The Brainless Initiative
why it's time to REALLY study the brain
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 10, 2024
At a recent get-together, a healthcare expert assured me that solving crossword puzzles does not help one avoid contracting Alzheimer's Disease in their old age, that we can focus all we want, but if dementia has 'got our ticket,' then the disease will be sure to punch it eventually. This conclusion is not surprising coming from a materialist scientist, who sees the individual as a generic biological widget subject to the inexorable laws of a fully reified illness like Alzheimer's. But even in the age of the Drug War, the medical journals are full of instances in which the human will has altered the course of a seemingly 'destined' illness. I say 'even in the age of the Drug War,' for the Drug War severely limits the psychoactive arsenal that is available for us when it comes to 'unthinking' illness and thinking 'health' instead.
The fact is, no one yet knows what the limits are to mental power. And why not? Because no society has set out with the goal of finding out. Typical tribal societies use psychoactive medicines, but for specific ritual and religious purposes, not as part of an ongoing search for the limits of the human mind. Western societies, on the other hand, demonize psychoactive substances wholesale and so are totally unaware of the way that they can enhance our mental powers. Even when such powers are grudgingly acknowledged, they are demonized with slanderous phrases such as 'getting high' and 'getting wasted.'
But there is a third way of dealing with the fact that the world is full of psychoactive substances - and will be increasingly full of them thanks to the progress of chemical synthesis. That third way involves using psychoactive drugs to leverage the powers of the human mind to fight illness, improve quality of life, and - who knows - perhaps even learn something about the nature of reality itself1.
And how do we accomplish this? By studying drugs, not with the help of materialist scientists whose interest is in the microscopic, but rather with the help of psychonauts whose focus is on the drug user's experience itself in all its subjective and holistic glory2. The possibilities for research are legion and would be limited only by our own creativity, especially when we evaluate the use of various combinations of drugs for certain persons in certain situations with certain desired outcomes in mind: not just resistance to disease, but increased comprehension, increased empathy, increased patience, etc.
But the western world is blind to such a way of thinking. We have a previous commitment to the drug-hating religious ideology of Mary Baker Eddy. And so we launch a multi-billion-dollar BRAIN initiative while simultaneously outlawing all the substances that could help us demonstrate the powers of that brain3.
Author's Follow-up: March 10, 2024
As HG Wells told us, health is not a thing but rather a balance of qualities4. We may find no direct correlation between completing crossword puzzles and avoiding Alzheimer's Disease, but that does not mean that puzzle-solving does not help. Completing a crossword puzzle can trigger other mental improvements that trigger other mental improvements that trigger other mental improvements. We're basically talking about the butterfly effect here, by which every action in a system ultimately affects the entire system and cannot be parceled off as being separate from the whole. We should at least remain agnostic about the powers of such activities until we have fully studied the power of the human brain, and that's a task that we have scarcely even begun, thanks to the fact that we have outlawed almost all the ways of improving that organ.
Notes:
1: As William James wrote: "No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." (up)
2: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism (up)
3: The Brain Initiative (up)
4: Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument against the Scientifically Organized State (up)
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.
Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.
"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary
ECT is like euthanasia. Neither make sense in the age of prohibition.
Who would have thought back in 1776 that Americans would eventually have to petition their government for the right to even possess a damn mushroom. The Drug War has destroyed America.
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
The existence of a handful of bad outcomes of drug use does not justify substance prohibition... any more than the existence of drunkards justifies a call for liquor prohibition. Instead, we need to teach safe use and offer a wide choice of uncontaminated psychoactive drugs.
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.
It is a truism to say that we cannot change the world and that therefore we have to change ourselves -- but the drug war outlaws even this latter option.
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.
Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us
Looking for God in All the Wrong Places
The Drug War is the Perfect Storm
Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass
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