Three things that set me apart from other drug pundits
by 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 McKenna 78, etc. etc.?
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 James9 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 MDMA10 and laughing gas 11 and opium12 and cocaine 13 illegal -- when they are actually killing people and destroying lives. People commit suicide when we outlaw substances that inspire and elate14. People undergo unnecessary shock therapy15. 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 substance16. 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 prohibition1718. 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 life19. 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 UK20. There is nothing that Drug Warriors fear so much as peace, love and understanding.
Speaking of antidepressants 21: 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 Dreams22." 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 23 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!24"
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 Freudian25 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 Drugs26," 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 27. 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 all28, 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 Brain29
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 30 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-Ups31," 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.32"
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-Ponty33
Author's Follow-up:
October 15, 2025
Merleau-Ponty 34 makes a great point (see quotation above), but he stops short of noticing (let alone denouncing) the devastating real-world consequences of the scientific attitude that he criticizes. Had he drawn the obvious corollaries from his own conclusions, he would have seen how the drug prohibition of his time had placed materialist scientists in charge of our emotional and mental healthcare, which, according to his own viewpoint, is a category error with disastrous implications. It means that human beings are to be treated as machines when it comes to their "mental health," as biochemically identical widgets amenable to one-size-fits-all interventions of the self-interested pharmaceutical companies: hence the pill mill of our time that has turned 1 in 4 American women into Big Pharma 3536 customers for life37.
My role as a renegade philosopher is to draw these sorts of politically incorrect corollaries on behalf of the philosophers (living and dead) who fail(ed) to draw them, either because they are (or were) blind to the corollaries of their own insights or because they are (or were) understandably worried about the dire consequences that would accrue to them should they dare to speak out honestly on such topics.
And so I have pointed out the so-far unnoticed fact that Immanuel Kant 38 wrote in ignoration of the sort of mental states inspired by the use of psychoactive medicines, without which his statements denying telepathy (for just one example) are shielded from all experiential criticism.
"Assumed powers of anticipating the future or of telepathic communication with other minds are, [Kant] says, concepts '...the possibility of which is altogether groundless, as they cannot be based on experience and its known laws, and without such confirmation are arbitrary combinations of thoughts, which, although indeed free from contradiction, can make no claim to objective reality and so to the possibility of an object such as we here profess to think.'" --Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason39
We will have to take Kant's word for that since drug law requires us to ignore alternative possible ways of accessing "truth."
Nor is this just my own view. William James himself told philosophers that they must study altered states in order to understand the nature of reality.
"Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." --William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience40
In a sane world, the ideas of James regarding the so-called 'anesthetic revelation 41 ' 42 would open up a whole new world of research on the supposed sufficiency of the Kantian categories43, but philosophers refuse to "go there" because they know it is literally against the law to do so. It would mean at very least that they would have to publicly protest drug prohibition as necessarily involving the censorship of academia, and this they will never do, either because they fear the consequences of doing so, or else they share the superstitious belief of the Drug Warrior that drugs can be evil in and of themselves without regard for how or why they are used. These philosophers have, after all, like all of us, been brainwashed in this belief since grade school, above all by the propaganda of censorship, thanks to which they never see the positive depiction of any sort of drug use whatsoever, neither in magazines, movies 4445 nor on TV shows 46 , this despite the fact that drugs have inspired entire religions47 and that most drugs are far less inherently dangerous than alcohol, which kills 178,000 a year in America alone48.
And when I say "philosophers refuse to go there," I mean it. The biography of William James that is posted online by his alma mater, Harvard University, does not even mention the fact that James ever used laughing gas 49 , let alone that that one experience inspired his whole philosophy of life50! Thus the materialist ontology triumphs, not by advancing rational arguments but rather by censoring the views of their opponents -- in the name of the substance-demonizing ideology of drug prohibition.
It's worth noting here that both James and Kant lived before Richard Schultes single-handedly founded the field of ethnobotany in the 20th century51. Schultes discovered that all indigenous people used drugs for human benefit (imagine that!). Moreover, indigenous people insisted that some of these drugs inspired a kind of telepathy, at least in certain people, usually curanderos, or shaman. In fact, Harmine, the active ingredient of the psychedelic concoction known as ayahuasca, was originally named Telepathine by the first chemist to isolate the substance52. Let me add here that I am always surprised by the angry vehemence with which materialists deny the power of telepathy. I came across one site where the author fumed: "Let me be clear! There is no evidence that telepathy exists. None!" I can only conclude that materialism is the modern religion, since such passionate intolerance is philosophically identical to the passionate intolerance of the religious zealots of medieval Europe. Of course, I myself deny most extravagant claims on this subject. But the real question is, does such a power as telepathy exist at all, however subtle it might be? An affirmative answer would have huge philosophical ramifications.
