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How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 9, 2022



America turns the fate of all supposed 'drug abusers' into a morality tale about the evil of 'drugs' and, by implication, the moral weakness of those who use them. But instead of asking psychologically naive questions like, 'Why did Amy think she needed drugs?' (hint: it's the self-transcendence, stupid), we should be looking in the mirror, asking: 'Why did WE not bother to teach her how to use drugs wisely?' For the villain of this piece is the Drug War itself, a Drug War which 1) limits Amy's available pharmacopeia to the problematic and addictive substances whose sale is incentivized by Drug War prohibition, and 2) discourages the substance-related research that could lead to safe use guidelines for all psychoactive medicines.

Of course, Amy's fate was especially easy for Christian Science America to spin into a Drug War morality tale in which 'drugs' were the bad guy. One of the last songs that Amy sang contained the heretical lyrics: 'He's tried to make me go to rehab, but I won't go, go, go.' And at the Oscars, she was quoted as telling her friend Juliette that, 'This is so boring without drugs.'

When these facts were shown to contestants on Gogglebox in 2014, there was plenty of backhanded sympathy for Amy from the reality-show couch potatoes, with the general consensus being that she had unfortunately caved before the evil temptress known as 'drugs.'

No one ever asked the apparently heretical question: 'What if we had researched all drugs that provided personal transcendence and educated Amy about how to choose among them and use them wisely?'

But Drug Warriors do not think this way because they completely ignore the motivation for drug use, which is self-transcendence. Even if they do recognize the impulse, they insist that self-transcendence must come only from supposedly 'natural' sources, such as church, yoga, meditation, jogging, and the like. (The Drug Warrior might even suggest stoicism as an alternative to drugs, failing to realize that the paragon of that discipline, Marcus Aurelius, was himself a big fan of opium.) But this notion about 'drugs' being unnatural or a 'copout' is a mere Christian Science prejudice and not an ineluctable truth to which all intelligent humans are led upon rational reflection. It's certainly not a 'truth' that would naturally occur to someone who grew up in a botanically rich rainforest.

In point of fact, the mind truly boggles at the plethora of treatment possibilities that would have been open to Amy had she been able to meet with a pharmacologically savvy empath who had unrestricted access to every psychoactive plant in the entire world. Amy might have been led through an emotionally restorative journey on psylocibin to see the world in a new way, been given something to look forward to in the form of weekly cocaine or opium use, or provided with morphine on special mental 'holidays,' whereby she could see the natural world in exquisite detail a la August Bedloe in 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains' by Edgar Allan Poe. She could have had her head screwed back on straight with the strategic use of the drugs which Americans have been taught to scorn.

But such cures run counter to the Christian Science notion that 'drugs' are evil. And so Drug War society could only sit back impotently and watch Amy's decline, as one watches a slow-motion car crash, unable to offer her anything more enticing than pious suggestions that she renounce her desire for self-transcendence and join a 12-step program instead.

How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb

Drug War Ghouls




The Drug War Ghouls get busy any time a well-known figure dies prematurely, especially when the figure in question is a rock star or actor. You can just hear them whispering childishly: "Aww! Were they on any drugs? Were they on any drugs?" The presumption behind such tittering is that drugs are evil and can only lead to death and destruction. Of course, those who hold this viewpoint always forget that the Drug War does everything it can to make such outcomes of drug use a self-fulfilling prophecy by discouraging education about safe use and by ensuring corrupt and uncertain drug supply with their eternal kneejerk prohibition. This is all completely inexcusable. The Drug Warriors cause death. They are the villains. They are the criminals. Take the so-called opiate crisis. Young people were not dying en masse from opioids when such drugs were legal in the United States. It took prohibition to bring that about.

  • Attention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propaganda
  • Childish Drug Warriors
  • Dirty Minded Drug Warriors
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Fentanyl does not kill! Prohibition does!
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
  • How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb
  • How the Drug War killed Leah Betts
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
  • Matthew Perry and the Drug War Ghouls
  • The Lopsided Focus on the Misuse and Abuse of Drugs
  • The Problem is Prohibition, not Fentanyl
  • There are no such things as 'killer drugs'


  • 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."

  • Attention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propaganda
  • Childish Drug Warriors
  • Dirty Minded Drug Warriors
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Fentanyl does not kill! Prohibition does!
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
  • How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb
  • How the Drug War killed Leah Betts
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
  • Matthew Perry and the Drug War Ghouls
  • The Lopsided Focus on the Misuse and Abuse of Drugs
  • The Problem is Prohibition, not Fentanyl
  • There are no such things as 'killer drugs'
  • 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





  • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."

    The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.

    Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.

    We should be encouraging certain drug use by the elderly. Many Indigenous drugs have been shown to grow new neurons and increase neural connectivity -- to refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!

    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.

    Rick Strassman reportedly stopped his DMT trials because some folks had bad experiences at high doses. That is like giving up on aspirin because high doses of NSAIDs can kill.

    AI is like almost every subject under the sun: it takes on a very different and ominous meaning when we view it in light of the modern world's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine.

    I passed a sign that says "Trust Trump." What does that mean? Trust him to crack down on his opposition using the U.S. Army? Or trust him not to do all the anti-American things that he's saying he's going to do.

    Timothy Leary's wife wrote: "We went to Puerto Rico and all we did was take cocaine and read Faust to one another." And there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with that!!! The drug war is all about scaring us and making illegal drug use as dangerous as possible.

    What attracts me about "drug dealers" is that they are NOT interested in prying into my private life. What a relief! With psychiatry, you are probed for pathological behavior on every office visit. You are a child. To the "drug dealer," I am an adult at least.


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






    Top 10 Problems with the Drug War
    Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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