I asked 100 American philosophers what they thought about the Drug War
Every one of them took the fifth
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 9, 2020
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question--for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness." -- William James from "The Varieties of Religious Experience"1
"These gentlemen had seen quite rightly that the only means to be used against my writings, was to secrete them from the public by maintaining profound silence concerning them..." Arthur Schopenhauer from "On the Fourfold Principle of Sufficient Reason2"
I recently sent a 16-page pamphlet to 100 American philosophy professors, urging them to fight back against the philosophical absurdities by which the Drug War has bamboozled Americans into renouncing natural law and embracing the government-mandated religion of Christian Science. I reminded these philosophical giants how this Drug War demonizes all psychoactive products that are not created by Big Pharma , meanwhile imprisoning a record number of minorities and creating civil wars overseas out of whole cloth. I pointed out how the Drug War creates all the problems that it purports to solve and turns a politically created category called drugs (chiefly meaning "Mother Nature's plant medicines") into an all-purpose scapegoat for social problems.
I went on to explain how the corrupt DEA -- which has used chemical weapons against "its own people," and with impunity -- has lied about psychoactive plant medicines for almost 50 years now, also with impunity, leading us to believe that the agency has so much power now that its very existence is a threat to the democratic process. I then expatiated at length upon the DEA's role in quashing medical and botanical research, including the study of plants that show promise for treating Alzheimer's disease, decrying the anti-scientific nature of the prohibitions in question and likening them to the impediments that the Church of Galileo's day erected for the 16th-century cosmologist.
In short, when I came away from the local post office after licking 300 stamps (two 25's and a 10 per envelope) I was pretty happy with myself: I had woken up the philosophical world to the mother of all American calamities: the overthrow of natural law and the establishment of Christian Science as America's state religion3 - a calamity that the layperson more commonly refers to as "the Drug War." Surely it would not be long now before these academic worthies started speaking truth to Imperial power, right? (Hey, we go overseas to burn plants that have been used responsibly by non-Western cultures for millennia4. How's that for imperialism?)
I know what you're asking right now: after spending three days and $50 to send this snail mail heads-up to the best American philosophers of our time, how many responses did I get back in the course of two months or so of patient waiting on my part? Hmm?
May I have the envelope, please?
[drum roll]
Zero. I received exactly zero responses. Hmm. Maybe Stephen Hawking had a point about philosophy being irrelevant.
Then you can hardly blame them. They really could be driven from their universities, should they have the gall to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. After all, Americans' bias against Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines has been beaten into them for half a century and more, chiefly by the propaganda of omission, whereby we Statesiders never - but never - see or read about the positive and life-affirming uses of criminalized plant medicines by people and societies. Indeed nowadays, you merely have to say the word "cocaine " in public to give a Drug Warrior a coronary, so used are they to an obedient silence on the topic of that officially hated substance - never mind the fact that Sigmund Freud considered it a godsend for the treatment of depression5. Besides, Americans know that all substances magically start frying the brain the very second that they are criminalized by politicians. Hey, this was shown in an actual TV ad: it has to be true, right6?
So philosophers better lay low indeed. We Americans are all now confirmed Christian Scientists, when it comes to plant medicine. Just say no, we cry, as we reach for another Adderall or Zoloft. Speaking of which, 1 in 4 American women are hooked on Big Pharma 78 meds while Americans in general are the most drug-taking race on earth (thanks largely to today's psychiatric pill mill 9 ) but, to cite the catchphrase from those old Leslie Nielsen movies 1011 , "that's not important right now." The important thing (to have our politicians tell it, anyway) is that we hold Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines in contempt, like all good scientistic Christians. Just let go and let medical science (addict you, that is)12.
Given this addle-brained zeitgeist, why should an academic risk his or her career by speaking out? Besides, maybe they have other priorities, like (oh, I don't know) say, slamming patriarchy? or proving that we're all living in a Matrix? or that we're all brains in a vat? or else explaining why morality is an artificial construct?
Well, in THAT case, let's hope that morality IS an artificial construct, otherwise it's downright immoral of these philosophers to ignore the Drug War like this and the many evils that it brings about daily, in inner cities via gunfire, in nursing homes via the government prohibition on godsend mind meds, and overseas via the civil wars that are created when one idiotically outlaws a natural substance that has been used responsibly for millennia by non-Western cultures. Philosophers are the people who are supposed to think straight when everyone else is caught up in the passionate lies of the times. Why this roaring silence from the ivory tower?
