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Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





August 5, 2025



My 94-year-old mother is in a memory care facility, where she often complains to me of having 'knots' in her stomach, which is her way of saying that she is anxious as hell.

Author's follow-up for August 05, 2025

This complaint always depresses me because I know that in a Drug War society, there is absolutely nothing that medical science can (or rather WILL) do for her. Why not? Because the Drug War has outlawed all the psychoactive medicine that might be of help to her in a non-addictive fashion. But it's really worse than that, because the Drug War ideology of substance demonization keeps us from even considering the ways that such medicines might help.

Like all good Americans, the stateside doctors have been indoctrinated since childhood to despise Mother Nature's psychoactive pharmacy. They probably even got a teddy bear from the state police during grade school as their reward for saying no to Mother Nature's godsend medicines. As for Big Pharma, they make their money off of addictive and dependence-causing medications, so they're of no help. To the contrary, the Drug War shunts thousands of women off onto such addictive meds because that's the only legal road that Drug War prohibition leaves open for the relief of such anxiety. That's why the Betty Fords of the world become hooked on Valium, not because drugs are bad per se (as Americans like to think) but because the Drug War has outlawed all but the intentionally addictive kinds of drugs, those for which dependency is not a 'bug' but a feature.

In a world in which scientists were free to work with any medicine that held prima facie promise in ameliorating my mother's anxiety, there would be all sorts of anti-anxiety therapies and trials underway in America, first and foremost using drugs like MDMA and psychedelics, in all sorts of regimens, doses, settings, and overall approaches. At the risk of giving drug-hating Americans a stroke, the approaches could even include the non-addictive use of coca and opium. For drug-war propaganda notwithstanding, drugs like coca and opium can be used non-addictively. That surely comes as such a shock to brainwashed Drug Warriors that I'd better repeat that sentence in order to let it sink in: drugs like coca and opium can be used non-addictively.

Such therapy sounds impossible to westerners who are used to playing a passive role in their recovery from illness. If they have condition 'A,' they expect to take pill 'B' for a cure and then sit back and let pharmacology do all the heavy lifting. But if we get out of the materialist habit of referring dysphoric emotional states to 'illness,' then we can begin imagining anxiety and depression cures of a shamanic nature in which a pharmacologically savvy 'empath' works with a specific individual to craft a drug-using plan that alleviates anxiety without addicting the 'patient' to the various nostrums thus employed.

The only way that we can do this and begin helping folks like my mother is to abandon the anti-scientific Drug War notion that psychoactive substances can be judged a priori as being good or evil, without regard for precisely how they are used: in what doses, what settings, for what reasons, for which people, etc. etc. To put it another way: pharmacologically clueless politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan should no longer have the last word in deciding what medicines are available for giving my mother peace of mind.

I know this is 'a big ask,' because helping my mom (and future anxious mothers like her) requires not simply the re-legalization of Mother Nature's bounty, it also requires our abandonment of the illness paradigm in which 'patients' are considered to be interchangeable units, each theoretically amenable to the exact same addictive Big Pharma treatment, a treatment in which the patient's one and only job is to swallow pills (and don't get me started on the absurd amount of ineffective pills that Big Pharma has my mother swallowing on a daily basis). Only a shamanic approach (or more precisely, an approach informed by shamanistic holism) can lead us to the individualized therapies that can successfully leverage the vast relegalized pharmacy of Mother Nature for the benefit of the anxious (as well as the depressed, the lonely, etc.).

Until then, we may as well live in the Dark Ages when it comes to treating anxiety in the elderly (or in anyone else for that matter). The Drug War simply forbids us to treat such conditions effectively, the same way that it reduces our treatment for addiction to cold turkey and Narcan. Such shabby and stinting 'non-treatments' give the lie to America's claimed status as a scientific and forward-looking country.

How do Americans live with themselves, knowing that the Drug War that they endorse is allowing for so much unnecessary emotional suffering in the world, if not for themselves, then for their friends and loved ones? I suspect that it has something to do with our Puritan heritage which tells us that there is a moral value in suffering, and so at some fundamental religious level, we would rather see our loved ones suffer than to see them achieving peace of mind using the kinds of medicines that our forebears have always associated with witchcraft and 'savages.' But that's a subject for another essay.



Author's Follow-up:

August 05, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up







In the age of the Drug War, the Hippocratic Oath has become "First, do no good." Why? Because our political, moral and materialist prejudices compel us to focus exclusively on the potential downsides of drugs, and never on their obvious benefits -- like the fact that mind and mood medicines have inspired entire religions!

Is it just me? Am I the only one who looks at the needless suffering of humanity -- as in the case of my own mother -- and am outraged that we Americans actually prefer this suffering to drug use?

Consider the following reports of positive drug use -- bearing in mind that scientists are dogmatically and politically incapable of recognizing any of the following benefits AS benefits!

