why Chicken Littles like Kevin Sabet do not deserve a place at the table
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 10, 2023
Kevin Sabet was recently bemoaning the fact that a discussion group on psychedelics failed to invite board-certified scientists to their meetings. I also read the post of another prohibitionist who was up in arms about the failure of another psychedelic group to discuss the topic of psychedelics as used by cults. The prohibitionists see this as great hypocrisy and a drop-dead argument that the debate on psychedelics is one-sided in the favor of substance legalization .
This isn't censorship, guys. It's a rejection of the whole idea that naturally occurring substances (including ergot-based LSD) have to be defended in this way. Nature belongs to human beings via Natural Law and its plants and fungi are never justifiably subject to prohibition, as John Locke makes clear in his Second Treatise of Government1. Science, moreover, is never neutral and fair in the age of the Drug War. To the contrary, modern science focuses almost exclusively on the downsides of drugs. Our government pays for advertisements treating drugs as a scourge. Our academics publish only papers about abuse and misuse because the drug-hating NIDA 2 does not generally fund papers that speak otherwise3. Science is not science in such a milieu, it is politics. Kevin and his fellow Chicken Littles know this: that's why they want a place at the table so that they can advance their political cause: i.e., the suppression of medicines that are ours by right and which were used by all tribal cultures, time out of mind, until the west decimated these tribes and subjected them to the comparatively deadly drug of alcohol. (Note: When I refer to alcohol as "deadly," I am not blaming alcohol for anything. The misuse of alcohol is down to social factors, including the state policy of giving alcohol a monopoly on providing self-transcendence. Drug warriors generally admit this truth, while hypocritically denying that it pertains to any other psychoactive substances.)
And the cry about "cults" which employ psychedelics is an hysterical non-sequitur. It is based on the absurd belief that we should hold substances responsible for how people use them. It is this very premise that we legalizers reject as a childish way of thinking about the world. By associating evil with drugs rather than people, we throw millions of people under the bus in an effort to save poor little white kids in the suburbs (those poor little white kids whom we have refused to educate about safe use). When you demonize Fentanyl, for example, you think that you're saving white teenagers, when what you're really doing is punishing kids in hospice4. How? By creating the kinds of laws that will make doctors reluctant to provide adequate pain relief for fear of being arrested. (The Washington Post recently reported that the shipment of opioid pills dropped 45% between 2011 and 2019 thanks to law enforcement crackdowns. During the same time, the deaths by overdose skyrocketed! Just imagine the world of suffering that prohibitionists have thus created for those in pain with their demonstrably counterproductive policy of prohibition.5)
Don't get me wrong. I am all in favor of unbiased science. But let's first define science's role. Drug warriors like Sabet want science to have the final say when it comes to legalization , but that is, so to speak, a category error. Psychoactive drugs are not used for medical reasons but for psycho-social and religious reasons. Scientists can tell us of the physical risks of use, perhaps, but they cannot tell us whether use is preferable in any one case because they do not know the value system of the user and what they consider to be the "good life" as Plato would define that term. Take me, for instance: I believe (with God in the Old Testament) that Mother Nature is actually good. For this reason, I believe (in common with the tribal peoples that America has helped decimate) that drug use is GOOD and can bring helpful dreams, ideas about cure, ideas about the nature of the universe writ large. Nor is this just a tribal view. William James believed that we needed to investigate altered states in order to understand reality and the nature of perception and human consciousness6.
Here's another reason why science is not scientific in the age of the Drug War. In the Drug War, scientists speak as if substances can be judged "up" or "down," as good or bad, but this is a very anti-scientific notion. Dosage counts. Reason for use counts. Time of use counts. No drug can be judged in the abstract. Yet that's what Drug Warriors do. And what's the practical result of this choplogic? Any drug that cannot be used safely today (by those white teenagers whom we have refused to educate about safe use) cannot be used by anybody, anywhere, for any reason, ever.
