I watched a clip on Sky News last night in which the wide-eyed tech pundit told us that the AI behemoth known as Anthropic had its own philosopher on staff. Its own philosopher! This was supposed to shock the viewer. A company the size of Coca-Cola has its own philosopher on staff! But what shocked me was the fact that Anthropic did not have DOZENS of philosophers on staff -- or that it did not subject the implicit philosophical point of view of its algorithms to multiple critiques from the general public. If such companies are going to leverage Big Data to give us the apparent final word on everything, then it is hugely important upon which philosophies their answers are based, and that philosophy should not be invented by one single company-appointed philosopher. Sure, 2 + 2 is always going to be equal to 4 in abstract mathematics regardless of unspoken assumptions about the world, but the AI answers to questions about the propriety of drug use are going to depend entirely on the philosophies assumed, knowingly or not, by the AI algorithms.
Suppose that the algorithms are written under the assumption that all the "real" answers about things like drug use will come from science. Then the AI answers that the algorithms provide about drugs will serve to demonize drugs and emphasize their negative uses, since this is what science is paid to do these days in the west: to demonize psychoactive medicines by focusing only on misuse and worst-case scenarios, meanwhile never mentioning positive use, both extant and clearly possible with the use of a little psychological common sense. Indeed, the bylaws of the aptly named National Institute on Drug Abuse forbids the organization's employees from advocating for the legalization of any outlawed substance. Their real jobs are thus political in nature, not scientific. Unless AI "understands" these largely unspoken facts and takes them into account, its answers about drugs will always serve to support the many modern prejudices which are based on this government demonization campaign.
A fair algorithm would consider the fact that westerners have been shielded by media censorship from all positive talk about drug use since their childhood. Even should algorithms glean that fact from its use of inherently conservative Big Data, the weight that the algorithms assign to that fact will be based on assumptions, explicit or implicit, in those algorithms.
In other words, the question about the propriety of drug use raises a host of questions about which most people never consciously think. And we can be sure that AI will manifest the prejudices of the majority. And this, of course, is the nightmare of AI in general. It is innocent enough in telling us the scientific name of the leopard, but when it purports to give us final answers on subjects of human mind and mood, we can only expect blather in the age of the War on Drugs.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Author's Follow-up:
March 14, 2026
It makes common psychological sense that cocaine could be beneficial for many people. Common psychological sense. And yet when one searches online for "depression and cocaine," one sees endless papers by academics speculating on how cocaine could actually CAUSE depression. This is how unscientific science has become under the gun of the Drug Warrior. Scientists know that their research dollars depend on them demonizing drugs like cocaine, and they are happy to oblige.
Key Takeaways:
The philosophical premises of the AI company algorithms should be discussed and debated by the public.
AI reflects the prejudices of the majority.
AI will reflect the drug-related biases of indoctrinated Americans.
The depressed Canadian Claire Brosseau wants the state to kill her. This is the same state that refuses to let her use drugs that could make her want to live. https://abolishthedea.com/drug_use_is_not_worse_than_death
For most drugs, dependency is a bug. For Big Pharma antidepressants, it is a feature.
The drug war is the defeatist doctrine that we will never be able to use psychoactive drugs wisely. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the government does everything it can to make drug use dangerous.
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.
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?
It's "convenient" for scientists that their "REAL" cures happen to be the ones that racist politicians will allow. Scientists thus normalize prohibition by pretending that outlawed substances have no therapeutic value. It's materialism collaborating with the drug war.
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.
Our government treats drugs like uranium and spends hundreds of billions of dollars trying to scare us about them.
Most enemies of inner-city gun violence refuse to protest against the drug prohibition which caused the violence in the first place.
We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.
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