Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 18, 2025
The fact that drugs have benefits for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.
Well, pull up a chair and sit down, pardna! Let me tell you what this here website is all about. But first, let me tell you a little about yours truly. I am the Drug War Philosopher and founder of abolishthedea.com, one Brian Ballard Quass by name. I am not a board-certified philosopher, but I am a lover of wisdom and so I make so bold as to use the appellation. Last time I checked, it had not been trademarked. If it makes you feel any better, though, I was offered a job as a TA in the philosophy department of Virginia Commonwealth University back in 1989, but I turned it down. I did not realize at the time that by so doing, I was giving my ideological opponents of the future an excuse to pretend that I did not exist.
Truth be told, however, my lack of tenure actually makes me MORE of a philosopher than my board-certified counterparts. Why? Because I am able to speak truths that they could only speak on pain of losing their jobs!
Take the subject of laughing gas, for instance. The FDA recently decided that they were going to regulate that substance as a 'drug.'1 Now, as a philosopher, I knew that it was the use of laughing gas, nitrous oxide, that had inspired the ontology of William James. I knew, moreover, that James had conjured us as philosophers to study the effects of such substances in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'
'No account of the universe in its totality can be final,' wrote James, 'which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.2'
So I was appalled at the FDA's efforts to treat N2O as a drug and so make it even less available to the public than it already was.
But guess what happened when I tried to alert board-certified philosophers to this pending injustice? Not one of them responded. Not one. You would have thought that at least the Harvard philosophers would have been up in arms, since James founded the Harvard Psychology Department. But not a bit of it. In fact, James's use of laughing gas and related substances is not even mentioned in Harvard's online biography for James. They have censored James's life and philosophy in deference to the sensibilities of the Drug War. And so they dishonor William James in the same way that the Jefferson Foundation dishonored Thomas Jefferson. It will be remembered that the latter organization invited the DEA onto Monticello in 1987 to confiscate the founding father's poppy plants, in violation of everything that he stood for, politically speaking. Actually, it probably will NOT be remembered, because the Drug War is all about censorship -- the selective censorship of facts whose publication might encourage Americans to rise up against the War on Drugs.
So I tried my luck 'across the pond' and wrote individual letters on this subject to every single philosopher at Oxford University -- every single one of them -- and not one of them responded3. Not one.
And so when the FDA called for public comment on their attempts to demonize laughing gas, I was the only philosopher in the entire world who wrote in to protest the proposed action in the name of academic liberty.
And so it seems to me that my outsider status is a plus, not a negative.
Why do I care? I'm so glad that you probably asked that question!
You see, I am a 66-year-old chronic depressive who realized five years ago that the Drug War had been depriving me of godsend medicine for a lifetime and that it had shunted me off instead onto dependence-causing Big Pharma drugs, drugs for which dependence, indeed, was a feature, not a bug4. So I determined to track down the premises upon which such an inhumane policy was based and to expose the false assumptions that seemed to justify it in the minds of the masses. In other words, I decided to approach the subject of the Drug War and substance prohibition from a philosophical point of view.
I soon realized that the injustices of the Drug War were hidden in plain sight everywhere, but that I had been brainwashed by drug-war ideology not to see them. Take laughing gas again, for instance. In a sane world, nitrous oxide would be made available to the suicidal in portable kits, in the same way that we give epi pens to those with severe allergies. In fact, I soon realized that any 'pick-me-up' substance could be used as an antidepressant, or at least as one part of a mood-elevating protocol. And yet the DEA scheduling system tells me that such drugs have no positive uses whatsoever, this despite the fact that some of these substances had inspired entire religions in the past and were considered panaceas by all ancient physicians. Clearly, some false assumptions were at play here that no one was acknowledging, and that is where philosophers should come in. It is their job to identify false assumptions. Sadly, however, most board-certified philosophers are asleep on the job when it comes to the Drug War. It is clearly more than their jobs are worth to speak up on this subject. This explains why 100 of America's most well-known philosophers ghosted me when I sent them a 16-page thesis on these topics: not one of them even acknowledged receipt5.
