It's time to stop blaming others for the problems caused by drug prohibition
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 5, 2025
While I was looking about last year for that exquisitely rare article known as an ayahuasca ceremony inside the United States, I discovered some promising information from an outfit called Soul Quest in Florida which appeared to be facilitating such get-togethers in the Sunshine State.
Research soon revealed, however, that the organization had been disbanded in the aftermath of a death which had occurred on the premises. I did not even bother to read the details of the case, because what I was struck by as a philosopher was the hypocritical hysteria to which this incident gave rise. It was not just the Drug Warriors who were outraged, but so were ayahuasca proponents, like Steve Urquhart. The conclusion of everyone seemed to be that Soul Quest had scored a point for drug prohibition by holding an ayahuasca ceremony without proper safety protocols.
I write this essay because someone has got to point out the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room, namely, the fact that the Drug War has done everything it can to make such ceremonies dangerous by failing to regulate product and failing to teach safe use. Indeed, it prefers to scare Americans about drugs rather than educating them about them. From my perspective, the people at Soul Quest were heroes, for they alone took the enormous risks that make it possible for Americans to experience the time-honored transcendence of the Andes. I could literally find no other organization in the states that was offering such ceremonies. And while any death is tragic in itself, the fact is that the group would have been treated very differently had they experienced a fatality in any other risky activity imaginable. It is only when a death occurs during so-called 'drug use' that the axes come out to demand a victim in the name of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. (For more on this case, see below.)
I am not going to get into the subject of what safety level is appropriate for a stateside ayahuasca ceremony and how that safety level should be attained. My point is merely that the Drug War makes it impossible to establish such safety criteria. Sure, in a sane world, there would be established safety protocols championed by curanderos, but we need the return of freedom to even begin to freely talk about such things. My point is that the real villain of the piece remains the anti-scientific Drug War and the substance prohibition for which it stands. Meanwhile, I should add, if only for the record, that some of us have always denied that government had the right to outlaw Mother Nature in the first place, which is what they do when they outlaw ayahuasca. Thomas Jefferson would never have signed off on such a huge governmental power grab. That is why he was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 1 in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants in violation of the natural law upon which he had founded America.
I practice what I preach, by the way. I eventually attended an ayahuasca ceremony facilitated by former members of Soul Quest, complete with medicine provided by a traditional Colombian curandero. I had no fear for my life because I knew that all risky activities - from mountain climbing to substance use - are just that: risky activities. I was not going to play along with the Drug Warrior by pretending that the risk of drug use was somehow qualitatively different and more sinister than any other risky activity on earth. Besides, my goal was not to live forever, which seems to be the assumption that the FDA makes when trying to 'protect me' from myself when it comes to psychoactive medicine. I wanted to experience the time-honored medicine that had helped inspire the Cosmovision of the Andes, the kind of holistic approach to life that is sorely lacking in the materialistic west. The folks from Soul Quest made that possible for me. They shouldered the legal risk associated with such ceremonies in the litigious west. That makes them heroes in my book, not villains.
Author's Follow-up: March 5, 2025
I said I was not going to get into the specifics of the Soul Quest case, but I cannot stop myself -- not after seeing Mattha Busby's article in Vice. Mattha personalizes the case with multiple photos of the 22-year-old Brandon Begley who died of an epileptic fit during an ayahuasca ceremony. Mattha makes Soul Quest out to be the villain for not calling an ambulance more rapidly, hence the title of his article, 'Bankrupt Ayahuasca Church Where Negligence Led to Death. 2'
As the only way to even potentially reach the Vice reporter was on the X platform, I responded to his article with the following three tweets:
1) 'It is our legislators who were negligent when they outlawed Mother Nature, thereby bringing about a huge raft of negative results for which today's reporters never hold them responsible.'
2) 'If you could be arrested for calling an ambulance, that is going to enter into your decision about when to call for help, even if it does so subconsciously.'
And finally...
3) 'In my book, the people at Soul Quest are heroes. They took on the enormous risk so that I could experience the time-honored ayahuasca of the Andes. If they reacted slowly in Brandon's case, it was because of drug laws. DRUG LAWS are the villain, not Soul Quest.'