In some ways, the question has already been answered in the affirmative. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab conducted studies for 28 years, between 1979 and 2007, which proved conclusively that observers can influence the outcome of a roll of dice (or of a digital proxy of dice) by merely concentrating on the dice and "willing" a specific result. In an absolute sense, the effect that these test participants had on the dice was tiny -- but it was nevertheless statistically significant. And that is huge. The philosophical implications are enormous -- and would certainly have Kant heading back to his drawing board in Konigsberg were he alive today. (Or would he? If he were like modern rationalists, alas, he would simply ignore the PEAR findings altogether.)
"In unattended calibrations all of these sophisticated machines produced strictly random data, yet the experimental results display increases in information content that can only be attributed to the consciousness of their human operators." -- Scientific Study of Consciousness-Related Physical Phenomena53
Philosopher-Speak
Finally, a word on "philosopher-speak." The term is not pejorative in itself. Philosophers need to speak as precisely as possible and if it baffles the layperson for them to do so, so be it. And yet there is something about the seemingly passion-free dialectic of philosophers that puts me in mind of the understated language of British aristocrats, at least when stereotypically considered by a philosopher on this side of the Atlantic. Such Brits seem to distance themselves from the evils of the world by dint of a stolid demeanor combined with the formulaic employment of euphemisms. We can imagine them responding to a grievous knife wound by saying: "I'm afraid I might have received something of a scratch there, hey, what?" There is no doubt a therapeutic value in such culturally muted reactions. By refusing to acknowledge such events on their own terms, by refusing to reify them in speech as horrible catastrophes, we are free to create our own more tolerable version of reality, or mythology, surrounding them, whereby we can stoically transcend our woes.
I fear, however, that an analogous detachment has infected philosophers over the centuries, in which case the outcome is not so benign. Any attempt on my part to connect the Drug War and its superstitious mentality with philosophical considerations is met with indignant silence, as if I had violated some unspoken rule of politeness in these online philosophy forums.
"Humph! It's rather boorish of you, old boy, to discuss matters of such obvious relevance to daily life in this elite forum of ours! We are professional philosophers after all, speaking of abstruse matters, sniff-sniff! Besides, drug prohibition only outlaws those drugs that produce states of mind about which we materialist philosophers are not interested in any case, so where precisely is your problem, old boy?"
I have written over two hundred snail-mail letters to universities over the last eight years -- many of them attempting to get philosophers to stand up for William James and academic freedom by protesting the drug prohibition which denies us the power to explore different states of consciousness. Yet I have never received so much as a single response -- not one -- not even a mere acknowledgement of receipt. Meanwhile, I have been banned or barred from philosophical forums merely for discussing such matters. The moderator of the Bernardo Kastrup philosophy forum suggested that I take my concerns to some niche group discussing drug laws. The Drug War's connections with materialism and behaviorism, etc., were apparently not fit subjects for REAL philosophers. This is how clueless modern philosophers are today about drug prohibition: they actually think that we can have such a policy and academic freedom as well, whereas the two are mutually exclusive. Their cowering silence on such topics is the proof -- as are the millions of books in America's libraries today whose authors pretend to write ex cathedra about subjects like depression and consciousness while ignoring the fact that drugs even exist -- as for instance when scientists tell us that depression is a tough nut to crack, despite the fact that Freud himself knew that the responsible use of cocaine 54 could end depression in a trice! In a trice! Indeed, very few authors dare to mention ANY beneficial uses for drugs, despite the fact that drug use has inspired entire religions. Indeed, the Vedic religion, and hence Hinduism itself, was inspired by the use of a drug (or drugs) that inspired and elated.
