author of 'Medicine's Bad Philosophy Threatens Your Health'
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 25, 2022
Good morning, Professor O'Leary.
I am a 63-year-old philosophy major who writes essays against America's Drug War. Today, I received an email from the IAI advising me of an article you had written entitled "Medicine's Bad Philosophy Threatens Your Health." This interested me greatly because I have been writing on this topic since I founded my Drug War Philosopher website over three years ago now.
As a lifelong depressive, my thesis has always been that materialist science (in collaboration with drug-war prohibition) has turned me into an eternal patient. It was the search for a reductive cure for depression that created the unacknowledged pharmacological dystopia in which we live today, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma "meds" for life -- this while we outlaw godsend antidepressant plant medicines and fungi that have inspired entire religions. In other words, we are living in a real-life version of "The Stepford Wives," with Big Pharma 12 attempting to spin-off sequels such as "Stepford Husbands" and "Stepford Children" (in the latter case by promoting the prophylactic use of their dependence-causing meds). The main long-term effect of these meds, based on my decades of experience with taking them, is foggy thinking and a mild tranquilization: precisely the kind of mental trouble that the Partnership for a Drug Free America 3 did its best to blame on Mother Nature's psychoactive bounty in its mendacious "frying pan" ad of the 1980s.
I do not wish to presume upon your time, so I will resist the temptation to develop my thesis further in this email. However, if you would be interested in the thoughts of a layperson who has been a lifelong victim of the materialist mindset that you yourself are denouncing, then I invite you to read some of the many essays that I've written on this topic, including...
Meanwhile, I will search for a way to read the entirety of your IAI article, since my current non-membership in IAI precludes me from doing so.
Thanks so much for your time!
August 25, 2022
Will Diane respond? Tune in for the next exciting episode of "Open Letter to Diane O'Leary"! Of course, one may say, "Of course she'll respond, Madam Editor" -- but then the penny has yet to drop for many academics viz. the Drug War's link to both materialism 4 and the psychiatric pill mill 5 .
Author's Follow-up: November 8, 2022
The good news is, Diane did get back to me. The bad news is, she left me with the link to the same paywall that had stopped me from accessing her article in the first place. Fair cop. You've got to pay to play, right? There is no free lunch. Still, I thought that she was going to talk to me at least a little bit about the price of tea in China, i.e., about the issues described above, not simply give me a 404 page redirect. Like most -- indeed all -- academicians, she won't let poor Rudolphs like myself join in any intellectual reindeer games. No, really, I understand: you pay thru the nose for your degree, you don't want some layperson pretending to know something too. At least she didn't upbraid me for the supposed prolixity of my missive. Rick Strassman, the author of "The DMT Molecule," dressed me down good and proper for the length of my query to him. I wouldn't have minded, except the prose in question was a rare outpouring of the heart. Consequently, when I was rebuffed, I felt like I had been weeping in a confessional and the priest had turned to me and shouted: "Get on with it already!"
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
After watching my mother suffer because of the drug war, I hate to hear people tell me that the problem is drugs. WRONG! That's a western colonialist viewpoint. God loved his creation (see Genesis). He did not make trash. We need to use entheogenic medicines wisely.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.
Materialist scientists are drug war collaborators. They are more than happy to have their fight against idealism rigged by drug law, which outlaws precisely those substances whose use serves to cast their materialism into question.
The sad fact is that America regularly arrests people whose only crime is that they are keeping performance anxiety at bay... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
The Drug War treats doctors like potential criminals and it treats the rest of us like children. Prohibition does not end drug risks: it just outsources them to minorities and other vulnerable populations.
Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.
Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
The Drug War is a crime against humanity.