"The world was as if newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity, which persisted for the entire day."1


"To breathe the gas [nitrous oxide] was, simply and literally, inspiration." 2


"Intense intellectual stimulation, one that inspired the scribbling of some 14 pages of handwritten notes."3


"The afterglow was benign and rich in empathy for everything. "4


"I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world."5


Hello? My mother was not from Mars. She could have benefited from feeling good, just like anybody else. All drugs that inspire and elate have obvious uses for treating psychological distress -- not just thanks to materialist effects but because of holistic effects as well: like the fact that feeling good has obvious knock-on benefits -- or benefits that used to be obvious until Americans insisted on judging drug efficacy only under the lens of a microscope.

And let's not forget that the Drug Warrior first went after a drug that Avicenna and Paracelsus considered to be a panacea: namely, opium. If opium were legal, then much of the nostrums peddled by drug stores would be irrelevant today. (No wonder the Drug War has staying power!)

And yet, in the words of 19th-century physician Thomas Sydenham:

"Among the remedies which it has pleased the Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium."6


And yet my Mom could receive no relief from that time-honored godsend. Why not? Because materialists, moralists, racists and xenophobic fearmongers have convinced the world that powerful drugs can only be abused. What willful know-nothing obscurantism -- obscurantism with a body count! What a power grab by government, denying us the right to tend to our own healthcare! What a perfect crime, to which the western world has been blinded by Drug War propaganda, chiefly in the form of the censorship of all positive uses for drugs.


SUMMARY

It has become clear over the last 50 years that there are a potentially endless list of drugs that could provide benefits of the kind reported above -- in plants, in fungi, on animal skins, and in laboratories where we synthesize phenethylamines and beta-carbolines in response to hints provided by Mother Nature. There is thus an ever-growing gap between common sense and the rabid drug demonization of the Drug Warrior. Surely, at some point, even the slow kid in the room is going to wake up to the fact that we are literally outlawing "everything that works" for anxious people like my mother -- to say nothing of those who merely want to reacquire the mental, spiritual and emotional freedom that was their birthright as a human being until racist and xenophobic politicians began strategically outlawing godsends by associating their use with the hated "other": read Blacks, Hispanics, the Chinese, and so forth.


I close with an insight from Thomas Szasz in support of the points made above. The following citation is drawn from page 67 of the hardback edition of Szasz's groundbreaking 1992 classic entitled Our Right to Drugs:

"The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs."7






Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths




In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.

This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just their way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.

This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.

How do I know this?

Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.

More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of Drug War propaganda to the true evil that it causes?

This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."

  • Addicted to Addiction
  • Addicted to Ignorance
  • Addiction
  • After the Drug War
  • After the Drug War part 2
  • Another Cry in the Wilderness
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Case Studies in Wise Drug Use
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Declaration of Independence from the War on Drugs
  • Drug Use as Self-Medication
  • Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy
  • Ego Transcendence Made Easy
  • Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
  • Heroin versus Alcohol
  • How Cocaine could have helped me
  • How drug prohibition destroys the lives of the depressed
  • How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine
  • How the Drug War is a War on Creativity
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
  • How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb
  • How the Drug War Punishes the Elderly
  • How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the War on Drugs
  • How to Unite Drug War Opponents of all Ethnicities
  • Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism
  • In Praise of Doctor Feelgood
  • In Praise of Drug Dealers
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy
  • Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion
  • Notes about the Madness of Drug Prohibition
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open Letter to Erowid
  • Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Pihkal 2.0
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism
  • Science is not free in the age of the Drug War
  • Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms
  • Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the War on Drugs
  • Thank God for Erowid
  • Thank God for Soul Quest
  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG
  • The Drug War and Armageddon
  • The Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
  • The Mother of all Western Biases
  • The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • The New Age of Pharmacological Serfdom
  • The Origins of Modern Psychiatry
  • The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs
  • Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane
  • Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs


    • Notes:

    1: Artificial paradises : a drugs reader (up)
    2: Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (up)
    3: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (up)
    4: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (up)
    5: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (up)
    6: Our Right to Drugs: The case for a free market (up)
    7: Our Right to Drugs: The case for a free market (up)







    Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    If NIDA covered all drugs (not just politically ostracized drugs), they'd produce articles like this: "Aspirin continues to kill hundreds." "Penicillin misuse approaching crisis levels." "More bad news about Tylenol and liver damage." "Study revives cancer fears from caffeine."

    In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.

    A law proposed in Colorado in February 2024 would have criminalized positive talk about drugs online. What? The world is on the brink of nuclear war because of hate-driven politics, and I can be arrested for singing the praises of empathogens?

    The proof that psychedelics work has always been extant. We are hoodwinked by scientists who convince us that efficacy has not been "proven." This is materialist denial of the obvious.

    "Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?

    "There has been so much delirious nonsense written about drugs that sane men may well despair of seeing the light." -- Aleister Crowley, from "Essays on Intoxication"

    In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."

    Outlawing drugs is outlawing obvious therapies for Alzheimer's and autism patients, therapies based on common sense and not on the passion-free behaviorism of modern scientists.

    "The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.

    Someday the world will realize that Freud's real achievement was his discovery of the depression-busting power of cocaine.


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






    Attention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propaganda
    Open letter to Kenneth Sewell


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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