Of course, I can't presume to know why these 100 philosophers stonewalled me to a man (and/or to a woman). Perhaps they really fear for their jobs. Perhaps they're all Christian scientists (every mother's son of them, and every father's daughter) and they all considered me a heretic. Search me.
But to show you just what a principled guy I am, I am not going to "call any of them out" here by publishing their names in order to task them for their nonresponse. That would just plain be wrong. Sure, I was (how should I say this) a trifle "wounded" by their unanimous indifference to my admittedly humble person, but hey, I'm a big boy now, I'm strong. Revenge would be a sign of weakness. Take Professor Kit Fine, for instance, at NYU. I am definitely NOT going to call him out for ignoring me. What would be the point of that? I'm also going to overlook the oversight of his colleague David Chalmers in this regard. Mercy before justice, say I. As for Professor Steven Diner of Rutgers: his status as a non-responder is a secret that I'm going to take to my grave - along with the never-to-be-mentioned fact that Princeton Professor Elizabeth Harman "cut me" ruthlessly in the self-same manner. Live and let live, say I.
Of course, there's always the off chance that my entire mailing list considers me a nobody and therefore felt no compunction in failing to acknowledge my (ahem) somewhat painstakingly compiled pamphlet (for which I made two trips to Staples, by the way, to buy all the relevant envelopes, labels and copier paper, not to mention the opportunity cost of spending an hour at the post office licking stamps).
Snarkiness aside, however: all I really want to do is end the War on Drugs and re-legalize all of Mother Nature's plant medicines, meanwhile not only abolishing the DEA but holding its leaders responsible for poisoning Americans and lying about Mother Nature's godsend plant meds. (If we could reaffirm the demagogue-thwarting principle of Natural Law while we're at it, that would be so much gravy.) Should my pamphlet eventually prod just one of these so-far tight-lipped academics to help me check off these desiderata on my philosophical bucket list, then I will consider my epistolary exertions in that quarter to have been a success. As for their indifference to me personally, all will be forgiven. No harm, no foul. Namaste, padres. Namaste.
That said, would it really have been so difficult for just one of them to say, "Thanks for the reminder about the need for immediate action against this great hydra-headed injustice, Brian. Well done, you"?
What? I'm just sayin'.
September 27, 2022
Brian's not alone in being rudely "cut" by academia. When author W. Golden Mortimer was performing research on his eye-opening book about coca13 (spoiler alert: turns out coca and cocaine 1415 are two very different drugs)... he wrote to hundreds in academia -- not to persuade them, as Brian had done, but merely to get their input on the subject of coca. And guess what? Almost no one responded. Worse yet, those who did were actually indignant that he would dare even write about such a subject. That's where our policy of substance demonization has gotten us: now we cannot even investigate the subject of medicines that have inspired entire religions. Instead of protesting against the very concept of free research, academics should be protesting the fact that they are discouraged and even forbidden from investigating medicines thanks to the US government. But American academics have yet to realize, let alone to admit, that they are censored by their government just as much as Galileo was censored by the church. And today's censorship is far more insidious because it is reinforced by so much propaganda (chiefly the propaganda of omission whereby we ignore all positive use of demonized medicine), that the censorship is completely invisible to modern scholars.
Author's Follow-up: September 30, 2022
Speaking of academia, Great Courses/Wondrium had a live online meet-up with Philosopher Patrick Grim. I decided to attend this meeting virtually so that I could ask Patrick a simple question: how can one fairly and fully evaluate topics like mind and reality and consciousness in the age of a Drug War when we're not allowed to follow up the powerful leads that psychoactive substances give us concerning consciousness and reality, etc.?
I saw distinct Mesoamerican imagery after consuming peyote in Arizona four years ago. How does materialism 16 account for that, Patrick?
Spoiler alert: Patrick avoided the question entirely. This is not to pick on Patrick, for almost every modern philosopher reckons without the Drug War. The philosophers say with Mistress Quickly in Merry Wives of Windsor:
"I'll ne'er put my finger in the fire, and need not."