This is, of course, the very reason why I created abolishthedea.com in 2018, to attempt to waken philosophers -- and indeed all of brainwashed humanity -- from their dogmatic slumbers when it comes to the pernicious effects of drug prohibition. Drug prohibition is a policy based on an anti-scientific Weltanschauung which has censored academia, ended the rule of law in Latin America, destroyed inner cities around the globe, and handed once-close elections to tyrants by throwing millions of minorities in jail, thereby ending democracy in America. And all this has come about over the last 100+ years (since the effective outlawing of the poppy plant in 1914) with the tacit support of philosophers, who, with their fellow academics, have retired into their own little world of in-house chatter, wearing rose-colored glasses, refusing to even acknowledge the existence of drug prohibition, let alone mount a principled pushback against the same. And yet drug prohibition is the great philosophical problem of our time, depending as it does not just on a hodgepodge of unexamined and contradictory claims, but on the presuppositions of a Christian Science metaphysic with respect to the very meaning of life. If philosophers refuse to speak up and cry foul on such an inherently tyrannous policy -- one which has already failed demonstrably, even on its own terms, when applied to liquor -- then who will?
It's funny to hear fans of sacred plants indignantly insisting that their meds are not "drugs." They're right in a way, but actually NO substances are "drugs." Calling substances "drugs" is like referring to striking workers as "scabs." It's biased terminology.
Even the worst forms of "abuse" can be combatted with a wise use of a wide range of psychoactive drugs, to combat both physical and psychological cravings. But drug warriors NEED addiction to be a HUGE problem. That's their golden goose.
What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.
People groan about "profiling," but why is profiling even a "thing"? There would be little or no profiling of blacks if the Drug War did not exist.
Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.
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.
It is actually illegal to be a Ben Franklin in 21st century America. To put this another way: we outlaw far more than drugs when we outlaw mind and mood medicine.
MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. These are the people who think Electro Shock Therapy is not used often enough! What sick priorities.
This is why America is creeping toward authoritarianism -- because of the prohibitionists' ability to get away with everything by blaming "drugs." The fact that Americans still fall for this crap represents a kind of collective pathology.
The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.
In a sane world, the ideas of James regarding the so-called 'anesthetic revelation 41 ' 42 would open up a whole new world of research on the supposed sufficiency of the Kantian categories43, but philosophers refuse to "go there" because they know it is literally against the law to do so. It would mean at very least that they would have to publicly protest drug prohibition as necessarily involving the censorship of academia, and this they will never do, either because they fear the consequences of doing so, or else they share the superstitious belief of the Drug Warrior that drugs can be evil in and of themselves without regard for how or why they are used. These philosophers have, after all, like all of us, been brainwashed in this belief since grade school, above all by the propaganda of censorship, thanks to which they never see the positive depiction of any sort of drug use whatsoever, neither in magazines, movies 44 45 nor on TV shows 46 , this despite the fact that drugs have inspired entire religions47 and that most drugs are far less inherently dangerous than alcohol, which kills 178,000 a year in America alone48. 
I have written over two hundred snail-mail letters to universities over the last eight years -- many of them attempting to get philosophers to stand up for William James and academic freedom by protesting the drug prohibition which denies us the power to explore different states of consciousness. Yet I have never received so much as a single response -- not one -- not even a mere acknowledgement of receipt. Meanwhile, I have been banned or barred from philosophical forums merely for discussing such matters. The moderator of the Bernardo Kastrup philosophy forum suggested that I take my concerns to some niche group discussing drug laws. The Drug War's connections with materialism and behaviorism, etc., were apparently not fit subjects for REAL philosophers. This is how clueless modern philosophers are today about drug prohibition: they actually think that we can have such a policy and academic freedom as well, whereas the two are mutually exclusive. Their cowering silence on such topics is the proof -- as are the millions of books in America's libraries today whose authors pretend to write ex cathedra about subjects like depression and consciousness while ignoring the fact that drugs even exist -- as for instance when scientists tell us that depression is a tough nut to crack, despite the fact that Freud himself knew that the responsible use of cocaine 54 could end depression in a trice! In a trice! Indeed, very few authors dare to mention ANY beneficial uses for drugs, despite the fact that drug use has inspired entire religions. Indeed, the Vedic religion, and hence Hinduism itself, was inspired by the use of a drug (or drugs) that inspired and elated.
It's funny to hear fans of sacred plants indignantly insisting that their meds are not "drugs." They're right in a way, but actually NO substances are "drugs." Calling substances "drugs" is like referring to striking workers as "scabs." It's biased terminology.