I soon found that the problematic assumptions of the Drug War did not just come from 'the great unwashed,' however, but that the assumptions of materialists were giving a veneer of 'science' to Drug War lies6. Take the lie, for instance, that most psychoactive drugs have no positive uses whatsoever. This is clearly just a prejudiced belief based on the unspoken Christian Science assumptions of the poorly educated, but the materialists find themselves agreeing with this absurd statement, albeit for their own unique reasons. They believe that the true causes of human behavior are to be found under a microscope, and so it is okay to ignore both anecdotes and history when it comes to drug use. They are dedicated to the inhumane philosophy of Behaviorism. And so the fact that a drug cheers you up and gives you something to look forward to means nothing to them. The fact that you laugh under the influence of laughing gas means nothing to them7. They are after the Holy Grail of a materialist 'cure' for your depression. They do not want to simply make you laugh and feel good. They have a much higher metaphysical ambition in mind: they want to create a 'REAL' cure for you.
And what is the result of this materialist hubris? One in four American women are dependent upon Big Pharma drugs for life - while we yet outlaw drugs that have inspired entire religions.
In 'The Concept of Nature,' Alfred North Whitehead tells us that:
'The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us.'8
The absurd consequences just noted clearly show us then that it was a category error to have placed materialists in charge of American drug policy and research in the first place. The true experts in these fields are what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, those shaman-like individuals who have used the drugs in question and who know something about human motivation and aspirations in the vocational, psychological, and spiritual realms. Materialist scientists may tell us of physical dangers associated with specific dosages of specific substances, but they have no expertise whatsoever in deciding if drug use passes a risk/benefit test for a given person. Such judgment calls must be made by the potential users themselves in light of their goals in life, their philosophy of life, and their risk tolerance given their own particular circumstances.
And so we see that materialists and Drug Warriors conspire to keep us from any obvious treatments for our depression and anxiety. As a lifelong victim of this absurd mindset, I can only say, 'Thanks for nothing, guys!!!'
Nor is it just the anxious and depressed who suffer. Many of the drugs that we have outlawed can inspire spiritual states, as William James well knew. So the fact that we have outlawed drugs means we are outlawing religions - and not just a specific religion, either, but the religious impulse itself. Drug prohibition is thus unconscionably evil. It not only controls what we can think, but how and how much we can think. It is the greatest and most intimate degree of totalitarianism imaginable. The outlawing of opium, in particular, was an enormous power grab by government. It put government in charge of doling out pain relief.
As Jim Hogshire wrote in 'Opium for the Masses':
'The poppy's central and indispensable position in our civilization makes access to it important, and thus forbidding public access to the poppy is staggeringly cruel.'9
And then there's the racial angle of substance prohibition. Racist politicians have passed bills to remove minorities from subsidized housing if they fail to pass drug tests. This is racist in the extreme. To see this clearly, do a little thought experiment. Imagine that Congress had passed a law to give drug-tests to middle-class white women and planned to deny them Social Security payments if they tested positive for oxy or valium. One cannot imagine such a thing. Congress would never pass such a law because the Drug War is all about punishing minorities, not 'respectable' white women. If that latter population misuses a drug, they are thought to demand our compassion and help - whereas we kick minority 'substance abusers' out of their houses. This is horrific racism, and yet Americans are blinded to the injustice thanks to the immensely hypocritical fearmongering and substance demonization of the War on Drugs. It could not be clearer, however, that substance prohibition is ultimately just an excuse to disempower minorities, in a world in which more overt forms of racism are still considered more or less unacceptable10.
