mathematics regardless of unspoken assumptions about the world, but the AI answers to questions about the propriety of drug use are going to depend entirely on the philosophies assumed, knowingly or not, by the AI algorithms.
Suppose that the algorithms are written under the assumption that all the "real" answers about things like drug use will come from science. Then the AI answers that the algorithms provide about drugs will serve to demonize drugs and emphasize their negative uses, since this is what science is paid to do these days in the west: to demonize psychoactive medicines by focusing only on misuse and worst-case scenarios, meanwhile never mentioning positive use, both extant and clearly possible with the use of a little psychological common sense. Indeed, the bylaws of the aptly named National Institute on Drug Abuse forbids the organization's employees from advocating for the legalization of any outlawed substance. Their real jobs are thus political in nature, not scientific. Unless AI "understands" these largely unspoken facts and takes them into account, its answers about drugs will always serve to support the many modern prejudices which are based on this government demonization campaign.
A fair algorithm would consider the fact that westerners have been shielded by media censorship from all positive talk about drug use since their childhood. Even should algorithms glean that fact from its use of inherently conservative Big Data, the weight that the algorithms assign to that fact will be based on assumptions, explicit or implicit, in those algorithms.
In other words, the question about the propriety of drug use raises a host of questions about which most people never consciously think. And we can be sure that AI will manifest the prejudices of the majority. And this, of course, is the nightmare of AI in general. It is innocent enough in telling us the scientific name of the leopard, but when it purports to give us final answers on subjects of human mind and mood, we can only expect blather in the age of the War on Drugs.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Author's Follow-up:
March 14, 2026
It makes common psychological sense that cocaine could be beneficial for many people. Common psychological sense. And yet when one searches online for "depression and cocaine," one sees endless papers by academics speculating on how cocaine could actually CAUSE depression. This is how unscientific science has become under the gun of the Drug Warrior. Scientists know that their research dollars depend on them demonizing drugs like cocaine, and they are happy to oblige.
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If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.
Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.
Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."
Timothy Leary's wife wrote: "We went to Puerto Rico and all we did was take cocaine and read Faust to one another." And there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with that!!! The drug war is all about scaring us and making illegal drug use as dangerous as possible.
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
In an article about Mazatec mushroom use, the author says: "Mushrooms should not be considered a drug." True. But then NOTHING should be considered a drug: every substance has potential good uses.
In the 2015 movie "No Escape," the only place that was safe from anti-American hysteria was an opium den. How ironic that the U.S. forced Iran to outlaw opium.
The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.
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