more obvious uses for the substances that Americans love to hate
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
July 29, 2025
Hercules had it easy. Cleaning the Augean stables may not have been a cakewalk, and it's no doubt difficult for even the strongest of men to kill a man-eating bird or a triple-headed dog. But if King Eurystheus had REALLY wanted to play hardball with the Greco-Roman hero in response to his god-inspired murder of Megara and her kids, he would have tasked the hero with transferring a database-driven website from one hosting platform to another. Now THAT is a challenge! I know this all too well, for that is the Herculean labor over which I myself have been slaving over the last week and which I have found to require the firing of every single available neuron in my brain, including many which I fear have grown dusty over the years with non-use.
This, of course, has everything to do with drug prohibition, insofar as anti-scientific and racist politicians have outlawed all the medicines that could have helped me to improve my brain power and so to handle this host-switching task with relative ease, that is, both calmly and in an organized manner. This is the evil of the Drug War: it allows these self-interested demagogues called "Drug Warriors" to dictate the limits of my mental power -- all in the name of protecting white American young people from so-called "drugs," the same young people whom America refuses on principle to educate about safe use. What kind of moronic principle is that?!
It is amazing to me that Americans do not see this for the anti-scientific evil that it is. Both common sense and a scientific mindset tell us that a drug that can increase mental focus has all manner of beneficial uses, especially when we actually teach how to use them wisely -- and yet the Drug Warrior tells us that we all must go without godsend benefits from drugs -- merely because the drugs could, in theory, be misused by a white American young person, whom we refuse to educate about safe use.
This is paleolithic nonsense, a mindset that is inherently racist and xenophobic. Americans have yet to understand that saying things like "Fentanyl 1 kills" is philosophically identical to shouting "Fire bad!" Those who utter such inane bromides are counseling us to fear dangerous substances rather than to learn to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of human beings. This is superstitious fearmongering.
We are surrounded by all sorts of possible godsend medicines for achieving mental focus -- not just cocaine 23 and Ritalin but drugs like Harmaline and the kinds of phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. And yet we are not allowed to use any of them! This is an outrageous state of affairs, especially given the astonishing fact that the vast majority of Americans have no problem with this hateful status quo whatsoever. How depressing is THAT?! They fail to realize that this status quo represents nothing less than the outlawing of human progress. Let me repeat: drug prohibition is the outlawing of human progress.
We will only leave this Prehistoric mindset behind when we start responding to the downsides of drug use in the way that we now respond to the downsides of liquor consumption: calmly, and with an eye toward educating people rather than arresting them!
Drugs that activate the mind's neural networks have prima facie potential in the fight against dementia and yet Drug Warriors show by their actions that they prefer dementia to the use of drugs -- that they prefer suicide 4 to the use of drugs, that they prefer brain-damaging shock therapy to the use of drugs. This is why we have make-believe healthcare in the United States. This is why we have entire make-believe libraries these days, full of books whose authors have dutifully ignored drug prohibition. These authors completely ignore what drug use could tell us about the topics which they pretend to cover so thoroughly -- for after a century of politically inspired propaganda, Americans now consider drug prohibition to be a natural baseline from which to research and study the world around us.
Switching web hosts would not have been a Herculean task if I had lived in a world wherein individuals like myself had sovereignty over their own mental and emotional states. In such a world, I would be able to wisely use substances for the purposes of focusing my mind in the times and circumstances where such focus was beneficial for me. In the absence of those time-honored freedoms, however -- that is, in the age of the unprecedented, superstitious and racist war on mind medicine -- I can only envy Hercules for having gotten off so easily when it comes to his appointed tasks. Capturing the Cretan Bull may have had its challenges and it no doubt takes a real diplomat to steal a girdle worn by the Queen of the Amazons -- but just you try focusing laser-like on creating successful PHP code when your government has outlawed every possible substance in the world that might help you to do so. Now, that is a challenge worthy of Hercules himself.
Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!
If the depressed patient laughs, that means nothing. Materialists have to see results under a microscopic or they will never sign off on a therapy.
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
Most prohibitionists think that they merely have to use the word "drugs" to win an argument. Like: "Oh, so you're in favor of DRUGS then, are you?" You can just see them sneering as they type. That's because the word "drugs" is like the word "scab": it's a loaded political term.
Big pharma drugs are designed to be hard to get off. Doctors write glowingly of "beta blockers" for anxiety, for instance, but ignore that fact that such drugs are hard -- and even dangerous -- to get off. We have outlawed all sorts of less dependence-causing alternatives.
All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.
In his treatise on laws, Cicero reported that the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries gave the participants "not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope."
LA Police Chief Daryl Gates said drug users should be summarily executed. William Bennett said drug dealers should be beheaded. These are the attitudes that the drug war inculcates. This racist and brutal ideology must be wiped out.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
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!
Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!
