written on my 2025 summer vacation in Wildwood, New Jersey
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 25, 2025
As I am feeling depressed and lazy this morning thanks to drug prohibition, I have decided to write today's essay in the form of disparate notes on the ENORMOUSLY FRAUGHT subject of drugs and drug use in the modern world.
THE PROFIT-DRIVEN MISDIAGNOSIS OF ADDICTION
The Drug War mentality of substance demonization leads us to misdiagnose the unhappy drug user as the victim of a neurological disease called addiction. This is just the self-serving way that materialists sidestep the obvious facts of the case so as to position themselves as the well-remunerated experts on mind and mood medicine. In reality, the so-called addictive personality types are just human beings who are desperately searching for a way to feel comfortable in their own skin. They simply wish to be able to sleep at night and to appreciate the world around them. They simply wish to live a meaningful life. This desire on their part is not a medical pathology, and the real experts in such cases are not medical doctors! The real experts in such cases are the same people whom they have always been throughout the course of human history: namely, those highly empathic human beings whom we have variously denominated as priests, counselors, shaman and sages.
To be sure, such experts in our time would ideally have an extensive knowledge of biochemistry and pharmacology, but their most important qualification would be what it has always been for such experts: their ability to listen to a suffering human being and to guide them empathically on a quest for specific problem-solving protocols as suggested by real cases in the real world. Such experts would be able to suggest a wide variety of drug-aided protocols based on actual user experiences in a world wherein we actually sought to profit from the vast and so-far largely untapped treasure trove of psychoactive substances with which we have always been surrounded as biochemically activated human beings -- those substances which, caveman like, we moderns have so far sought to demonize rather than to use as wisely as possible (alone or in combination) for the benefit of a suffering humanity.
This is why drug prohibition is such tyrannical folly. People in a secular society are always going to be searching for peace of mind -- and a War on Drugs is all about ensuring that their search will end in disaster -- thanks to a lack of education, a lack of regulated drug supply, and a lack of true and informed drug choice -- to say nothing of the fact that they are at risk of being thrown in jail. And why? Because they had the insolence to try to take care of their own health in the age of Big Nanny government! For in the age of the Drug War, Americans have decided that a cabal of materialist doctors (at the FDA) and law enforcement personnel (at the DEA) are somehow the experts when it comes to deciding how and how much we should be allowed to think and feel in this life! Even when drugs are legal, they are tightly controlled, to the extent that puritanical bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., are put in charge of second-guessing the prescriptions of doctors-- under the assumption that human beings do not have unique needs but rather should respond to what bureaucrats THINK they need in order to live a meaningful life. Everyone is only allowed to "need" what their more-or-less identical fellows have been shown to "need" on the basis of purely statistical analysis.
I have mixed feelings about Erowid. It is certainly part of a good trend, one in which we finally listen to what actual users say about their own drug use. But it is of little use -- and even a source of potential enormous confusion -- for current and/or would-be drug users. The real value of Erowid is clearly as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: namely, 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 wisely and for good reasons by actual people throughout the course of human history. Such professionals would be eventual replacements for today's psychiatrists who are legally forced to ignore a vast pharmacopoeia of medicines in favor of prescribing the expensive dependence-causing nostrums of Big Pharma.
To illustrate my meaning, consider the following anecdote. Last night, I visited the Erowid website in an attempt to learn the truth about Kratom. I need not have bothered. I left the Erowid website as confused as ever about whether the use of Kratom made sense for me, personally, as a unique individual, given my age, my goals in using, my personal biochemistry, my psychosocial history, etc. etc. Sure, there were plenty of alleged facts about Kratom and Kratom use, but there was no way to put those facts into any kind of meaningful context. Take the summary page for Kratom, for instance: it mentioned one suspected death related to Kratom use -- one -- but what does that tell me? There are thousands of deaths related to aspirin use every year in the United Kingdom alone and yet this factoid never discouraged me from using that popular analgesic2.
DRUG WAR AS BRANDING OPERATION
How do we account for this fact, that one single "debatable" death from Kratom use strikes us as a knockdown argument for avoiding that drug altogether, while thousands of deaths from aspirin leave us completely unmoved? The answer tells us much more about modern capitalism than it does about drugs. In a capitalist society, the propriety of the use of any given drug is determined by a branding campaign. Instead of recognizing the once obvious truth that drug use was only good or bad based on the many interacting details of use, parties with various ideological biases are encouraged to focus exclusively on either the upsides or downsides of Kratom use, thus judging the drug outside of all context. The goal is to spin the data one way or the other, not to help people make decisions based on their own unique circumstances.
The drug seems to have benefits for opiate withdrawal -- but this begs the question: why did we outlaw the relatively benign and time-honored smoking of opium in the first place, thereby shunting people off onto opiates whose addictive potential was greater than opium smoking by whole orders of magnitude? HELLO?! Let us learn a lesson from the Benjamin Franklins and the Marcus Aureliuses of the world: that people can live meaningful lives while indulging in the nightly smoking of time-honored opium, just as people now live meaningful lives while indulging in the nightly drinking of alcohol! We accept that latter drug even though it is associated with 178,000 deaths a year in America alone3! Wouldn't it break a heart of stone?! One wants to scream in frustration at the hypocritical counterproductivity of our unprecedented wholesale prohibition of godsend substances! Will America ever awaken from this self-inflicted nightmare!
