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Open Letter to Erowid

about a misleading 2018 article by Karolina Zieba

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





August 22, 2020



Erowid is (per its own description) 'a member-supported organization providing access to reliable, non-judgmental information about psychoactive plants, chemicals, and related issues.' I sent its editors the following email today to alert them to the philosophically shallow reasoning in a 2018 article entitled 'In case you choose not to say no to drugs, kids,' published in The Student Newspaper.

2025 UPDATE
Update: May 08, 2025

See also &761&.


This is not exactly a correction, but I could not find an email address that precisely covered my reason for writing you today.

I'm writing in reference to The Student Newspaper article that you cite, apparently because it contains a favorable mention of Erowid. The article is entitled 'In Case You Choose Not to Say No to Drugs, Kids.'

Although we might praise the author of that post for 'having her heart in the right place,' her article demonstrates clearly that she is under the influence of Drug War propaganda, which she has apparently accepted uncritically.

Why, for instance, should we be telling kids to say no to 'drugs' in the first place, when drugs are essentially Mother Nature's plant medicines? Why do we not also want them to say no to 'Big Pharma meds' to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted?

These are just two philosophical issues that loom unnoticed in Karolina Zieba's article. I critique the article in more detail in two essays on my site at abolishthedea.com (see links below). I invite you to read them. I've devoted two essays to this one article because I think that the staying power of drug-war prohibition has been due in large part to the philosophical shallowness of many of its would-be opponents, folks who write half-heartedly on the topic, taking the anemic and misinformed line that 'Illegal drug use is unnecessary, but it's going to happen anyway, so we might as well allow it.'

I fear that, like Karolina, many Erowid readers (perhaps editors, too, for all I know) may 'have their heart in the right place' when it comes to these topics and yet fail to comprehend the full evil of the Drug War, because they have been bamboozled by Drug War lies, propaganda, and the drug-war revision of history thanks to which Americans never hear of the positive use of currently illegal substances. Perhaps they've also been bamboozled by well-meaning authors like Karolina herself who fail to grasp the many injustices that are perpetrated daily in the name of the Drug War: from stifled research on drugs to fight Alzheimer's to the use of electroshock therapy that could have been avoided had medical godsend plants been available to treat depression.

I also write because, by prominently listing Karolina's article, Erowid seems to be (at least to some degree) endorsing its content, and I therefore feel compelled to write you to explain why I believe that such an endorsement is misplaced.






July 18, 2022



Brian shot, Brian scored. Yes, writers like Karolina seem to share the Libertarian view of 'drugs' -- they agree with the Drug Warrior that this politically defined category of substances is indeed horrible -- but since such horrible substances exist and people seem to want to use them (sigh...), well, doggone it, we shouldn't go overboard in trying to punish them!

With friends like that in the drug-law-reform business, who needs enemies?

The fact is that there are no such things as 'drugs.' Why not? Because there are no substances that are bad in and of themselves, without regard to how, why, when and where they are used and by whom. Even the highly toxic Botox can be used in safe doses and in safe ways.

Besides, the kinds of substances that we demonize today have inspired entire religions (including the Vedic-Hindu religion and the mushroom and coca cults of Latin America) and been used wisely for good reasons by such western luminaries as Marcus Aurelius, Benjamin Franklin, HG Wells, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Richard Feynman, Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft -- along with a who's who of philosophical greats including Plato, who got his ideas about the afterlife from his psychedelic-fueled experience at the Eleusinian Mysteries1.

Finally, never mind what happened in the past: once we stop demonizing substances, we'll see that (Drug Warrior lies not withstanding) psychoactive drugs can be strategically used for all sorts of mind-building purposes. Morphine could be used intermittently to improve our appreciation of Mother Nature. Opium could be used intermittently to improve our knack for creative visualization. And coca (as HG Wells and Jules Verne well knew) can be used wisely to increase our mental focus for tasks like writing books.

But America's Office of National Drug Control Policy is committed to ignoring any possible beneficial uses for these 'drugs.' In fact, the organization's ground rules actually require them to ignore any potential benefits of vilified psychoactive substances, meaning, of course, that the organization in question should be referred to as the Office of National Drug Control Propaganda.

With this backstory in mind, we can see how would-be drug-law reformers (like the Liberal Media and Libertarians) are actually damning drugs with their faint praise of them. I fear that they have all received one too many teddy bears from the State Police in their formative years in return for having 'just said no' to the psychoactive bounty of Mother Nature.



Author's Follow-up: March 8, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up



Many drug-law reformers are cowed into silence about obvious drug benefits by the mainstream party line that doctors are the experts about drugs -- and so only THEY can talk about drugs advisedly.

But this is the entire problem: our materialist doctors are not -- and cannot -- be the experts when it comes to psychoactive medicine for the simple reason that they are blinded to all obvious drug benefits by their implicit belief in the behaviorist principles of JB Watson, the belief that all that matters is what can be quantified2. This is why today's doctors cannot figure out whether laughing gas, or MDMA, or coca, or opium, or psilocybin can help the depressed. All of these have OBVIOUS benefits for the depressed -- at some dose, at some time, for certain people. THIS IS PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMON SENSE. But today's doctors are dogmatically incapable of using common sense. They do not care about positive reports of drug use. They do not care about anecdote, they do not care about history. Opium and coca have inspired entire religious movements and been considered panaceas by various cultures in the past. So when materialist doctors tell us that these drugs have no known uses, they are not being scientific: they are being political. It's just that the inhumane assumptions of behaviorism give their prejudice a veneer of 'science.'



