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Another non-fiction author reckons without the drug war

open letter to Greg Epstein, author of Tech Agnostic

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





July 9, 2025



Hi, Greg.

You're obviously a great writer and researcher. I recognize that after listening to the first six tracks of your book1 on Downpour.com.

With respect, however, you are like almost every other non-fiction author today in that you reckon without the Drug War.

The fact that AI seeks to give us "transcendence" takes on a very different meaning when we recognize that we live in a world in which all drugs that can facilitate human transcendence have been outlawed by government, everything from the godsend phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin2 3 4 to the erstwhile panacea called opium5, to the deified coca plant of the Peruvians6 7, not to mention, of course, the Soma 8 juice of the Vedic people9 or the psychedelic kykeon at Eleusis10, which some drug pundits believe inspired Plato's views of the afterlife11.

This is the reason why I am so bothered by AI triumphalists. Before we rewire our brains to become one with AI, we should have the right to use the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet -- and the elating and insight-bringing medicines inspired thereby. I don't want an implant for depression from Elon Musk12 -- not until I have been allowed to first see what the myriad of potential psychoactive therapies hold in store for those who use them wisely and for good purposes (notwithstanding our government's superstitious and racist-motivated attempts to portray safe drug use as a contradiction in terms). And yet America even is now outlawing laughing gas 13 , a substance which elates and inspires and which William James himself told us to study in order to learn about the nature of reality14 15.

You are in good company, however, in ignoring this tyrannical context. Even today's science magazines ignore the implications of drug prohibition. That's why Science News and Scientific American still pretend that depression is a hard nut to crack, never acknowledging the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a trice (albeit not in a way that passion-scorning behaviorists and materialists would understand)16.

The result? We literally prefer that people commit suicide 17 than to use "drugs"18 -- and we prefer that they undergo shock therapy rather than to use "drugs."19 My depressed uncle was a victim of this sick mindset, by the way. His materialist shock "treatment" was a blessing only for his care staff, for whom he was henceforth less obstreperous.

You mentioned a guy who said that Science was his God. That sounds like a rash conclusion in a world in which his government has purposefully outlawed all substances that provide human transcendence. That is about the only thing that Schedule I drugs have in common, after all: their ability to inspire and elate -- with the "worst" of them having the potential to inspire entire new religions. Does this guy really think that he has enough data to rule out other kinds of spirituality? or is he not rather brainwashed like almost every other westerner into assuming that drug prohibition is a natural baseline for human societies?

I can understand why you ignore this drug angle, however; because Americans are brainwashed about drugs -- having been shielded for a lifetime from positive reports of drug use -- and so writing openly on the subject no doubt runs the risk of losing your audience.


Best Wishes,
Brian Quass
abolishthedea.com

PS Wise drug use has the potential to make people comfortable in their own skins, appreciative of Mother Nature, etc.20 This fact alone suggests why a tech-centered world is in no hurry to re-legalize psychoactive substances. Big Tech wants a world in which we continually want to "keep up with the Joneses," not one in which we're happy with the simple things in life.

PPS For more on the relevance of drugs to the subject of Big Tech triumphalism, I invite you to see my articles describing the link between drug prohibition and materialism 21.22 23 24 25 26 I hold that it was always a category error to place materialists27 in charge of creating and approving mind and mood medicine in the first place -- and that the proof of that conclusion is that it leads to absurd and inhumane outcomes, a few of which I have hinted at above.

Notes:

1: Tech Agnostic (up)
2: Pihkal 2.0: Finding drugs that work for users rather than for pharmaceutical companies (up)
3: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (up)
4: Scribd.com: PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (up)
5: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
6: Coca and its Therapeutic Application, Third Edition (up)
7: Scribd.com: Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas (up)
8: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay (up)
9: How the Drug War Outlaws Religion (up)
10: The road to Eleusis: unveiling the secret of the mysteries (up)
11: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
12: This is your brain on Neuralink (up)
13: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide (up)
14: Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas (up)
15: Scribd.com: The Varieties of Religious Experience (up)
16: Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no war on drugs (up)
17: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use (up)
18: Suicide and the Drug War (up)
19: Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War (up)
20: "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul" -- French philosopher Jean de La Bruyère, as quoted by Edgar Allan Poe in "Man of the Crowd" (up)
21: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors (up)
22: Husserl and Drugs: how materialist psychology blinds us to common sense about godsend medicine (up)
23: How materialists turned me into a patient for life (up)
24: Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs (up)
25: The Poorly Hidden Materialist Agenda at Scientific American (up)
26: Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk (up)
27: When I use the term "materialism" as a reproach, I am thinking about reductive materialism, or what Eugene Seaich described as pseudo-materialism. This is the materialism that seeks proof of therapeutic efficacy of psychoactive drugs at the molecular level while paying decidedly short shrift to the evidence right before our very eyes. It is this kind of materialism that allows materialists like Dr. Robert Glatter to question whether laughing gas could help the depressed. He is not impressed by the fact that laughing gas makes people laugh, nor that the anticipation of such laughter can have positive health effects in and of itself. He wants to know if laughing gas can be proven to "really" work, at some molecular, atomic or genetic level. In this way, scientists today help normalize drug prohibition, by pretending that the DEA is somehow right when they say that time-honored medicines have no positive uses whatsoever: for they have not yet shown up under a microscope. In other words, this complicity is collaboration in a BIG LIE. (up)







Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war.

Antidepressants might be fine in a world where drugs were legal. Then it would actually be possible to get off them by using drugs that have inspired entire religions. In the age of prohibition, however, an antidepressant prescription is usually a life sentence.

It is folly to put bureaucrats in charge of second-guessing drug prescriptions: what such bureaucrats are really doing is second-guessing the various philosophies of life which are presupposed by the way we use psychoactive drugs.

This pretend concern for the safety of young drug users is bizarre in a country that does not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.

In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed. Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.

The Partnership for a Drug Free America should be put on trial for having blatantly lied to Americans in the 1980s about drugs, and using our taxpayer money to do so!

After watching my mother suffer because of the drug war, I hate to hear people tell me that the problem is drugs. WRONG! That's a western colonialist viewpoint. God loved his creation (see Genesis). He did not make trash. We need to use entheogenic medicines wisely.

There are endless drugs that could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for drug warriors to understand).

M. Pollan says "not so fast" when it comes to drug re-legalization. I say FAST? I've gone a whole lifetime w/o access to Mother Nature's plants. How can a botanist approve of that? Answer: By ignoring all legalization stakeholders except for the kids whom we refuse to educate.

America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.


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






Notes on Artificial Paradises by Mike Jay
Discussion Questions for Studying Drug Prohibition in Schools and Universities


Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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