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How the Drug War is a War on Creativity

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 23, 2022



Lovecraft's stories are full of opiate imagery. In Celaphais, for instance, his beleaguered and homeless protagonist wanders through 'the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams.' Hear that, Drug Warriors? Many-coloured dreams? This is why your War on Drugs is a war on creativity, because it outlaws the natural plant medicines that can bring many-coloured dreams, the influence of which can inspire great literature, at least in the minds of talented authors who are prepared to profit from such visions.


Just as opium use clearly inspired Lovecraft, Lewis Carroll must have known a thing or two about the effects of psychoactive mushroom consumption when he wrote 'Alice in Wonderland.' And both HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their best stories after taking generous swigs from a bottle of 'coca wine.' And don't even get me started on Edgar Allan Poe. Suffice it to say that he showed how even the hated morphine can bring wonderful, almost surreal visions to an ardent naturalist (see 'Tale of the Ragged Mountains') -- tho' America seems at least a century away from being able to admit this inconvenient truth to its drug-hating self, namely that the ideologically despised morphine, used wisely, can deeply increase our ability to appreciate the natural world around us.

?266?


The fact that the latter drugs can be dangerous is no excuse to outlaw them, least of all in a country in which 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent on Big Pharma meds for a lifetime. Besides, the inspirational 'drugs' that we're talking about here derive from plants, which cannot be justifiably criminalized in the first place, at least if America is to maintain its legacy of natural law upon which the citizen's most basic rights are founded, like the right to what John Locke himself called 'the use of the land and all that lies therein.' (Just ask Jefferson, who was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants, in violation of everything that he stood for as a Founding Father.)


August 1, 2022



It never seems to have occurred to westerners that potentially addictive drugs can be used non-addictively. Through a properly scheduled dose therapy, folks can find pharmacologically aided self-transcendence without becoming addicted. Of course, Americans have been browbeaten from birth to believe that this is impossible, thanks to propaganda in the form of teddy bears from DART and hypocritically defined 'drug-free zones' -- and the fact that they never, but never, hear anything about POSITIVE drug use, for the simple reason that the Office of National Drug Control Policy has dictated that no positive uses of 'drugs' can ever be considered.

In a world where substances are legal again and where knowledge, not fear, is encouraged, folks would know how to avoid addictions -- and where to go whenever they begin developing a habit that they dislike. For in such a free world, a pharmacologically savvy empath would be able to steer him or her towards a substance use with which they can live. But the Drug War State does not want rational use. They want to ensure, through public policy, that drugs end up being just as dangerous as propaganda says they should be. And how do they accomplish this? By demonizing drugs rather than teaching about them.

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."

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  • Case Studies in Wise Drug Use
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  • Declaration of Independence from the War on Drugs
  • Drug Use as Self-Medication
  • Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy
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  • Heroin versus Alcohol
  • How Cocaine could have helped me
  • How drug prohibition destroys the lives of the depressed
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  • 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
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  • How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the War on Drugs
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  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG
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  • 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





  • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"

    Ug! Fire bad! There were 4,731 fire-related deaths in America in 2023. Learn more at the Partnership for a Death Free America.

    If our loved ones should experience severe depression and visit an emergency room for treatment, they will be started on a regime of dependence-causing Big Pharma drugs. They will not be given any drugs that elate and inspire.

    I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.

    Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.

    In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan says psychedelic legalization would endanger young people. What? Prohibition forces users to decide for themselves which mushrooms are toxic, or to risk buying contaminated product. And that's safe, Michael?

    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.

    There are endless creative ways to ward off addiction if all psychoactive medicines were at our disposal. The use of the drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin could combat the psychological downsides of withdrawal by providing strategic "as-needed" relief.

    It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.

    The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.


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






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    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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