an open letter to Professor Steven Gimbel of Gettysburg College
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 21, 2020
Dear Professor Gimbel,
I'm enjoying your course on Formal Logic. I graduated as a philosophy major back in 1989, so the beginning lectures have been a nice refresher and I'm looking forward to improving my analytic skills as the course continues.
I did want to say something, however, regarding your criticism of the argument that compared alcohol to heroin.
I believe that, in analyzing the reasonableness of premises, we have to be mindful not only of our personal prejudices but of the mindset of our culture. We live in a drug-war culture in which we suppress all talk of positive effects of illegal substances. Thus we have rewritten history so that there's no mention of Benjamin Franklin using opium, or Sigmund Freud using cocaine , or Francis Crick using psychedelics. In our cop shows and movies , all such drugs are used only by 'scumbags.' Meanwhile, a drug like alcohol is advertised 24 hours a day in positive images spread by TV, radio, print and the Internet. So personally, I do not think that Americans are in a position to objectively compare alcohol, say, to heroin (or to any other illegal substance), without first investigating how the culture has shaped their views of the substances in question.
Should we fail to do so (should we place a naïve trust in our own socially-determined viewpoints on these issues) we run the risk of accepting drug-related premises on the basis of a fallacy: namely, the fallacy that 'Everyone knows that...' (for instance, 'Everyone knows that alcohol isn't THAT bad...') when what 'everyone knows' has been determined by Big Liquor marketing combined with a century-old anti-drug campaign full of lies (such as 'drugs fry the brain'1) and rewritten history, in which the positive use of currently criminalized substances disappears from religions, cults and cultures of the past.
Even the safety of coffee, which we take for granted in the US (and which I'm drinking right now, in a way because I'm literally ADDICTED to my 'morning cup'), was a view inculcated in us through an intense lobbying and PR campaign by the coffee industry, which was determined not to have its coffee beans outlawed as Drug War hysteria reached a fever pitch in the 1980s (the decade in which the DEA marched onto Monticello 2 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants - thus, in my view, violating the natural law upon which Jefferson founded this country). And so advertisements turned coffee into an innocent non-drug in the minds of Americans and the west in general.
Meanwhile Americans of all social classes and education levels take the 'frying pan' ad as gospel truth. That's the infamous 1980s ad from the Partnership for a Drug Free America 3 which claims that substances fry the brain once they have been criminalized by politicians. The facts, however, are almost the opposite: say what you will about drugs like cocaine , opium, and morphine , but they don't fry the brain. Freud used cocaine to increase his mental power and endurance, not to fry his brain. Benjamin Franklin certainly wasn't frying his brain by using opium. morphine can produce an almost surreal mental clarity (as can be seen by Edgar Allan Poe's descriptions of the drug's effect in 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains'). Indeed, one of the founders of the Johns Hopkins medical school, Dr. William Stewart Halsted, was a lifelong user of morphine . Amphetamines are so far from frying the brain that the Air Force has required pilots to use them prior to vital missions.
What Americans 'know' about drugs is a very fraught topic. Psychiatrist Julie Holland has found that many SSRIs are harder to quit than heroin for long-term users (because the former drugs muck about with brain chemistry, such that it may take months or years - if ever - for a former user to regain a pre-drug neurochemical baseline). My own psychiatrist told me not to bother trying to get off Effexor 4 since a recent study by the NIH shows it has a 95% recidivism rate after three years of non-use.* Meanwhile, one in four American women are currently addicted to Big Pharma meds - one in four -- and yet America does not even consider this to be a problem. To the contrary, influential doctors still appear on shows like Oprah (under the pay of Big Pharma ) to remind Americans to 'take their meds' (and now Big Pharma is even going after the toddler market under the guise of 'nipping ADHD in the bud'). So even the seemingly knock-out argument against heroin - that it is addictive - is a shortcoming that can only be hypocritically urged against that drug, at least in a drug-war culture.
