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Open letter to Wolfgang Smith

author of 'The Quantum Enigma'

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 19, 2022



I greatly enjoyed the documentary "The End of Quantum Reality," which I was happy to purchase, and am now looking forward to reading Wolfgang's refutation of Stephen Hawking's "Grand Design."

Update

Wolfgang seems to understand that the materialist quantitative bias has implications for everyone in all parts of our lives -- and yet I wonder if he can see something which almost every other smart person seems to be blind to today, and that is materialism's role in the Drug War and in our attitude toward medicine in general. We live in a world in which 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent on big pharma meds for depression -- meds justified on the scientistic ground that they fix a chemical imbalance (which is wrong for both philosophical and scientific reasons) -- and yet laughing gas and ultra-safe Ecstasy are illegal to use for depression. Why? Because today's drug researchers don't care how much the depressed laugh: they want to see quantitative proof the substance "really" works. Likewise, Descartes didn't care how animals screeched and howled -- he needed quantitative proof before he would say that animals could "really" experience pain. In other words, they want to study pain and depression in the physical world only, not the corporeal one. (As Rimbaud said: science is too slow for us -- too slow for animals and too slow for the depressed)

The results of this world view lead to reductio ad absurdum today, when doctors can ask with a straight face: "Can laughing gas help the depressed?" (see essay link below)

I've written to over 100 philosophers on this subject without receiving any response. The Drug War terrifies folk. I just hope that Wolfgang has not been fooled by the Drug War propaganda campaign of self-censorship, thanks to which one never hears of the positive use of safe but criminalized substances, either in books or movies or TV shows -- and certainly never in cop shows, this despite the fact that the kind of drugs that we demonize today have inspired entire religions -- including the Vedic/Hindu religion that influences Wolfgang today.

I hope your organization will consider speaking out philosophically against the Drug War -- for science is not free in America, insofar as study of certain botanicals has been criminalized. Galileo knew he was censored by the church but today's scientists almost unanimously pretend that they are free when they are not. Otherwise they would write disclaimers after their articles, saying that their research on a given topic was limited by Drug War laws and the way that those laws discourage project funding.

Psychoactive plant medicine has been shown to grow neurons in the brain, and yet scientists write books about depression, addiction, Alzheimer's, etc., in which they seem to be giving us the final word on these topics -- but they are actually reckoning without their host, namely the fact that they live in the time of a Drug War, which starkly limits the places in which they can search for answers and cures. Researching the therapeutic value of MDMA is particularly difficult, insofar as the anti-scientific DEA treats MDMA like highly fissionable material and requires researchers (should they be grudgingly approved to obtain the drug) to do the same.

I hope what I'm saying here means something to you, because it's hard for my ideas to gain traction in a world that's been full of Drug War lies and presuppositions ever since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 first essentially outlawed a plant (the poppy). Wolfgang has seen through so much in his work -- I hope he can see through the anti-scientific Drug War as well -- especially since the Drug War outlaws the kind of plant medicine that inspired the Indian religion with which he is so understandably fascinated.

Thanks again to Wolfgang and those who brought his important work to my attention.




The Links Police



Do you know why I pulled you over? That's right, because the Drug War gives me carte blanche to be a noxious busybody. That, plus the fact that you might be interested in the following links related to materialism and the Drug War.
To wit...

The Mother of all Western Biases
Materialism and the Drug War
Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide
Scientism and America's Drug War hypocrisy




August 19, 2022

For more information about Wolfgang Smith, visit The Philos-Sophia Initiative.



Author's Follow-up: May 3, 2023





Upon perusing various works of the author, I was sorry to notice that he shared some common drug-war prejudices, like the idea that hippies were nuts for using psychedelic medicine, or rather for using it for improper reasons. But the mindset of the 1960 hippies can only be fairly judged by contrasting it with the mindset of the age against which they were rebelling, a mindset which was responsible for thermonuclear weapons and the war in Vietnam. Against that backdrop, a huge lot of silliness and even childish irresponsibility is to be tolerated, being so immensely preferable to the alternative: namely, the world of today in which we outlaw the very psychoactive substances that inspired the philosophy of William James, those medicines whose use tends to demonstrate or at least hint at the unseen and neglected world(s) of which Smith otherwise approvingly writes.

Drug warriors like Michael Pollan look at the '60s and say: "Think of the young lives that could have been ruined back then!" To which I say: "Think of the billions of lives of all ages that could disappear thanks to the militaristic mindset against which these young lives were rebelling!"

The dinosaurs were around for 150 million years. Modern humans, thanks to that militaristic mindset, will be lucky to be around for 5,000 years.

Open Letters




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.



