Three things that set me apart from other drug pundits
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 16, 2025
I know what you're thinking, reader:
What makes these drug essays of yours so special, Brian, right? What makes your essays different from the essays and books that one could find by, say, Jacob Sullum1 or Thomas Szasz2 or Mike Jay3 or Carl Hart4 or Andrew Weil5 or Rick Strassman6 or Terence McKenna7, etc. etc.?
Well, here are three things that set me apart:
1) I insist that there are obvious potential common-sense benefits for drug use that none of these authors seem to notice -- or at least that they fail to highlight sufficiently.
I maintain that any drug that inspires and elates can be used (by some people, in some circumstances) as an anti-depressant in a common-sense routine which does not require laboratory trials to justify. Science-loving Americans refuse to notice this because they have placed medical personnel in charge of mind, mood and spirituality, a move which I maintain is the mother of all category errors. For people seeking self-fulfillment in life do not need the help of scientists and microscopes. The expert on my own internal mental life is myself and only I can judge what works for me given my unique personality, my unique circumstances in life, my unique biochemistry, my unique upbringing, etc. Speaking for myself as a chronic depressive: One hit of laughing gas a day could set me up for life, besides helping me follow in the footsteps of William James8 who asked that philosophers investigate gas-altered states to learn about the nature of reality. An occasional opium pipe could also work wonders. The occasional use of phenethylamines would be obviously beneficial as well, as anyone can see from reading the ecstatic drug-user reports from "Pihkal." I would even add that cocaine could be of occasional use (though I should probably redact that observation lest I thereby cause coronaries in a brainwashed readership which has been safeguarded their whole life from reading any positive reports of drug use). Nor is it just the actual use of such drugs which would improve my mood: the mere anticipation of use would inspire me and improve my mood by giving me something to look forward to. That is just psychological common sense. And yet the medical doctor says, "What do YOU know about it, Brian? We doctors are the experts in how you think and feel, thank you very much!" And so the lab-coated technicians continue to study drugs at a glacial pace, in a clinical environment that has been bought and paid for by Big Pharma itself. Cui bono? Not the 'patient,' that's for sure.
In many ways then, our task as champions of mental freedom is to claw back our rights to medicine from the medical establishment itself, which has set itself up as experts on things which it knows nothing about: namely, the human dimension of mentation, emotions and spirituality.
2) I have pointed out the fact that Americans never do a proper risk/benefit analysis for any drug.
The FDA, for instance, never properly considers the risks of NOT re-legalizing a drug. So they childishly think that they are saving lives by making MDMA9 and laughing gas10 and opium11 and cocaine12 illegal -- when they are actually killing people and destroying lives. People commit suicide when we outlaw substances that inspire and elate13. People undergo unnecessary shock therapy14. People engage in risky drug-finding (and even drug-making) activity when we outlaw drugs. And yet the FDA never considers any of these to be downsides of criminalizing a substance15. But then prohibitionists have never cared about the health of the people. Fifty-thousand Americans died from rotgut in the 1920s when the U.S. government approved wood alcohol as an additive to liquor during prohibition16. Such downsides are somehow invisible to prohibitionists.
3) I am one of the only Drug War opponents to point out the significance of the psychiatric pill mill to the drugs debate.
I maintain that no one properly understands the War on Drugs who does not see it in light of America's greatest mass dependency of all time, the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma meds for life17. The fact that this dependency is invisible to Americans, or even viewed as a good thing, exposes the medical assumptions behind the Drug War and how it leads to absurd biases against any drug that cannot be proven effective from a reductionist viewpoint. This approach to drugs is nothing less than pharmacological colonialism, for it leads us to denigrate holistic healing and to search instead for a holy grail of targeted intervention, and this in a country in which we fear drugs? Why? Clearly, not because drugs can cause dependency. We just want to make sure that Americans are dependent on the right drugs, sold by the right people, with predictable outcomes that will not rock the boat when it comes to the consumeristic and militaristic status quo. Speaking of which, it is no coincidence that the two Summers of Love of the Anglophone world in the 20th century were shut down in the name of fighting drugs: the hippie movement of 1960s America and the rave scene of the 1990s UK18. There is nothing that Drug Warriors fear so much as peace, love and understanding.