This should not come as a surprise, however. Drug prohibition has always been about cracking down on minorities. Opium was outlawed thanks to fearmongering about Chinese influence in America, cocaine thanks to fearmongering about Blacks, and marijuana thanks to fearmongering about Hispanics. Harry Anslinger helped bring about the death of Billie Holiday by harassing her over her use of heroin, not because Harry was interested in her well-being but because he wanted her to stop singing songs that made white America uncomfortable.
I hope you are starting to get a sense of why I am devoting my 'twilight years' to attacking the War on Drugs. It is a hydra-headed injustice that causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some. It is the reason why America is now a dictatorship of the ignorant - because the Drug War has thrown millions of liberal minorities into jail, thus removing them from the voting rolls and ensuring the election of card-carrying Drug Warriors.
Let's think about movies, for a minute. Think of all the most violent films and scenes of torture. Most of them involve drug dealing. Sadly, these movies only reflect reality, and yet no one realizes that it is substance prohibition which brought this vicious dystopia to life! Prohibition incentivizes hugely profitable illicit drug dealing, and this empowers the amoral to be as evil as they want to be11. 60,000 have been 'disappeared' in Mexico since 2006, and yet that astounding fact is never blamed on the War on Drugs, which created all that violence and death out of whole cloth! No one is willing to connect the dots12.
The Drug War and prohibition will never end, however, as long as we fail to hold it responsible for the deaths and heartache that it causes, like the drive-by shootings in America's inner cities. Today's clueless reporters attribute such violence to things like global warming and lack of jobs - to anything, in fact, but to drug prohibition, which armed the hood to the teeth in the first place.
As Anne Heather Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014:
'Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist.'
And yet Lisa Ling produced an hour-long special on violence in Chicago, without even MENTIONING the War on Drugs13.
Do you see now why I created this website? Someone's got to say this stuff.
In a sane world, there would be Drug War programs at major universities where the assumptions and injustices of the prohibitionists would be held up to educated scorn14. One class would discuss the outlawing of religion implicit in drug criminalization, another would trace the psychiatric pill mill to the monopoly that Big Pharma received from substance prohibition, still another would show how reductive materialism lends a veneer of 'science' to Drug War injustice, yet another would concentrate on the violence and hard feeling that substance prohibition has needlessly introduced into the world. There would also be courses covering the heretofore ignored fate of the millions who suffer in silence thanks to the under-prescription and/or outlawing of godsends and who are never considered as stakeholders in the drug-related debates sponsored by demagogue politicians. But for now, that's just a dream. The tide of willful ignorance has not yet turned. And so in the meantime, all I can do is set a principled example for a more educated and less brainwashed posterity.
This leads us to another unrecognized problem of the Drug War: it has censored both science and academia in general15. The scientific censorship can be seen in magazines like 'Scientific American' and 'Psychology Today,' where they write supposedly definitive articles about emotions and consciousness while ignoring the insights that drug use provides us on such subjects. 'Science News' magazine recently promoted a new kind of shock therapy for depression, which they told us was a difficult condition to treat16. But depression is difficult to treat only if we assume that psychoactive drugs do not exist. There are hundreds of drugs that could end depression for a user in a heartbeat - most notably, perhaps, the many phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin17, but also opium18 and coca19. And none of these drugs force us to risk damaging the brain to attain our ends.
I have frequently written to magazines that dogmatically ignore references to 'drugs,' asking them to end their censored articles with a disclaimer, such as: 'The author has written in fealty to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization and has thus ignored the insights that drug use might provide on this topic.' The author's conclusions are often just wrong unless one assumes such a disclaimer. But, as with most of my drug-related correspondence, I never receive a response. I guess that the editors assume that their readers are just as brainwashed by Drug War ideology as are their writers, and so no one is likely to hold the magazine responsible for their self-censorship when it comes to drugs.
And it's not just scientists who censor themselves in the age of the Drug War. Almost every non-fiction book either ignores drugs or speaks of them disparagingly - as if it makes sense to subsume a vast array of completely unique substances under the dismissive classification of 'drugs.'