CHILDISH WESTERNERS
I sometimes think that the FDA and the DEA give drugs like Kratom a temporary reprieve from criminalization for a cynical purpose. They know that, in a secular and profit-driven world, the grudgingly provided legality of such a potentially effective substance will result in the proliferation of a variety of dodgy websites advocating the hedonistic and uninformed use of the drug. The prohibitionist powers-that-be love such websites because they tend to cast the drug in question in a highly dubious light in the eyes of an already intoxiphobic and brainwashed mainstream -- and this in turn reinforces a brainwashed mindset that is already friendly to drug prohibition and to further crackdowns in the name of "safety."
A search for "Kratom" turns up dozens of highly sensational and dodgy websites, occasionally interspersed with websites sounding alarm bells about the drug. Both kinds of sites clearly have an axe to grind and so it is impossible to see the info thus provided in any kind of meaningful context! This is why we need those pharmacologically savvy experts mentioned above -- so that we can finally get beyond the idea that "everybody and their brother" is free to judge such drugs "up" or "down" depending on their own experiences or biases based on what their friends have experienced or picked up second or even third hand on the subject. The whole point here is that the propriety of the use of a given drug is always dependent on specific circumstances. Take just one of endless examples of this fact. The use of a drug with uncertain long-term side effects may not make sense for a depressed young person, but if said drug provides godsend relief for, say, a suicidal 60-year-old, it is both childish and cruel to deny him or her that drug simply because its use might eventually prove problematic for a young person with a long life ahead of them.
The problem is that America has no recognized experts when it comes to the holistic use of psychoactive medicine -- so potential users have to decide on the propriety of use based on the reports of parties with various axes to grind. Even if one believes the claims, these partisan sites never can tell us if the use of a given drug is right for any given individual. This, once again, is because of the once-obvious truth that the propriety of the use of psychoactive drugs is based on individual circumstances -- and this is a fact that we are legally bound to ignore in the age of drug prohibition.
EXILING LEGAL DRUGS TO DODGY NEIGHBORHOODS
Even when drugs temporarily escape the fine sieve of wholesale drug prohibition, they are exiled to dodgy neighborhoods. People should be able to visit highly empathic pharmacological experts to see if drugs like Kratom make sense for them as unique human beings. Instead, the drug is being sold by teenagers at T-shirt shops on the Jersey Shore! Selling Kratom on the Jersey Shore is fine -- but those who need information should have a place to go. Instead, America recognizes no experts on "drugs," except for drug-hating materialists who judge drug use up or down, outside of all context. Even the ridiculously expensive bottles of Kratom capsules thus marketed seem to have the words "fly by night" written all over them in neon lights. Take the "Just Kratom Capsules" marketed by a company called JustCBDStore.com. The bottle itself says the company is located in Hollywood, Florida, and yet the website gives the address as Watertown, South Dakota. Moreover, the website itself does not even MENTION Kratom! These research findings are not exactly reassuring from the standpoint of a would-be purchaser of such a product!
TAKE YOUR MEDS
Speaking of the Jersey Shore, I was there this weekend with family members, half of whom spent half of their time smoking cigarettes! And at least half of these family members were being careful to "take their meds" every single morning as wards of the healthcare state. And all of these family members were confirmed tipplers. It is against this positively drug-drenched background that our so-called "drug prohibition" is so outrageous. It is blazingly clear that Americans do not want a drug-free world: they want a world in which Americans use the "right" kind of drugs, as determined by materialists, Big Pharma, Big Liquor, and by intoxiphobic Christian Science hypocrites.
THE PERFECT RACIST CRIME
While visiting the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey, this weekend, I saw billboards calling for an end to gun violence in nearby Philadelphia. I sighed inwardly as I passed them, because I was sure that those calling for that ceasefire were themselves in complete denial about the true cause of the violence. They were blind to the fact that drug prohibition was responsible for arming "The City of Brotherly Love" to the teeth in the first place. And yet I wanted to give the peace lovers the benefit of the doubt. So upon arriving home, I visited the website for the sponsors of the movement, which turned out to be a group called The Philadelphia Citizen4. I wanted to confirm what I already felt sure of: that the organization in question really was as blind as a bat. And sure enough, they were. I found only one mention of "drugs" when I searched the website -- and that was a guest article discussing the downsides of potent new marijuana products. Such an article is not propaganda by itself, but it has the effect of propaganda in the context of a website that never mentions any upsides to drug re-legalization, nor any downsides to drug prohibition -- a policy which has now led to the end of democracy in America by effectively removing over one million minorities from the voting rolls, thereby handing the American presidency to a would-be fascist.