Speaking of antidepressants: I seem to be the only one in the world who finds an irony in the fact that we praise people for taking Big Pharma drugs every day of their life, and yet we would be outraged (and might even call the local police) were we to learn that they were peaceably smoking an opium pipe at home every night of their life. This absurd difference of reactions tells us everything we need to know about the folly of drug prohibition: it is based on a host of assumptions that do not stand up to the light of philosophical scrutiny. If I have to be reliant on a drug for life, then I should at least be able to choose the drug that creates the symptoms that I myself value. The fact that my interests are not consulted shows us that the Drug War is all about instilling mindsets that are of benefit to Big Pharma, not to individuals. Indeed, the individual does not exist according to Big Pharma, except as a biochemical widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionist science.
CONCLUSION
I have thus briefly attempted to explain how I am different from other drug pundits, but now let me tell you WHY I am different. The answer is simply that, unlike most other authors on such topics, I have skin in the game. My life story is full of instances in which a little positive reinforcement from the wise use of drugs could have made my life infinitely more enjoyable and more meaningful. The reader will have to take my word for that since I have neither the time nor patience (nor, alas, the fan base) to write an autobiography. Suffice it to say that I have used demonized drugs that have given me whole new ways of seeing the world -- and in so doing revealed to me the enormous inadequacy of the legal medicines onto which I have been shunted off by drug prohibition and thereby turned into a demoralized ward of the healthcare state. This is why I react excitedly to things that other drug pundits would take in stride. Take for instance the book by Mike Jay called "Emperor of Dreams19." Though Mike is clearly on the right side of the drugs debate as a whole, his attempts to give a 'balanced' view of the 19th-century opium debate bothered me. Yes, I am sure that opium merchants had their biases, just as missionaries had theirs. But this effort to be "fair" completely loses track of the 6,400-pound gorilla in the room: the fact that common sense itself tells us that panaceas like opium have potential benefits for the depressed and anxious when used in a wide array of readily imaginable protocols. This is common sense, despite the siren call of modern medicine to make us look in a microscope to see what REALLY works for human beings. This is why I am frustrated with authors who imply that there are no easy answers here, that drug re-legalization is just too fraught a topic. To the contrary: there are obvious godsends available for the depressed even as we speak and it is long past time that folks like myself were able to use them again -- preferably in a world in which we learned about such substances and devised protocols to use them as wisely as possible for human benefit. Until then, Americans will be troglodytes when it comes to drugs, saying things like "Fentanyl kills!" and "Oxy kills!" -- statements that are philosophically equivalent to shouting "Fire bad!20"
Author's Follow-up:
June 17, 2025
I can easily imagine the kneejerk objections to this essay, the objections of a readership that has been protected for a lifetime from all positive reports of drug use. It will be argued that no one really "needs" the kinds of drugs that I am talking about here. Some readers will even proudly point out that they have never personally felt the need for such substances, thank me very much. They will say that I must have Freudian issues which will require a lifetime of talk therapy instead and membership in a 12-step group in which I can affirm my faith in a vaguely defined Christian God, etc. But this is the whole problem: that we have been taught from grade school that each of us is qualified to get inside the "skins" of our fellows and pontificate as to what they need in this life and when. We might just as well opine that our next-door neighbor has no need of aspirin or penicillin. But what do WE know about it? And even if we ourselves have a general animosity toward those latter two medicines, we may yet find ourselves in desperate need of such substances in the future thanks to circumstances that we cannot now envision.
Incidentally, it is worth remembering how the medical establishment helped deprive us of psychoactive medicines in the first place. As Thomas Szasz points out in "Our Right to Drugs21," we lost our right to drugs as part of a crack down on patent medicines that contained a wide variety of drugs, including alcohol, opiates, coca, and heroin. The medical establishment claimed that these drugs did not really "work," but that was false. These medicines affected people's outlook on their "illnesses" and so worked in an holistic and psychological fashion, one which materialist science is far from understanding. When the medical establishment claimed that they did not "work," they simply meant that the patent medicines did not work in a reductive cause-and-effect manner that could be clearly isolated and identified under a microscope. And so the initial outlawing of these patent medicines was already based on a dogmatic blindness to their obvious beneficial effects. Who cared if the use of an opiate-laced tonic ended your cold? It only did so through seemingly indirect means and so that did not "count" as a real cure.