Take the book by historian Ronald Hutton entitled 'The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present.20' Like most academics, Ronald has nothing good to say about drugs. He only mentions them once in his book, when he likens them to the fatal brews created by so-called service magicians on behalf of murderers. What he does not realize, however, is that the 'herbs' that he's forever referencing in his book are drugs! The word may sound gentler and more homey than 'drugs,' but clearly the 'herbs' he mentioned were used as psychoactive agents. To claim that herbs are different than drugs, at least in this context, is like claiming that 'meds' are different than 'drugs.' The only substantive difference, however, is that the former are promoted as good by the Drug Warrior and the latter are demonized as evil. The distinction is an irrational one based on fearmongering.
Hutton's failure to see this is unfortunate, because his whole book is about strategic fearmongering by the powers-that-be, and the Drug War is the most notorious example of strategic fearmongering in the history of the world21.
But you see what I'm up against, right? The whole world has gone mad with the prohibitionist mindset - with the possible exception of a few indigenous tribes that we westerners have not yet dispossessed and killed for failing to embrace a drug-free Christianity.
And believe me, I have only begun to list the downsides of the War on Drugs and substance prohibition. I have written hundreds of essays on drug-related topics over the last five years and I am still spoiled for choice when it comes to new angles to pursue in demonstrating the inhumanity and imbecility of the prohibitionist mindset.
The Drug Warrior has taught us to fear drug use in a way that we fear no other potentially dangerous activity on earth: not mountain climbing, not SCUBA diving, not tightrope walking, not drag-racing - not even car driving or beer drinking22. This is strategic fearmongering, however. Its goal is to deprive Americans of democratic freedoms by erecting the boogieman of 'drugs,' one which is nevertheless far less threatening in actuality than the many dangerous activities that we allow freely and even promote. We have the Drug War to thank for the destruction of our rights under the 4th amendment, for suppressing our freedom of religion, and for all but outlawing free and honest speech about drugs - something that is unconscionably suppressed these days by media of all kinds. We have, in fact, the Drug War to thank for Donald Trump and the end of American democracy.
And yet Americans slumber on.
It is easy to become depressed. The finish line keeps getting kicked further into the future, until one suspects that it will take a dose of Armageddon for the world to re-evaluate drugs from the indigenous point of view, to realize that they are our friends and that we should learn how to use them wisely for the benefit of individuals and communities, rather than superstitiously demonizing them a priori.
Strategic fearmongering is the enemy, and until that fact is realized, the Drug Warriors will continue destroying what's left of democracy around the world, leading to all sorts of unnecessary violence and suffering as they do so.
And Americans in particular should know better. Liquor prohibition created the Mafia, after all.
Meanwhile, any social policy that relies on ignorance rather than education should be abhorrent to freedom-loving people around the world. These are just a few of the reasons why I say that the Drug War is not just bad policy, but that it represents a wrong way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve and then some.
Conclusion
The list of problems with the Drug War mindset goes on and on and so I have to end this introduction somewhat arbitrarily. To simplify matters for the reader, however, let me close with an apothegm that says it all:
The Drug War is based on two enormous lies: 1) that there are no upsides to drug use, and 2) that there are no downsides to prohibition.
Author's Follow-up: January 28, 2025
There is an additional reason that I am devoting my twilight years to ending the hateful War on Drugs, and that is because my job in so doing is AI-proof. Artificial intelligence can never deal with the world's drug biases -- except perhaps tyrannically, by imposing its own supposedly logical 'viewpoint' on the world. For the 'viewpoint' of any AI app with respect to a philosophically fraught subject is a product of the algorithm that created it and the assumptions upon which that algorithm was coded. You can be sure, moreover, that coders will be under ongoing pressure to ensure that their AI algorithms are productive of politically correct output when it comes to the Drug War.