By the way, there is something sinister about the media's habit of personalizing cases. That approach is so often misused, and Drug Warrior's love it. Take the death of 100-pound Leah Betts after dancing for hours while taking Ecstasy. Her death was turned into a cause célèbre for cracking down on Ecstasy use in Britain. News stories could not show enough pictures of Leah as a carefree teenager. There were billboards erected around the country designed to tug at the heart strings and show that this 100-pound young girl had been killed by a mean, nasty drug. Imagine if someone had personalized the case of alcohol with such photos. The country would run out of billboards. But that latter case cannot be imagined, of course, because people do not think that way about alcohol.
The fact was, of course, that the Drug War had killed Leah Betts by refusing to regulate product and by frightening her about drugs rather than educating her about them. Had she simply been told to remain hydrated while engaging in vigorous activity while under the influence, she would be alive today.
This is the point that is missed in articles like Mattha's. If Soul Quest was negligent, it was only the inevitable result of the warped incentives and disincentives that had been put in place by outlawing psychoactive substances in the first place. The real villain of the piece was drug prohibition. Mattha would seem to realize this based on a brief search into his life story and interests. And yet his article on the Soul Quest case gives the Drug War a huge mulligan for leading to unnecessary death, pinning all the blame instead on the easy target, the guys who took on enormous legal risk so that transcendence-seekers like myself would not have to. Until we start blaming drug prohibition for its decisive role in causing problems like this, it will remain a cancer on the body politic, eroding American freedoms and diverting attention from the real causes of social problems -- beginning with drug prohibition itself.
This huge social bias against 'drugs' creates disincentives to best practices in many areas of life. Take clinical drug trials of psychoactive drugs. In performing such studies for groups like the FDA, researchers are well aware of the organization's enormous prejudice against psychoactive medicines, demonstrated by the fact that they ignore all glaringly positive uses of drugs and all equally obvious downsides of prohibition. In light of this enormous prejudice, it is very tempting not to be entirely forthcoming about downsides of psychoactive drugs -- because researchers know that the pharma-backed FDA is going to grasp at any downside, however slight, to use as a fig leaf to cover their enormous bias against psychoactive drugs and so 'justify' their disapproval of the same. Meanwhile, of course, alcohol kills 178,000 a year in America and it's not seen as a problem. Meanwhile, the FDA approves of Big Pharma 34 drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself 5 . Meanwhile, the FDA approves of shock therapy that damages the brain. And yet we wonder why groups would not wish to be entirely open with this money-driven behemoth about psychoactive downsides?
Discussion Topics
May 23, 2025
Attention Teachers and Professors: Brian is not writing these essays for his health. (Well, in a way he is, actually, but that's not important now.) His goal is to get the world thinking about the anti-democratic and anti-scientific idiocy of the War on Drugs. You can stimulate your students' brainwashed grey matter on this topic by having them read the above essay and then discuss the following questions as a group!
How does the Drug War make it difficult to ensure safety at ayahuasca ceremonies?
In what sense can the people at SoulQuest be considered heroes?
Explain how personalized stories about so-called drug victims are extremely misleading, statistically speaking, and as such constitute drug-war propaganda.
Explain the 'enormous prejudices' of the FDA in evaluating psychoactive drugs.
Drug warriors have taught us that honesty about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.
"The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.
It's really an insurance concern, however, disguised as a concern for public health. Because of America's distrust of "drugs," a company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.
Americans think that fighting drugs is more important than freedom. We have already given up on the fourth amendment. Nor is the right to religion honored for those who believe in indigenous medicines. Pols are now trying to end free speech about drugs as well.
Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
In "Psychedelic Refugee," Rosemary Leary writes:
"Fueled by small doses of LSD, almost everything was amusing or weird." -- Rosemary Leary
In a non-brainwashed world, such testimony would suggest obvious ways to help the depressed.
Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
Saying "Fentanyl kills" is philosophically equivalent to saying "Fire bad!" Both statements are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as safely as possible for human benefit.
Drug warriors have taught us that honesty about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.