And so the War on Drugs is the perfect racist crime. It suborns the citizens of the very communities that it destroys into participating in their own destruction.
DEPRESSION
Did I mention that I am depressed? I am still trying to get off of the Effexor that I have been on for decades. Actually, I have been off the drug for almost a month now, but it is by no means clear to me whether I will be able to avoid a relapse in the long run -- especially since the Drug Warrior has outlawed everything that could help me avoid that relapse. I will not go into the details here. Suffice it to say, however, that if any illegal drug produced the kinds of subtle but insidious withdrawal downsides that are produced by Effexor -- even when incrementally reduced over the course of a year, as in my case -- that drug would be pilloried to the ends of the earth. And yet drugs like Effexor "can do no wrong" in the opinion of the pharmacological powers-that-be.
My psychiatrist himself sings the praises of the drug -- which is one of the main reasons that I want to get off it, by the way, since I do not want to be dependent on a doctor who is so blind to the needs of his "patients." Indeed, I am sick of being a patient at all.
CRAVINGS FOR WHAT?
I just do not understand a psychiatrist who thinks it is good for me to be on a drug that makes me his patient for life! He should surely recuse himself from drawing such a conclusion based on his own obvious financial interests in thus disempowering me.
This psychiatrist praises Effexor because he claims that it does not cause cravings for those who attempt to get off it. But this is a philosophically shallow conclusion. In reality, I have strong cravings as I attempt to remain off the drug: they may not be cravings for the drug itself, but I do have a strong craving for mental relief in attempting to stay off the drug.
YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE
I am not at all sure that it is even possible for me to get off of Effexor entirely. I may have to make my peace with taking a 37.5 mg capsule every day for the rest of my life. But I am determined to go to my grave kicking and screaming, so to speak, about this raging injustice -- which speaks volumes about everything that is wrong with drug prohibition. If I am forced to take a drug every day of my life, then I should be able to CHOOSE the identity of that drug. It is a meta-tyranny -- a sort of tyranny of tyrannies -- for the government to prevent me from using plants that grow at my very feet. It is a meta-tyranny for government to decide for me how I should think and feel in my innermost soul and mind. It is pure tyranny of the worst imaginable kind.
Had the government chosen to torture me physically, I could have risen above the evil with an imaginative mindset -- but when the government goes after my mind itself, then the injustice beggars description.
Amazingly, I seem to be the only one in the world who realizes this. Everyone else just shuts up and takes their meds -- or else tells others to do so.
I am glad, in a way, that I am now an old-timer at age 67.
Perhaps Homo sapiens are a doomed species, as democracy now seems to be a doomed form of government -- vetoed as it has been by fearmongering demagogues. The best I can do is to state my case against an inhuman and inhumane status quo and hope that someone finds these words eventually and works to leverage them into effective pushback.
I cannot say that I am optimistic, especially since these ephemeral digital words of mine may well disappear from the world shortly after I do -- but then the government itself is controlling my very level of optimism on this subject by reaching right into my very brain and deciding which chemical activity can and cannot take place therein.
I say this not in a quest for self-pity -- but merely to make the strongest possible case for a rethink on drug policy in the western world.
CONCLUSION
America has a completely wrong way of looking at the world when it comes to drugs -- one which racist politicians have successfully manufactured in order to remake the world in their own violent, racist and xenophobic image -- and with the help of their very victims!
Even if I cannot awaken the world to the many unrecognized evils of drug prohibition, there may yet be money in it for someone who takes up the baton when I lay it down. For, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed:
"The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody."
And sadly enough, the Western world has generally accepted the following two demonstrably false ideas: 1) that drug use has no upsides, and 2) that drug prohibition has no downsides.
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."
"The irreducible core of the disease theory of addiction is still as strong as ever -- the significant distinction between good and bad opiate use is whether it's medically supervised." --Emperors of Dreams by Mike Jay
Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the Drug War censors honest talk about drug use.
In short, until we end the Drug War, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.
Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both Drug War ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.
The outlawing of coca and opium is a crime against humanity.
Philip Jenkins reports that Rophynol had positive uses for treating mental disorders until the media called it the "date rape drug." We thus punished those who were benefitting from the drug, tho' the biggest drug culprit in date rape is alcohol. Oprah spread the fear virally.
When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.
This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.
Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.
I agree that Big Pharma drugs have wrought disaster when used in psychotherapy -- but it is common sense that non-Big Pharma drugs that elate could be used to prevent suicide and obviate the need for ECT.
High suicide rates? What a poser! Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the US has outlawed all substances that elate and inspire???
Trump is the prototypical drug warrior. He knows that he can destroy American freedoms by fearmongering. He has seen it work with the Drug War, which got rid of the 4th Amendment, religious freedom and is now going after free speech.
Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.
I know. I'm on SNRIs. But SSRIs and SNRIs are both made with materialist presumptions in mind: that the best way to change people is with a surgical strike at one-size-fits-all chemistry. That's the opposite of the shamanic holism that I favor.
The outlawing of coca and opium is a crime against humanity.