For these reasons, I would personally suggest that you avoid using drug-related premises in your examples of argumentation, unless your purpose in doing so is to highlight the role of culture and propaganda in biasing us as to what is reasonable to believe when it comes to 'drugs.'
Best Wishes.
PS I personally believe that the Drug War is the philosophical problem par excellence. That's why I created my website (abolishthedea.com) a year ago to start publishing my own essays on this topic. I do this in part because I consider myself to be a victim of the Drug War, since its criminalization of therapeutic godsends from Mother Nature has shunted me off onto the highly addictive nostrums of Big Pharma .
FOOTNOTE added MAY 23 2022 *The psychiatrist stopped working at the center in question shortly after this incident. I have no doubt that he was fired for being honest with me about psychiatric medicine. His superiors must have deduced that he was being honest given the complaints that I lodged about the addictive nature of psychoactive medicine shortly after my last visit with him. This illustrates the religious and supernatural power of the politically created boogieman called 'drugs' in American society. It is a modern taboo. The less one talks honestly about the subject, the better, if one values their job and their professional reputation.
AFTERTHOUGHTS January 13, 2022:
Heroin Problem: Solved
We could solve the heroin problem overnight once we remove the ideological Christian Science blinders of the Drug War. Here's what we do: Make quality heroin easily available to heroin users at a reasonable price, just as highly addictive Big Pharma pills are currently made easily available to Big Pharma addicts. Those satisfied with their life may keep using heroin just as Big Pharma patients keep using Big Pharma meds. Those who are unhappy with their heroin use can be treated by psychologically savvy empathic individuals, who will use a variety of plant medicines -- coca, opium, shrooms, etc. -- to help the dissatisfied heroin habitue gradually change their drug of choice to meds that they find it more easy to live with, or to complete abstinence if they so desire. In this treatment, the therapist does not believe that the 'patient' has to feel like crap in order to be cured.
The accepted 'treatment' for heroin addiction, on the other hand, is more like Christian Science punishment for heroin addiction. Cold turkey. Charge $3,000 for a cot and keep the patient there for a week. It's a religious cure, based on the Christian Science assumption that the good life is a life without medicine. It's a religion that values suffering over giving the 'patient' a real life and helping them achieve self-actualization.
APRIL 30, 2022 In writing on this topic, of course, one has to constantly try to anticipate all the ways in which one is going to be misunderstood. One's reader, like almost everyone in the world today, has been raised on a steady diet of drug-war propaganda. In grade-school we are told to say no to psychoactive medicine and surrounded by signs reading 'drug-free' zone -- basically sending the message that Mary Baker Eddy is in control of our children's schooling. Eddy, of course, is the founder of the Christian Science religion which tells us to say no to drugs. Then in our teenage years, we grow accustomed to cop shows in which those who use illegal substances are 'scumbags' and 'filth.' We then watch movies 56 in which those who dare to sell Mother Nature's plant medicine are shot at point-blank range by self-righteous cigarette-smoking DEA agents and hung from meathooks in their Speedos in order to elicit confessions (see 'Running with the Devil'). Then when we enter the workforce, we are required to submit to the humiliation of drug testing 7 , in which the amoral lab techs are not searching for impairment but rather for the least trace of psychoactive medicines of which politicians disapprove -- and all this to get a minimum wage job at Lowe's, Home Depot or Burger King.
Of course, all this time we've been reading the horror stories about juveniles misusing substances -- by reporters who never bother to point out that mind-altering substances have inspired entire religions, given Plato his view of the afterlife, and inspired the stories of such modern writers as Lovecraft, Poe, HG Wells, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen and Alexandre Dumas. But the Drug War party line only lets us hear about abuse, abuse, abuse, when it comes to the politically defined category of 'drugs,' which of course does not include the most deadly drugs of all (namely, alcohol and tobacco) nor the drugs to which 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent for life: namely Big Pharma antidepressants 8.
But once we throw out this noxious brew of lies and half-truths in which we have all been steeped since birth, we see a world of possibility when it comes, not simply to the pharmacological treatment of mood disorders, but more ambitiously to the psychological improvement of the 'normal' human mind. This issue is coming to the fore now as tech companies seek employees who are truly on the ball -- companies that do not particularly care what substances their employees may have consumed in order to evince that desired quality.