  • America's Blind Spot
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Drugs are not the problem
  • End the Drug War Now
  • Feedback on my first legal psilocybin session in Oregon
  • Finally, a Drug War opponent who checks all my boxes
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • God and Drugs
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca
  • How Scientific American reckons without the Drug War
  • How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant
  • How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987
  • How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big Pharma
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
  • Illusions with Professor Arthur Shapiro
  • In Defense of Religious Drug Use
  • Keep Laughing Gas Legal
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • No drugs are bad in and of themselves
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Anthony Gottlieb
  • Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
  • Open Letter to Diane O'Leary
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama
  • Open letter to Kenneth Sewell
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Open Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland Griffiths
  • Open Letter to Roy Benaroch MD
  • Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
  • Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer
  • Open Letter to Vincent Rado
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
  • Prohibitionists Never Learn
  • Regulate and Educate
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Review of When Plants Dream
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no War on Drugs
  • Solquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invited
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Teenagers and Cannabis
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Invisible Mass Shootings
  • The Menace of the Drug War
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts
  • The Pseudoscience of Mental Health Treatment
  • There is nothing to debate: the Drug War is wrong, root and branch
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting Drug War lies
  • Top 10 Problems with the Drug War
  • Unscientific American
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM
  • Whitehead and Psychedelics
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than you can Imagine
  • Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine

  • Materialism




    In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James demonstrated how materialists are blind to the depth and meaning of psychological states of ecstasy and transcendence -- or in other words the states that are peculiar to mystics like St. Teresa... and to those who use psychoactive substances like laughing gas. The medical materialist is dogmatically dismissive of such states, which explains why they can pretend that godsend medicines that elate and inspire have no positive uses whatsoever:

    "To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce."


    And so materialist scientists collaborate with the Drug War by refusing to see glaringly obvious drug benefits. They acknowledge only those benefits that they believe are visible under a microscope. The Hindu religion would not exist today had materialist scientists held Soma to such a standard. But that's the absurd pass to which prohibition eventually brings us in a society wherein materialist science is the new god: scientists are put in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to imagine new religions or not.

    This materialist bias is inspired in turn by behaviorism, the anti-indigenous doctrine of JB Watson that makes the following inhumane claim:

    "Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic."

    According to this view, the hopes and the dreams of a "patient" are to be ignored. Instead, we are to chart their physiology and brain chemistry.

    JB Watson's Behaviorism is a sort of Dr. Spock with a vengeance. It is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it would seem to justify all their inability to deal with human emotions. Unfortunately, the attitude has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive usage reports or historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide how they are doing. It is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with Drug War ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants.

    That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a bar chart.





  • America's Blind Spot
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Drugs are not the problem
  • End the Drug War Now
  • Feedback on my first legal psilocybin session in Oregon
  • Finally, a Drug War opponent who checks all my boxes
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • God and Drugs
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca
  • How Scientific American reckons without the Drug War
  • How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant
  • How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987
  • How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big Pharma
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
  • Illusions with Professor Arthur Shapiro
  • In Defense of Religious Drug Use
  • Keep Laughing Gas Legal
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • No drugs are bad in and of themselves
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Anthony Gottlieb
  • Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
  • Open Letter to Diane O'Leary
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama
  • Open letter to Kenneth Sewell
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Open Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland Griffiths
  • Open Letter to Roy Benaroch MD
  • Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
  • Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer
  • Open Letter to Vincent Rado
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
  • Prohibitionists Never Learn
  • Regulate and Educate
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Review of When Plants Dream
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no War on Drugs
  • Solquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invited
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Teenagers and Cannabis
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Invisible Mass Shootings
  • The Menace of the Drug War
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts
  • The Pseudoscience of Mental Health Treatment
  • There is nothing to debate: the Drug War is wrong, root and branch
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting Drug War lies
  • Top 10 Problems with the Drug War
  • Unscientific American
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM
  • Whitehead and Psychedelics
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than you can Imagine
  • Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine
  • A Quantum of Hubris
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Behaviorism and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Common Sense and the Drug War
  • Constructive criticism of the MAPS strategy for re-legalizing MDMA
  • David Chalmers and the Drug War
  • Dogmatic Dullards
  • Every Day and in every way, you are getting more and more bamboozled by Drug War propaganda
  • Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman
  • How AI turned William James into a Drug Warrior
  • How Bernardo Kastrup reckons without the Drug War
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Scientific Materialism Keeps Godsend Medicines from the Depressed
  • I've got a bone to pick with Jim Hogshire
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Materialism and the Drug War
  • Materialism and the Drug War Part II
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II
  • The Inhumanity of Drug Prohibition
  • The Poorly Hidden Materialist Agenda at Scientific American
  • Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk
  • What Can the Chemical Hold?
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs
  • William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas
  • Without Philosophy, Science becomes Scientism





  • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    Health is not a quality, it's a balance. To decide drug legality based on 'health' grounds thus opens a Pandora's box of different points of view.

    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.

    As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.

    The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.

    According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.

    There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.

    Most substance withdrawal would be EASY if drugs were re-legalized and we could use any substance we wanted to mitigate negative psychological effects.

    That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.

    I wish someone would tell Getty Images to start earning an honest living. I bought AI credits only to find that words like "mushrooms" and "drugs" could not be used. Nor "blood," nor "violence." And they refuse to refund my $14,99. Who is their service for, Ozzie Harriet?

    Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.


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






    Re-Legalize Opium Now
    Doctor Feel Bad


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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