Author's Follow-up:

May 08, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




The attentive reader (should there be such) will have noticed that I have yet to fulfill my recent promise to philosophically evaluate the Erowid website.

This is because I have realized upon digging further into the site that I am not yet qualified to perform such a review. Some of the qualms that I originally thought I had about the resource are probably the result of my failure to investigate it thoroughly. So stay tuned.

See? I'm not such a bad guy. I try to be fair.

I am looking forward to reading the drug summary pages in particular.

What was my concern in the first place?

My concern was that the site might tend to place potential godsend meds in a harsh light by failing to put the downsides of use in context. If Erowid covered shark encounters, for instance, there would be plenty of reports about shark attacks. My question then would be: how successfully does the website put those attack reports in context, so that the casual site visitor does not come away with the idea that sharks are a clear and present danger for anyone who so much as dips a toe in the ocean?

Ideally, any horror story about a statistically super-safe drug should have a disclaimer reminding the reader that the gnarly outcomes being documented are extremely unlikely to occur. What's more, this disclaimer should appear on the same page as the horror story. The mere fact that the drug's relative safety might be documented elsewhere on Erowid is not enough. A casual site visitor who sees the horror story out of context is likely to come to a negative conclusion about the drug in question without bothering to perform any further research on Erowid. To the contrary, their next Google search could very well include the drug name plus the words "horror stories," since they are now associating the drug with negative outcomes only.

These are not yet criticisms of Erowid, just a foretaste of what I fear I might find upon a closer investigation. I will be delving further to see if Erowid is actually guilty as charged -- or as initially feared.

I also hope to find that the "main page" for each drug makes it clear, to the extent possible, how risky the use of the drug is compared to the use of other drugs -- and to the performance of other life activities. If I am more likely to win the lottery than to experience a given drug downside, then tell me. Give me at least some idea of what is foreground and what is background when it comes to potential dangers, do not just overwhelm me with acontextual data.

Again, I am not (yet) charging Erowid with any shortcomings, merely enumerating my existing qualms prior to truly investigating the site.

--

The below text is from comments appended to my essay entitled &756&:

This is the shortcoming of the Erowid approach, by the way. It is fine to have a bunch of raw data in the form of user reports, but we need to establish a field of pharmacologically savvy experts who can parse and summarize such usage reports into an actionable format for folks in a variety of life situations. Unfortunately, it will be impossible to have recognized experts in this line without first re-legalizing drugs. Right now, we are told that materialist doctors are the experts about drugs, but that is an obvious lie. These doctors are blind to all the obvious benefits of drug use because they are wearing the twin blinders of behaviorism and the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. The real experts will eventually be actual drug users: empathic individuals who know the upsides and downsides of a wide variety of drugs and can tell us which make sense given our own particular goals of usage. They will be able to tell us how the chosen substances have been used effectively and the ways in which use has backfired. Moreover, they will be there at the first sign of things going wrong so that they can get us back on course, by fighting drugs with other drugs when necessary and appropriate.

Today, we urge folks to report certain minor physical problems to a doctor in order to be sure that these problems do not betoken something more serious, such as cancer. In the future, responsible Drug Warriors will go to experts to report usage problems so that timely drug-aided interventions can be undertaken to keep the user from unwanted addictions and dependencies.

In other words, a future world will use common sense when it comes to drugs. Imagine that!



Author's Follow-up:

May 22, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


Erowid is ghosting me, by the way. I think I'll have to write them about a rich uncle of mine who was looking for ideas about donating to good causes.

*erowid*

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."

  • 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


  • Notes:

    1: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
    2: The purblind coldness of the Behaviorist doctrine is made clear in the following words of its founder, JB Watson, as quoted in the 2015 book "Paradox" by Margaret Cuonzo: "Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic." (Surely, Watson was proactively channeling Dr. Spock of the original Star Trek series.) (up)







    Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?

    The Shipiba have learned to heal human beings physically, psychologically and spiritually with what they call "onanyati," plant allies and guides, such as Bobinsana, which "envelops seekers in a cocoon of love." You know: what the DEA would call "junk."

    Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.

    The Hindu religion was inspired by drug use.

    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.

    Governor Kotek is "dealing" with the homelessness problem in Oregon by arresting her way out of it, in fealty to fearmongering drug warriors.

    In 1886, coca enthusiast JJ Tschudi referred to prohibitionists as 'kickers.' He wrote: "If we were to listen to these kickers, most of us would die of hunger, for the reason that nearly everything we eat or drink has fallen under their ban."

    The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for withholding godsend medicine from the depressed. Here is just one typical drug-user report that appeared in "Pihkal": "A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."

    People talk about how dangerous Jamaica is -- but no one reminds us that it is all due to America's Drug War. Yes, cannabis and psilocybin are legal there, but plenty of drugs are not, and even if they were, their illegality elsewhere would lead to fierce dealer rivalry.

    Scientists are not the experts on psychoactive medicines. The experts are painters and artists and spiritualists -- and anyone else who simply wants to be all they can be in life. Scientists understand nothing of such goals and aspirations.


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






    The Drug War Board Game
    Heroin versus Alcohol


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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