To illustrate the wonderful therapeutic vistas that await us once we jettison the heavy backpack of fear and loathing with which Drug Warriors have loaded us westerners down since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, let's think in broad terms for a moment. There are generally two major sensibilities toward psychoactive substances in the world: the attitude of the Drug Warrior and the attitude of the shaman. The Drug Warrior declares all psychoactive drugs bad a priori (with a few glaringly hypocritical exceptions, of course), whereas the shaman wants to therapeutically employ any and all substances that conduce to a better mental life for the client -- as 'better' is defined by that client.
I hold that the latter choice is the one that is most becoming for democracies that value freedom, human improvement and the rights guaranteed by natural law.
For once we restore natural law (which gives us the right to what Locke called the use of the land 'and all that lies therein') and affirm the principle of 'my consciousness, my choice,' then the world is our collective oyster when it comes to mental improvement. Moreover, a society governed by such principles would get rid of the very concept of mental patient as anyone seeking mental improvement would seek out a shaman (which we define here as a 'pharmacologically savvy empath'), whether this so-called 'patient' were afflicted by what our materialist medicine calls OCD or passive-aggressive behavior or SAD syndrome -- or any of the countless other labels that capitalist science has foisted upon behavior in order to channel it efficiently in the direction of profit-making treatment protocols.
Based on our issues, our priorities, and our philosophy of life, the shaman might prescribe a vast array of therapies. Confused patient A-- or rather confused CLIENT A-- might require what we might call simple 'talk therapy,' whereas deeply depressed client B might respond to talk therapy aided by the honest gregariousness produced by MDMA or psilocybin, etc., whereas patient C might seek a weekly glimpse of self-transcendence through the weekend use of a variety of medicines, from morphine 9 to laudanum to opium to cocaine to mushrooms, etc. Of course, the average reader nearly faints like a 1920's drama queen upon merely hearing such a prescription, but that's only because the Drug War has taught us to fear the drugs in question, not to use them as wisely as possible for human benefit. Once we get over this carefully cultivated knee-jerk fear of ours, we realize that all of these demonized substances can be used non-addictively, especially in a once-weekly therapy that uses a variety of medicines -- in other words a protocol that is specifically created to avoid addiction.
Moreover, modern medicine can only be hypocritically dismissive of addiction in a world in which 1 in 4 women are chemically dependent upon Big Pharma meds for a lifetime.
This state of affairs begs the question: if the cost of legal therapy is the lifelong reliance on a drug, or set of drugs, then why can't the patient in question choose the drug upon which they will be reliant for life? Had I been given the choice -- me, a 40-year veteran of the psychiatric pill mill -- I would never in a million years have chosen Effexor, this mind-numbing drug that has led to anhedonia, but rather would have gladly opted for a prescription of 'Coca Wine, to be used as needed.' I want to be awake to life (as did coca-loving HG Wells and Jules Verne), not sleeping through it. And if that resulted in 'addiction,' so be it. Just call me an habitue and keep the coca wine coming (and I'll let you disapproving Drug Warriors keep smoking your stinky cigars, drinking booze10, and taking liberal doses of Xanax). Or better yet, let me use opium 'as needed' for life. That's what Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin did, before it became de rigueur to dismiss such users as 'scumbags.' Why opium? Because those gents and I value the metaphorical and creativity-sparking dreams that opium provides. Incidentally, the contents of those dreams could provide fertile fodder for psychoanalytic discussion -- once we get past the politically incorrect fact that those dreams were inspired by what the Drug Warrior can only see as a dirty evil drug.
But I'd better quit here, as this 'editorial note' of mine is already far longer than the post which inspired it. I trust that I have convinced at least one former member of the Drug War Cult (you, perhaps?) that a brave new world of POSITIVE drug use awaits us once we discard the Chicken Little 'fear first' doctrine of the Drug Warrior and start learning how to use any and all psychoactive substances as safely as possible for the benefit of humans -- and humanity.