What was really disconcerting was, my question for Patrick was automatically deleted by some Wondrium algorithm which had "decided" that I was a troublemaker or a troll. Why? Because I was talking about "drugs." I found that rather chilling, that even to mention the subject of drugs in other than a demonizing light is to become an enemy of the people, someone whose views are no longer to be tolerated in polite society. Fortunately, when I complained about my post being automatically deleted, Wondrium was willing and able to salvage it and re-post it.
Author's Follow-up: March 28, 2024
This is why I throw up my hands in desperation when folks in the blog-o-sphere try to tell me that all is well, that philosophers are fully taking into account the insights from psychedelic use -- which is a surprise to me, given the fact that I am the only philosopher in the world who has protested against the outlawing of William James's laughing gas 17 on philosophical grounds.
In other words, I keep getting gaslit on this topic, by niche enthusiasts who fail to comprehend the mass disconnect that exists today between mainstream philosophy and the world of psychoactive medicine18.
Author's Follow-up: January 30, 2025
Academics were putting their heads in the sand with respect to drugs even before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. Before W. Golden Mortimer published "Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas19" in 1909, he sought the input of academic researchers around the world. The vast majority ignored his request and most of those who responded struck a moral tone. They told him it was wrong to publish a book telling the truth about coca for it might lead to the abuse of the drug.
We see then that by the year 1900, fearmongering and prohibitionist hysteria had already convinced one-time knowledge seekers that it was our job to scare people about drugs rather than to educate them. This approach to drugs is so fundamentally wrong-headed that one does not know where to begin in refuting it. It is insane that an ostensibly scientific and freedom-loving people should adopt such a view toward any topic, the idea that ignorance is the best policy. Moreover, if Americans really cannot handle the truth about drugs, then there is something wrong with Americans, not with drugs. Indigenous people have had no such problems, and yet Americans are so convinced that "drugs" are the problem that they go overseas to eradicate the substances that we ourselves fear stateside. Americans are in a sort of aggressive state of denial, sick with their own hysteria about drugs and insistent that the world share our own neurotic viewpoint or suffer invasion.
Let's further consider the anti-patient and anti-progress viewpoint of the Drug Warriors, namely, that ignorance is the best policy. By the same hysterical logic, we should never talk honestly about alcohol use, or driving cars, or climbing mountains, or smoking cigarettes, or shooting guns, etc. And yet in all those cases, we acknowledge the power of honest education. Only when it comes to drugs have we been taught to fear unconditionally. And so the Drug Warriors say in advance of all evidence and research: "Psychoactive substances have no positive uses," a crass presumption that we turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy by outlawing drugs and thus stifling research on precisely such uses. Moreover, as I have shown time and time again on this website, the idea that such substances have no positive uses is based on a behaviorist understanding of life that dogmatically ignores all obvious benefits of drugs. The fact that they might make us feel better and laugh is completely ignored -- under the lie that the only real cure is one that shows up under a microscope. And so Drug Warriors and materialist academics conspire in the same blatant and hateful lie: that drugs have no conceivable positive uses, this despite the fact that substances of this kind have inspired entire religions in the past.
I know I will never be a Rhodes Scholar, but you cannot imagine how reassuring it is for me to know that Rhodes Scholars like Bill Clinton believe in the Drug War ideology of substance demonization20. It makes it absolutely clear that I am far smarter than Clinton on at least one subject, namely the subject of philosophy, however much he may be able to dance rings around me on less abstract topics. Clinton once said that he did not want coca to be legal because it would have meant the death of his brother. But this was just selfish nepotism on his part, the part of a well-to-do Caucasian. Bill did not care about the minority victims of drive-by shootings or of civil wars in Mexico. Bill did not care about the mass incarceration 21 of minorities that will be necessary to keep his brother safe. Bill did not worry about the millions of depressed Americans who suffer in silence behind closed doors, contemplating suicide, because Drug Warriors have outlawed everything that "works," psychologically speaking -- not just outlawed everything that works but made it impossible to try and test new drug-based protocols inspired by common sense psychology -- the kind of psychology that behaviorist moderns pride themselves on ignoring.