Philosophy, in general, is one field that AI can never conquer, except via ideological fiat. Such a technological triumph would always be guilty of the logical fallacy of petitio principii: it would presuppose the correctness of many of the highly debatable principles upon which such supposed preeminence would be both justified and based.
I recently asked an AI app what William James would have thought about the proposed outlawing of laughing gas. The app told me that he might have suggested that laughing gas be made available for philosophers only under special circumstances. But this answer is clearly based on modern Drug War ideology and not on James's views. James was a fan of Benjamin Paul Blood's work on anaesthetic revelation. Blood held that the mystic insights derived from the use of substances like laughing gas should be available to all people -- that they were educational and beneficial in and of themselves. To say that James would have wanted these revelations withheld from the average person is to impose modern drug-war biases on the past.
Author's Follow-up: March 13, 2025
I was racking my brains this morning, trying to figure out why Americans would support drug prohibition in spite of all the problems that it has caused and which it continues to cause as outlined above. They apparently think that drug prohibition saves lives, but this is simply not true. The Drug War causes far more deaths than it saves -- 60,000 deaths of innocents in Mexico alone over the last two decades, tens of thousands of deaths in American cities every year -- meanwhile destroying the rule of law in South America and destroying the 1st and 4th amendments to the U.S. Constitution here in the States.
But even if the Drug War did cut down on deaths, it would not make sense. We do not forbid horseback riding nor liquor consumption on the grounds that less people would die in a horse-free or a liquor-free world. Why not? Because we value freedom more than we do a death-free world. And yet horseback riding is the leading cause of traumatic brain injury in the United States. And liquor kills 178,000 a year per the CDC. This is something that even many drug reformers do not understand: that the Drug War not only does not work but that it SHOULD not work. No one should use drug law to dictate how and how much we should be allowed to think and feel in this life.
It is time for Americans to grow up and accept the fact that the world is, and will always be, full of psychoactive substances. That's the way the world is. And our way to deal with that fact should be to educate, not to incarcerate. Incarceration makes literally no sense, given that drug use has a raft of positive potential benefits and that such use has even inspired religions. It follows that the arrest for drug use is an enormous injustice. It is the injustice par excellence for it comes between us and our emotions and tells us what we are allowed to feel and what we are not allowed to feel in this life.
Before the American prohibitionists showed up, the tyrant could only outlaw things -- but the prohibitionist tyrants are far more ambitious: they outlaw new feelings and ideas by outlawing the substances that can inspire them. They not only tell us how the world must be but they tell us how we must feel about things in our innermost heart of hearts. It is the ultimate tyranny. This is why I always laugh when I see the Virginia license plates that read 'Don't tread on me,' knowing that the vast majority who own such plates are perfectly happy to have the government control their pain relief and to tell them what thoughts and feelings they are even allowed to entertain. 'Yeah, right,' I say, 'don't tread on you? Brother, they are treading you into the dust even while you're driving around town flaunting your supposed freedom.'
And here we come to another problem with the Drug War. At the risk of offending any libertarians in my readership, I must say that Drug Warriors are skinflints who refuse to spend a dime on social programs. What they do not realize, however, is that they ARE spending money on social programs -- billions, in fact. Or rather they are spending billions on anti-social programs, programs which they call law enforcement and corrections. They are spending billions so that the DEA and local police forces can deal with drug-related healthcare problems via the penal system -- thanks to which bizarre non-sequitur America now has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. They are spending billions so that the police can handle our healthcare problems when it comes to psychoactive medicine. This is insanity and yet most Americans seem to think that this is how a freedom-loving country should handle their healthcare problems: by arrest.