Speaking of humanity, we could actually save it from self-destruction with drugs -- like Ecstasy, for instance, which brought peace, love and understanding to the British dance floor in the 1990s (until Drug Warriors predictably shut it down, since they value the Drug War more than peace, love and understanding). Just require all haters to be therapeutically treated with love drugs like E (aka MDMA ) -- and require that all heads of state be 'on' such a drug when they meet with their adversaries.
To paraphrase Gordon Ramsay: 'Nuclear proliferation: sorted.'
Oh, one tiny footnote and then I'm outta here:
Of course, 'addiction' can be technically defined in a way to differentiate it from 'chemical dependence,' but in practice the term 'addict' is a value-laden term for 'habitue.' Moreover, the negative experiences of addiction -- in contradistinction to habituation -- are almost always a result of drug policy, and not of drug use itself, as when a user dies from tainted supply or goes through hard withdrawal symptoms due to a lack of supply, both of which circumstances are the result of prohibition, not of drug use itself.
Author's Follow-up: September 22, 2022
The coca leaf could cheer up the depressed and help those who want to get off of another substance. MDMA 11 and nitrous oxide would greatly help as well. But Drug Warriors are anti-patient and pro-medical establishment. They want to keep Americans dependent on Big Pharma 's dependence-causing meds. They don't care about the depressed or addicted. That's why I've gone a lifetime now without being allowed to access the plants that grow at my feet, tho' psychiatry was more than happy to addict me to Big Pharma meds, so that I can pay Wall Street fatcats a monthly dividend in the form of ridiculously expensive and worse-than-ineffective 'meds.' The coca leaf is a godsend valued greatly by HG Wells, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, and countless other 19th-century geniuses. America outlaws it by demonizing it, conflating it with the alkaloid cocaine , which is a different drug altogether, all so that we can keep boots on the ground in South America and facilitate the killing of minorities in inner cities -- 797 in Chicago alone in 2021. And if Trump gets elected, he'll start executing the very folks that he's screwing with his anti-scientific demonization of godsend medicines that have inspired entire religions.
Author's Follow-up: March 27, 2025
Since last updating this page, I have become familiar with two books whose combined message makes the Drug War more intolerable than ever:
The first is the Rig Veda of Vedic times12. It contains numerous references to Soma, 13 the psychoactive drug which inspired the creation of the Hindu religion. How? By vouchsafing ecstasy and insight to the user.
The second book is "Pihkal" from modern times14. This latter book contains qualitative reports of those who used phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin.
These are two books written thousands of years apart, and yet both with the same ultimate message: namely, that psychoactive substances can inspire ecstasy and insight.
Here is a quote from the Rig Veda:
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture."
Here is a quote from "Pihkal":
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."
In some ways, of course, this is a digression. The original topic of this essay was "heroin versus alcohol," and the biases that westerners have in attempting to compare such things. But these additional considerations at least show how fraught such topics are and hence how wrong it is for us to draw knee-jerk conclusions about the benefits or lack thereof of given substances.
The fallacy of those who make such universal judgments about drugs is the fallacy that HG Wells pointed out in discussing eugenics: namely, the fallacy of judging people and things outside of all context. Health is established by an interaction and balance of a vast array of factors -- some biochemical and some otherwise. You cannot simply discuss one potential input for health, such as "drugs" or "genetics," and decide that it is good or bad in itself. Life does not work that way. A drug that can be used wisely and for good purposes by one person can become a nightmare for another person. This has nothing to do with the drug per se but with the specific situation of the user -- the vast concatenation of psychological and biophysical inputs whose specific interaction results in his or her overall health or lack thereof.
The Drug Warrior throws out all variables except drug use and pretends to decide whether a given drug is good or bad in itself.
Well, guess what? No substance is good or bad in itself -- it all depends on circumstances -- the circumstances that the Drug War makes a habit of completely ignoring.