Of course, Republicans are even worse, to say nothing of MAGA supporters (to the extent to which there might be a difference these days). I am picking on Clinton here to show that the big business of Drug War ideology is an equal-opportunity employer and that even seeming freedom-loving Americans have fallen for it hook, line and sinker. This is why I keep reminding the reader that the end of the Drug War will require more than the changing of a few laws: we need to drive a stake through the heart of the prohibition ideology itself. The first step is to remind Americans that education is always a good thing in a freedom-loving republic and that there is definitely "something wrong with this picture" any time we try to build a life based on dogmatic ignorance. That latter premise used to be common sense until prohibitionist hysteria convinced us otherwise. The second step is to remind Americans that Drug War hysteria is based on two enormous lies: 1) that drug use has no upsides, and 2) that prohibition has no downsides. Both of these premises are demonstrably false, a fact that would be obvious except for Drug War censorship, which ensures that we never see, read or hear stories that make this clear. The problem is not just media censorship but the refusal of academics and other authors to publish anything that might make them appear as heretics with respect to America's modern religion: that of the Christian Science Drug War and the prohibition for which it stands.
I have found that it is considered bad manners to write a modern academic about the subject of drugs. If you don't believe me, just try to draw an academic out on such topics. You'll be ghosted before you can say "Drug War hysteria."
Academics live in a make-believe world these days, one in which substance prohibition is considered to be a baseline for research. They completely ignore what drug use has to tell us about consciousness and motivation and depression, etc., and simply pretend that such substances do not exist. This is how Science News gets away with telling their readers that depression is a tough nut to crack. Depression is actually only a tough nut to crack because we have outlawed almost all the drugs that could cheer a person up. But Science News will never make that point and so risk the wrath of the Drug Warrior. Normal scientific standards, however, should oblige them to end all articles on such topics with a disclaimer pointing out that they have accepted the drug-warrior premise that outlawed drugs have nothing to tell us on the topics on which they are holding forth. Yet they refrain from such honesty, apparently because they realize that their readers are just as brainwashed by Drug War ideology as are their writers and so no one is going to hold the magazine responsible for their silence when it comes to "drugs."
Author's Follow-up:
April 21, 2025
The Drug War outlaws academic progress and philosophic progress in particular. We are unable to undertake the investigation of reality that William James prescribed for us as philosophers. In the use of psychoactive substances, we have the ability to actually investigate the question of mind-body dualism and to ponder the nature of physical versus psychical reality -- to investigate the extent to which they depend upon each other or may even be, in some sense of the word, coterminous. In using a wide range of psychoactive substances -- like those referenced in Pikhal22, or in the Rig Veda23, for that matter -- we could test the powers of consciousness rather than sitting back as self-satisfied armchair materialists and denying those powers a priori. And yet drug law tells us to stand down, and in so doing, it privileges a materialist view of the world. That, I suspect, is one big reason why philosophers fail to protest the absurd premises of the Drug War, because they sense at some level that drug prohibition privileges the materialist view of life by outlawing substances whose use might cast that world view in doubt.
Scientists cannot tell us if psychoactive drugs are worth the risk any more than they can tell us if free climbing is worth the risk, or horseback riding or target practice or parkour.
"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"
Cocaine is not evil. Opium is not evil. Drug prohibition is evil.
Alexander Shulgin is a typical westerner when he speaks about cocaine. He moralizes about the drug, telling us that it does not give him "real" power. But so what? Does coffee give him "real" power? Coke helps some, others not. Stop holding it to this weird metaphysical standard.
The problem for alcoholics is that alcohol decreases rationality in proportion as it provides the desired self-transcendence. Outlawed drugs can provide self-transcendence with INCREASED rationality and be far more likely to keep the problem drinker off booze than abstinence.
Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.
Psychiatrists prescribe drugs that muck about with a patient's biochemical baseline, making them chemically dependent and turning them into patients for life.
America never ended prohibition. It just redirected prohibition from alcohol to all of alcohol's competitors.
There is an absurd safety standard for "drugs." The cost/benefit analysis of the FDA & co. never takes into account the costs of NOT prescribing nor the benefits of a productive life well lived. The "users" are not considered stakeholders.
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
Scientists cannot tell us if psychoactive drugs are worth the risk any more than they can tell us if free climbing is worth the risk, or horseback riding or target practice or parkour.