It is this anti-scientific mindset that outlaws and/or hamstrings research on potential treatments for Alzheimer's 7 and autism and endless other maladies. It is this anti-scientific mindset that throws millions (perhaps billions) of potentially responsible users under the bus in order to "crack down" on a vast minority of what the Drug Warrior considers to be irresponsible users, who, of course, usually turn out to be minorities: minorities that can be thrown in jail in order to further shrink the voting power of the enemies of absurd prohibition8.
If Chicken Little and co. are not invited to the table to discuss time-honored godsend medicines, it is because it is well-known that they will bring this anti-scientific and politically-motivated mindset with them to the table. These critics of substance re-legalization 9 do not want to protect us from cults and dangerous medicines. They want to protect their narrow and anti-historical Christian Science view of the world, which they feel is challenged when folks are allowed to improve their minds and mental power with plant medicine. For while the tribal mentality considers such meds to be godsends10, the fearful Drug Warrior of western society associates them with witches (i..e. overly assertive women of the Middle Ages) and poisoning.
Finally, it's ironic that these Drug Warriors complain about censorship. Censorship is what the Drug War is all about. That's why almost no academic papers are written about the positive effects of drugs11. That's why the plots of prime-time TV shows 12 are tweaked to contain anti-drug messages provided by the White House. That's why articles in so-called scientific magazines like Scientific American and Science News never mention drugs of which our politicians disapprove13. This self-censorship is so profound that the authors of such articles never even notice it. And so they take prohibition to be a natural baseline from which to do scientific research on subjects like consciousness and anxiety and depression.
Until scientists escape this fog of self-imposed amnesia about the world, science is little more than the handmaiden of the Drug War, helping to normalize a wholesale prohibition of psychoactive medicines that is unprecedented in human history.
Author's Follow-up: January 18, 2024
When scientists talk about the cost/benefit analysis of drugs, they are blind to a host of factors. Here are some of the benefits that they completely ignore: the ability of a user to appreciate music, to experience compassion, to have some peace from non-stop negative inner voices, etc. The fact is, these things have values that a scientist is not even qualified to rate. Their importance depends on what one values in life -- and should not be determined by materialist scientists, who, because of their reductive dogma, cannot even determine if laughing gas 14 could help the depressed.
As for risks, scientists ignore all the risks that come from OUTLAWING substances: like the destruction of the rule of law in Latin America, the risk of luring poor young people into lives of crime by giving them hugely profitable opportunities, the risk of turning inner cities into shooting galleries, the risk of throwing so many minorities in jail that only law-and-order conservatives are elected. Instead, they argue with childish simplicity as follows: "This drug could hurt Johnny Whitebread and so should not be available anywhere, at any dose, for any reason, ever, even if it means outlawing drugs that could help treat Alzheimer's or autism or could provide pain relief for children in hospice." This is racist and xenophobic politics, not a scientific evaluation of costs and benefits.
Scientists think they can ignore all these risks and benefits and still be taken seriously. What a joke.
In fact, we should not even do them the favor of calling them scientists, for any true scientist would know that no substance is good or bad in and of itself, and that even cyanide has beneficial uses, and that it's all about the nuances of dose and context, nuances that our so-called scientists completely ignore in the age of the anti-scientific Drug War.
The reasons that people use drugs are psychologically obvious. Academics gaslight us on this topic and invent new diseases to explain away our desire to live large.
Imagine a world in which we were told about both the potential benefits AND the potential harms of drugs like cocaine and opium.
Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.
"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.
Drug testing labs should give high marks for those who manage to use drugs responsibly, notwithstanding the efforts of law enforcement to ruin their lives. The lab guy would be like: "Wow, you are using opium wisely, my friend! Congratulations! Your boss is lucky to have you!"
Prohibitionists have the same M O they've had for the last 100+ years: blame drugs for everything. Being a drug warrior is never having the decency to say you're sorry -- not to Mexicans, not to inner-city crime victims, not to patients who go without adequate pain relief...
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
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