Discussion Topics
May 23, 2025
Attention Teachers and Professors: Brian is not writing these essays for his health. (Well, in a way he is, actually, but that's not important now.) His goal is to get the world thinking about the anti-democratic and anti-scientific idiocy of the War on Drugs. You can stimulate your students' brainwashed grey matter on this topic by having them read the above essay and then discuss the following questions as a group!
How has America rewritten history when it comes to beneficial drug use?
How does Professor Gimbel himself (ironically enough) commit the 'everyone knows that' fallacy?
Brian says, "What Americans 'know' about drugs is a very fraught topic." Explain.
How does society use censorship and propaganda to convince us to hate drugs rather than to understand them?
What are the two general approaches to drug use in the world? (hint: see Editor's note above)
Discuss how empathogenic medicines could be used strategically to help bring the world together in peace.
Author's Follow-up:
October 01, 2025
Lee Robins performed a study of American soldiers who had regularly used heroin while in Vietnam. This was 34% of those veterans, by the way. His study revealed that only 5% required help getting off the drug after returning to the States15. Compare this to the Big Pharma 1617 antidepressant known as Venlafaxine (brand name Effexor). My own psychiatrist told me that the drug has a 95% recidivism rate. Yes, 95% of long-term users find it impossible to get off Venlafaxine. And I speak from experience. I tried to get off this drug myself. I thought I was succeeding at first. After a year, I seemed to be off it for good. But soon I discovered that my depression was much worse than it had ever been before using Effexor. And yet I still tried to keep off the drug, because I was tired of being a ward of the healthcare state.
I finally went back on the drug, not because of depression alone, but because I found that I was no longer able to THINK STRAIGHT. Venlafaxine had screwed up my brain chemistry to the point that I now needed the drug merely to THINK STRAIGHT! Otherwise, I found myself in a brain fog any time I tried to exercise my intellect!!!!
I mention these details to reveal how thoroughly confused Americans are about drugs. Americans do not know anything about drugs -- they merely have been taught how to feel about certain drugs that racist politicians demonize for strategic reasons.
And so Americans are convinced that heroin is the drug from hell -- while they yet feel that it is the medical duty of the depressed to take their antidepressants.
And so we champion drugs that cause weight gain, lower libido, and ultimately scramble the brain -- meanwhile throwing people in jail for using substances whose statistical downsides are immensely lest drastic.
Freud had the right idea: he knew that cocaine could be used wisely by most people as a cure for depression, not because of its precise chemical action (for which the behaviorists are forever searching thanks to their purblind dogmatism) but merely because of the euphoria that the drug created, which he found to be inseparable from the drug's healing power.
"My impression has been that the use of cocaine 1819 over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine20
This is the reason why any drug is an antidepressant provided only that it inspires and elates. But then the Drug War is all about outlawing all substances that inspire and elate. Indeed, the Vedic and hence the Hindu religion would not exist today had the Drug War been in effect in the Punjab in 1500 BCE, for then the rishis would never have been allowed to partake of the Soma 21 juice.
And yet the very word "heroin" is used as a kneejerk reproach in modern society, while antidepressants are actively promoted.
And why? All because America never learned its lesson from liquor prohibition. We learned no lesson at all from that failed experiment, or rather we learned the wrong lesson. When we discovered that prohibition created immense violence, we did not reject the policy of prohibition; instead, our racist politicians took advantage of the violence-causing nature of prohibition to destroy minority communities around the world by passing drug laws to incentivize dealing in poor inner cities.
This is why I feel obligated to "pounce" on any throwaway lines that serve to both betray and promote a brainwashed attitude toward psychoactive substances.
Prohibition is the evil, not drugs. In fact, drug prohibition is a genocidal policy. It has resulted in hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths in America since Nixon launched his Drug War in 197122.
Moreover, we should remember why people are using drugs like heroin and Fentanyl in the first place. It is because we outlawed the peaceable smoking of opium at home based on our country's fear and hatred of the Chinese! American young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal in America: it took drug prohibition to accomplish that: by refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate product as to quantity and quality, and refusing to allow for drug choice.
