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The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





February 2, 2021



If an American has a negative response to an anti-depressant, we sigh and say, "Oh, dear, they had a bad reaction." We ascribe no blame to the Big Pharma anti-depressant. The bad reaction is the fault of the user: their system simply fails to respond appropriately to the drug in question.

Update: May 17, 2025

If an American has a negative response to a psychoactive plant medicine, we snarl and say, "Oh, dear, that is an evil drug!"

It's this kind of muddled thinking about substances that makes the Drug War the great philosophical problem of our time, because the Drug War is propped up and supported on a framework of bogus hypocritical assumptions like this.

Take the old canard of the "crutch," the idea that we should not use Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines because they are crutches.

Was coca a crutch when it helped HG Wells and Jules Verne write great stories? Was opium a crutch when it increased Benjamin Franklin's creativity and friendliness? Were psychedelics a crutch when they provided Plato with metaphysical insights at the Eleusinian mysteries1? Was the natural substance called Soma a crutch when it single-handedly (or single-plantedly) inspired the Vedic religion?

If any substances are "crutches," they are the tranquilizing meds of Big Pharma, which, since the introduction of lithium, have been designed, not to help folks achieve self-actualization in life, but to render them more docile and accepting of the status quo. (When Antonio Moniz won the Nobel Prize for lobotomy, it was the nurses who were cheering, not the patients.) In this way, Big Pharma meds are crutches designed to make the patient forget about the need to walk on their own two feet.



Author's Follow-up:

May 17, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




The Drug War is the great philosophical problem of our time. And yet most philosophers are in denial. I am the only philosopher on the planet who formally protested to the FDA about its plans to treat laughing gas as a "drug."2 The use of nitrous oxide inspired the ontology of William James. He conjured philosophers to use the substance to investigate the nature of reality. And yet our government has outlawed such research by making the gas in question harder to use than ever. Laughing gas was already shamefully unavailable to the depressed as a practical matter. In a sane and compassionate world, we would provide laughing-gas kits to the severely depressed just as we provide epi pens to those with severe allergies -- but Americans actually prefer that the depressed kill themselves rather than use substances that have been outlawed by racist politicians.

And what is the "justification" for outlawing such substances? The fact that white American young people have found ways to use the substances dangerously. These are the same white American young people whom the prohibitionists refuse to teach about safe drug use! And now they are going to tell all demographics in the world that they cannot use these substances because said substances might harm the local white kids whom America refuses to educate.

Americans are so outrageously presumptuous -- and so blind to all the stakeholders in their drug debates. They have no interest in the needs of those suffering silently behind closed doors. They have no interest in academic freedom. They have no interest in the drive-by shootings that drug prohibition has brought to inner city neighborhoods. They have no interest in the fact that drug prohibition has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America. They just want to crack down on the drug-related incidents that are highlighted in our financially suborned media -- the problems that they themselves have caused by refusing to educate our children about the fact that they live in a world full of psychoactive substances, not thanks to drug dealers, but rather thanks to God himself, or to Mother Nature, or to evolution, etc. That's a fact of life. It behooves us as free and supposedly scientific individuals to learn about these substances and to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity rather than to demonize and fear them. Meanwhile, we must understand that shouting phrases like "Fentanyl kills" is exactly like shouting "Fire bad!" -- all such statements promote the idea that we should fear potentially dangerous substances rather than learning how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.

*william*
*fent*

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: Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas (up)







    Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.

    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 problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.

    But that's the whole problem with Robert Whitaker's otherwise wonderful critique of Big Pharma. Like almost all non-fiction authors today, he reckons without the drug war, which gave Big Pharma a monopoly in the first place.

    Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.

    We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).

    Science keeps telling us that godsends have not been "proven" to work. What? To say that psilocybin has not been proven to work is like saying that a hammer has not yet been proven to smash glass. Why not? Because the process has not yet been studied under a microscope.

    The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.

    America never ended prohibition. It just redirected prohibition from alcohol to all of alcohol's competitors.

    This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.


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






    Taking the Drug War for Granted
    America's Anti-scientific Standards for Psychotherapeutic Medicine


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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