Why it's wrong to follow the science in the age of the drug war
in response to a 2025 essay by philosopher Pascal Boyer
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 9, 2025
I was so excited! I received an email this morning from the Institute for Arts and Ideas advising me of the publication of a new essay on their website from philosopher Pascal Boyer entitled 'Following the Science' is a Dangerous Illusion1. "Wow!", I thought to myself. "I myself have written multiple essays on that very topic23456. Could it be that another philosopher has joined me in realizing that science is political in the age of the Drug War and that we should therefore most definitely NOT follow the science when it comes to studying drugs and drug use? Could it be that my own essays on this topic have been discovered by the author in question and that I myself have played a role in alerting him to the issue at hand? Could it be that I have finally reached the big-time, philosophically speaking?" I even briefly entertained the flattering possibility that I had been plagiarized! Of course, I was just assuming that Boyer's article was about drugs -- but then what else could it be about? Surely the Drug War provides the perfect example of the dangers of following the science, insofar as science is political in the age of drug prohibition.
So thinking, I clicked on the proffered hyperlink... only to discover that the promoted adumbrations had nothing to do with drugs whatsoever! I found instead that Mr. Boyer had organized his attack on scientific omnipotence around the topic of divination. Yes, divination: the practice of "reading" horoscopes and entrails and the like. To be sure, Boyer was raising a valid point: namely, that science is a human endeavor and therefore cannot always give us the definitive and unbiased answers that we may wrongly expect of it. Moreover, scientists qua scientists approach human activities like divination in dogmatic ignoration of the utilitarian value of such practices and their role in establishing social cohesion in a given community. Agreed, agreed, agreed. And yet, like all authors these days, Boyer has missed the 6,400-pound gorilla in the room: the fact that the Drug War is the glaringly obvious example of why we should not "follow the science." Why not? Because science is political in the age of the Drug War. Moreover, it is materialist in nature, which means that it is blind to all the obvious holistic benefits of drugs and drug use.
With such considerations in mind, I posted the following comment to Boyer's essay -- or rather I submitted the following comments to the IAI website. Whether they will actually publish them remains to be seen -- since freedom of speech7 is never a "given" these days for those of us who dare to question Drug War orthodoxy.
Although you focused on divination, there is a huge problem with "following the science" when it comes to studying drugs. This is because Western governments and their materialist scientists are focused exclusively on the potential downsides of drug use. Such "science" is political. This is why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse in America and not a National Institute on Drug Use. The scientists' job today is to prove that drugs are dangerous. They ignore all glaringly obvious holistic benefits of drug use. And so our materialist scientists gaslight Americans by telling us that drugs like coca and opium 8 have no positive uses whatsoever. Sigmund Freud knew better9. So did Galen, Paracelsus and Avicenna. But modern science is blind to anecdote, history and common sense. This is why our FDA promotes brain-damaging shock therapy for the depressed and yet refuses to approve of a wide range of drugs whose intermittent use could make shock therapy unnecessary10. This is what they call "following the science" in the age of the Drug War: depriving the depressed (and endless others) of all inspirational medicine -- you know, the kinds of medicines that inspired the Vedic religion11, the kinds of medicines that our predecessors considered to be panaceas!
This is why drug prohibitionists want us to "follow the science," because they know that materialist science is blind to the obvious when it comes to drug benefits. And so they hold drug use to standards that we set for no other risky activity on the planet, thereby forcing millions to go without godsend medicine, merely because such substances could be misused by white American young people -- the white American young people whom we refuse "on principle" to educate about safe drug use. This is why hospice kids in India go without morphine 12 today, because fearmongers and demagogues have taught us to fear drugs rather than to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humankind13. This is what comes of "following the science" in the age of drug prohibition.
This is all due, in turn, to a category error. It was a mistake to place passion-scorning materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. By so doing, we have created endless jobs for materialists -- but only at the cost of completely disempowering human beings when it comes to healthcare.
I do not mean to pick on Pascal, but his article is just one of endless examples of how we completely hide the topics of drugs and prohibition from the public discourse these days. Our libraries and bookstores are full of books about drug misuse and abuse -- with nary a single title about positive drug use. Every book about human consciousness, every book about depression, every book about the search for ultimate reality should discuss psychoactive drugs and what their use can tell us about such topics. But we live in a world of make-believe in which we insist on two absurd propositions: 1) that drug use can have no upsides, and 2) that drug prohibition can have no downsides. And so our authors who write on such topics reckon without their host: they write as if drugs do not exist. Boyer is, alas, no exception to this rule of self-censorship: otherwise, he would have driven his thesis home by explaining how government drug policy is the prime example of the problems with following the science. This is because following the science does not mean being objective in the age of the Drug War: it means unfairly evaluating holistic medicines from the myopic viewpoint of reductive materialism 14. Following the science thus means practicing a kind of pharmacological colonialism. By so doing, our scientists lend a veneer of science to the xenophobia of the Francisco Pizarros of the world.
Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.
Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal":
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."
Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).
So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.
If we let "science" decide about drugs, i.e. base freedom on health concerns, then tea can be as easily outlawed as beer. The fact that horses are not illegal shows that prohibition is not about health. It's about the power to outlaw certain "ways of being in the world."
"Like Christians burning mosques and temples to spread the word of Jesus, modem drugabuseologists burn crops to spread the use of alcohol." -- Ceremonial Chemistry, p. 48
When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia:
OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!
Jim Hogshire described sleep cures that make physical withdrawal from opium close to pain-free. As for "psychological addiction," there are hundreds of elating drugs that could be used to keep the ex-user's mind from morbidly focusing on a drug whose use has become problematic for them.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.
I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.
Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.