Despite the Drug Warrior's ongoing attempts to rewrite history to conform with modern prejudices, the drug called opium was considered the closest thing to a panacea by the medical doctors of yore, including Avicenna, Paracelsus and Galen. It was the default go-to drug in the past, either by itself or in combination. The nightly smoking of an opium pipe compares favorably to the nightly drinking of liquor. As William Brereton points out in The Truth about Opium2324, the Chinese opium smoker lived a long, productive life and, unlike his beer-swilling counterparts in Great Britain, did not engage in wife beating while on his drug of choice.
And so our attempts to "save" people from drugs has backfired thanks to the Iron Law of Prohibition, which tells us that the outlawing of one drug necessarily leads to the creation and sale of more dangerous and potent black-market drugs to take its place.
Liquor prohibition ended over 90 years ago now. It is long past time that America learned a lesson from that disaster: namely, that prohibition kills25. Sadly, many modern prohibitionists are promoting prohibition for that very reason!
The Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. It is therefore a crime against religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate.
Prohibition is a crime against religious freedom.
William James found religious experience in substance use. See his discussion of what he calls "the anesthetic revelation" in his book entitled "The Varieties of Religious Experience."
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.
The Drug War violates religious freedom by putting bureaucrats in charge of deciding if a religion is 'sincere' or not. That is so absurd that one does not know whether to laugh or cry. No one in government is capable of determining whether the inner states that I achieve with psychoactive medicine are religious or not. This is why Milton Friedman was so wrong when he said in 1972 that there are good people on both sides of the drug war debate. WRONG! There are those who are more than ready to take away my religious liberty and those who are not. If the former wish to be called 'good,' they will first need a refresher course in American democracy and religious freedom. They need to renounce their Christian Science theocracy and let folks like myself worship using the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions in the past. Until they do that, do not expect me to praise the very people who have launched an inquisition against my form of experiencing the divine.
There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
Drug Warriors should be legally banned from watching or reading Sherlock Holmes stories, since in their world, it is a crime for such people as Sherlock Holmes to exist, i.e., people who use medicines to improve their mind and mood.
But that's the whole problem with Robert Whitaker's otherwise wonderful critique of Big Pharma. Like almost all non-fiction authors today, he reckons without the drug war, which gave Big Pharma a monopoly in the first place.
Getting off some drugs could actually be fun and instructive, by using a variety of other drugs to keep one's mind off the withdrawal process. But America believes that getting off a drug should be a big moral battle.
America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.
Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.
Saying "Fentanyl kills" is philosophically equivalent to saying "Fire bad!" Both statements are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as safely as possible for human benefit.
Guess who's in charge of protecting us from AI? Chuck Schumer! The same guy who protected us from drugs -- by turning America into a prison camp full of minorities and so handing two presidential elections to Donald Trump.
If I beat my depression by smoking opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag subject to immediate arrest. But if I do NOT "take my meds" every day of my life, I am a bad patient.
The sick thing is that the DEA is still saying that psilocybin has no medical uses and is addictive. They should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for using such lies to keep people from using the gifts of Mother Nature.
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
Lee Robins performed a study of American soldiers who had regularly used heroin while in Vietnam. This was 34% of those veterans, by the way. His study revealed that only 5% required help getting off the drug after returning to the States15. Compare this to the Big Pharma 16 17 antidepressant known as Venlafaxine (brand name Effexor). My own psychiatrist told me that the drug has a 95% recidivism rate. Yes, 95% of long-term users find it impossible to get off Venlafaxine. And I speak from experience. I tried to get off this drug myself. I thought I was succeeding at first. After a year, I seemed to be off it for good. But soon I discovered that my depression was much worse than it had ever been before using Effexor. And yet I still tried to keep off the drug, because I was tired of being a ward of the healthcare state. 
Drug Warriors should be legally banned from watching or reading Sherlock Holmes stories, since in their world, it is a crime for such people as Sherlock Holmes to exist, i.e., people who use medicines to improve their mind and mood.