We see here the rise of the doubtful metaphysics that prompted the creation of antidepressants in the first place. Absent materialist biases, everyone would have known that laughing gas and opium and cocaine and phenethylamines could cheer a person up -- and thereby provide a variety of knock-on benefits that are associated with a perky disposition. But the medical community insisted on "real" cures -- not drugs that simply worked. And so they connived in the Big Lie of the Drug Warrior that psychoactive drugs have no beneficial uses whatsoever -- unless they were created scientifically, that is. Hence the creation of modern antidepressants, which were understood by almost everyone for the last half century to work for "scientific" reasons. And yet, after all the triumphalist pseudoscientific chatter about such drugs on talk shows like Oprah over the last half century and all the pious talk about "taking your meds," we are now told by that same medical establishment that no one actually knows why antidepressants work -- to which I would add that no one knows that they work at all22, if by "work" we mean that they successfully treat the conditions for which we have given such "scientific" drugs a legal monopoly.
"We don't know how antidepressants work." --Noam Shpancer Ph.D., from Depression Is Not Caused by Chemical Imbalance in the Brain23
I am more than willing to grant that such drugs may keep people from committing suicide -- but then any tranquilizer could accomplish as much. What the depressed really need are drugs that inspire and elate -- the kinds of drugs, in fact, that have inspired entire religions -- and these are precisely the kinds of drugs that are anathema to both materialist scientists and to Drug Warriors.
Speaking of which, this illustrates a fourth difference between myself and other Drug War pundits:
I am one of the few philosophers who has identified the role that materialism and behaviorism play in blinding us to the benefits of godsend psychoactive medicines. In fact, some of the above-named pundits are blinded by materialist ideology to this very day. In his otherwise great book, "Drug Use for Grown-Ups24," Carl Hart tells us that "drugs" have no positive uses for those of us with "mental" conditions and that those who wish help with depression and anxiety, etc., should ask their materialist doctor for help: their materialist doctor. In other words, we should become a patient for life on Big Pharma meds that are "scientific" and so are to be preferred to substances that merely work. Hell, anybody could give us a drug that works, a drug dealer could give us THAT: only a board-certified doctor could give us something that works according to the latest scientific theory and which therefore we can feel proud to be taking. True, such "meds" may not "work" according to the patient's definition of that term, but then the patient is not considered to be the expert when it comes to their own mind and mood -- that is the role that the doctors have claimed as they work to deny us of any and all obvious pharmacological treatments, lest someday we should discover that we have no need for their materialist-based services in the first place.
Jacob Sullum recognized what was going on here when he wrote the following on page 251 of "Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use":
"The evolution of modern medicine gave us our current, bifurcated view of drugs: the good ones that treat illness and the bad ones that people use to change their minds and moods.25"
Let's end with a relevant quote from French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
"Scientific thinking, a thinking which looks on from above, and thinks of the object-in-general, must return to the 'there is' which underlies it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body -- not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and my acts."
--Alden L. Fisher, from The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty26
I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing "Howl!" while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like "Howl!"
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
There are endless creative ways to ward off addiction if all psychoactive medicines were at our disposal. The use of the drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin could combat the psychological downsides of withdrawal by providing strategic "as-needed" relief.
@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?
Science knows nothing of the human spirit and of the hopes and dreams of humankind. Science cannot tell us whether a given drug risk is worthwhile given the human need for creativity and passion in their life. Science has no expertise in making such philosophical judgements.
Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."
ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."
We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for the losers who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.
The idea that "drugs" have no medical benefits is not science, it is philosophy, and bad philosophy at that. It is based on the idea that benefits must be molecularly demonstratable and not created from mere knock-on psychological effects of drug use, time-honored tho' they be.
I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.
I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing "Howl!" while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like "Howl!"