Imagine if we redirected the billions we give the DEA to Head Start programs and to the top-notch education of the poor in inner cities. That would be the real way to combat problematic drug use: by teaching people, not just about safe drug use, but teaching people in general. But the Drug Warrior loves ignorance. They actually believe it is wrong to be honest with people about drugs. In a sane and free world, this fact alone would laugh them off the stage of public opinion. And yet this is a mainstream view in Drug War America. Bill Clinton once claimed that his brother would not be alive were cocaine legal. What he failed to realize was that tens of thousands had to die in inner cities so that his brother could 'survive' -- and that Americans had to lose the 1st and 4th amendments to the Constitution so that his brother could 'survive' -- and that poor inner-city women had to be evicted from their homes via drug testing so that his brother could survive -- and that the rule of law had to disappear in Latin America so that his brother could survive -- and that 60,000 had to go missing in Mexico alone over the last two decades so that his brother could survive.
And why did the Drug Warriors recently demand the re-criminalization of drugs in Oregon? Because they refused to spend one single penny on helping those people transition to a normal life while using drugs as safely as possible. In fact, they even arrested those who tried to help users to use safely. This is ironic because before drug prohibition, the opiate user was a member of society, smoking an opium pipe peaceably at home at night. But the Drug Warriors were not satisfied with the status quo, so they criminalized opium and forced opiate users onto the streets -- and now they are griping about the fact that opiate users are on the streets. One can only conclude that they believe the opiate users should be on Mars.
A sane person is tempted to restate the maxim of biologist JBS Haldane as follows:
'Not only is the Drug War stranger than we imagine, but it is stranger than we CAN imagine.'
That is why so few critics of drug criminalization understand the full evil of the War on Drugs. It is not a good idea that did not work: it is a demonstrably bad idea that SHOULD never work, not in any society that values freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and freedom of academia.
Author's Follow-up: March 19, 2025
FYI: When I use the term "Drug War" in my essays, I am usually not speaking merely of Nixon's War on Drugs but rather the Drug War that I maintain has been going on at least since the 19th-century in American society, as manifested by the popular desire to hold substances responsible for behavior. This puritanical crusade began as a religious movement against liquor -- but when the Carrie Nations of the world failed in their goal to outlaw liquor for all time, they turned all their moral outrage toward pretty much every other less dangerous psychoactive substance on earth. This is all part of the "Drug War" ethos, as I understand such terms, or what you might call "the spirit of prohibition," which, like a master criminal, has gotten away with causing endless suffering without ever being identified as the villain of the piece. The Drug War is thus the ultimate "gorilla in the room" -- a gorilla that has been ignored so long by media and politicians that most people no longer think it even exists -- hence their failure to hold it responsible for the endless evils that it propagates: such as inner-city violence, the destruction of the rule of law in Latin America, and the silent suffering of millions thanks to the outlawing of godsends.
And why are these godsends outlawed? It is because of the inhumane doctrine of the Drug Warrior, which tells us that a substance that can be misused by white American young people when used in one context for one reason at one dosage must not be used by anyone in any context for any reason at any dosage. A more hateful doctrine cannot be imagined upon which to base a system of mental health.
Author's Follow-up:
April 17, 2025
I am always looking for better, more pithy arguments to convince a thoroughly brainwashed world that its views about "drugs" are all wrong. This week, I had an epiphany that provided me with one such argument which goes straight to the heart of the matter. It occurred to me that phrases like "Fentanyl kills" (or "PCP kills" or "Oxy kills" or "Crack kills"...) are exactly like the phrase "Fire bad!" All such phrases are based on the following assumption: namely, that a substance that can cause problems when used by a white young person at one quantity in one situation cannot be used wisely by anyone at any quantity in any situation. Had humankind maintained that jaundiced view of fire, we would still be living in the Stone Age today.
In such a world, people like myself would be insisting that fire has good uses -- and we would be shouted down. The mainstream would fire back with indignant retorts like the following: "You wouldn't say such things, Og, if your family had been killed by fire like MINE has!"
Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.
MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. These are the people who think Electro Shock Therapy is not used often enough! What sick priorities.
People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
They still don't seem to get it. The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.
If we can go overseas to burn poppy plants, then Islamic countries should be free to come to the United States to burn our grape vines.
Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.
Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.