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Another non-fiction author reckons without the drug war

open letter to Greg Epstein, author of Tech Agnostic

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 9, 2025



Hi, Greg.

You're obviously a great writer and researcher. I recognize that after listening to the first six tracks of your book1 on Downpour.com.

With respect, however, you are like almost every other non-fiction author today in that you reckon without the Drug War.

The fact that AI seeks to give us "transcendence" takes on a very different meaning when we recognize that we live in a world in which all drugs that can facilitate human transcendence have been outlawed by government, everything from the godsend phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin2 3 4 to the erstwhile panacea called opium5, to the deified coca plant of the Peruvians6 7, not to mention, of course, the Soma 8 juice of the Vedic people9 or the psychedelic kykeon at Eleusis10, which some drug pundits believe inspired Plato's views of the afterlife11.

This is the reason why I am so bothered by AI triumphalists. Before we rewire our brains to become one with AI, we should have the right to use the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet -- and the elating and insight-bringing medicines inspired thereby. I don't want an implant for depression from Elon Musk12 -- not until I have been allowed to first see what the myriad of potential psychoactive therapies hold in store for those who use them wisely and for good purposes (notwithstanding our government's superstitious and racist-motivated attempts to portray safe drug use as a contradiction in terms). And yet America even is now outlawing laughing gas 13 , a substance which elates and inspires and which William James himself told us to study in order to learn about the nature of reality14 15.

You are in good company, however, in ignoring this tyrannical context. Even today's science magazines ignore the implications of drug prohibition. That's why Science News and Scientific American still pretend that depression is a hard nut to crack, never acknowledging the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a trice (albeit not in a way that passion-scorning behaviorists and materialists would understand)16.

The result? We literally prefer that people commit suicide 17 than to use "drugs"18 -- and we prefer that they undergo shock therapy rather than to use "drugs."19 My depressed uncle was a victim of this sick mindset, by the way. His materialist shock "treatment" was a blessing only for his care staff, for whom he was henceforth less obstreperous.

You mentioned a guy who said that Science was his God. That sounds like a rash conclusion in a world in which his government has purposefully outlawed all substances that provide human transcendence. That is about the only thing that Schedule I drugs have in common, after all: their ability to inspire and elate -- with the "worst" of them having the potential to inspire entire new religions. Does this guy really think that he has enough data to rule out other kinds of spirituality? or is he not rather brainwashed like almost every other westerner into assuming that drug prohibition is a natural baseline for human societies?

I can understand why you ignore this drug angle, however; because Americans are brainwashed about drugs -- having been shielded for a lifetime from positive reports of drug use -- and so writing openly on the subject no doubt runs the risk of losing your audience.


Best Wishes,
Brian Quass
abolishthedea.com

PS Wise drug use has the potential to make people comfortable in their own skins, appreciative of Mother Nature, etc.20 This fact alone suggests why a tech-centered world is in no hurry to re-legalize psychoactive substances. Big Tech wants a world in which we continually want to "keep up with the Joneses," not one in which we're happy with the simple things in life.

PPS For more on the relevance of drugs to the subject of Big Tech triumphalism, I invite you to see my articles describing the link between drug prohibition and materialism 21.22 23 24 25 26 I hold that it was always a category error to place materialists27 in charge of creating and approving mind and mood medicine in the first place -- and that the proof of that conclusion is that it leads to absurd and inhumane outcomes, a few of which I have hinted at above.









Notes for essay entitled Another non-fiction author reckons without the drug war: open letter to Greg Epstein, author of Tech Agnostic:

1: Tech Agnostic Epstein, Greg, 2024 (up)
2: Pihkal 2.0: Finding drugs that work for users rather than for pharmaceutical companies DWP (up)
3: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (up)
4: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
5: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
6: Coca and its Therapeutic Application, Third Edition Mariani, Angelo, Gutenberg.org, 1896 (up)
7: Scribd.com: Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas Mortimer MD, W. Golden, Ronin Publishing, Berkeley, California, 2017 (up)
8: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
9: How the Drug War Outlaws Religion DWP (up)
10: The road to Eleusis: unveiling the secret of the mysteries Wasson, Gordon (up)
11: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
12: This is your brain on Neuralink DWP (up)
13: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
14: Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas DWP (up)
15: James, William. 2016. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820.The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience. (up)
16: Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no war on drugs DWP (up)
17: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
18: Suicide and the Drug War DWP (up)
19: Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War DWP (up)
20: "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul" -- French philosopher Jean de La Bruyère, as quoted by Edgar Allan Poe in "Man of the Crowd" (up)
21: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
22: Husserl and Drugs: how materialist psychology blinds us to common sense about godsend medicine DWP (up)
23: How materialists turned me into a patient for life DWP (up)
24: Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs DWP (up)
25: The Poorly Hidden Materialist Agenda at Scientific American DWP (up)
26: Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk DWP (up)
27: When I use the term "materialism" as a reproach, I am thinking about reductive materialism, or what Eugene Seaich described as pseudo-materialism. This is the materialism that seeks proof of therapeutic efficacy of psychoactive drugs at the molecular level while paying decidedly short shrift to the evidence right before our very eyes. It is this kind of materialism that allows materialists like Dr. Robert Glatter to question whether laughing gas could help the depressed. He is not impressed by the fact that laughing gas makes people laugh, nor that the anticipation of such laughter can have positive health effects in and of itself. He wants to know if laughing gas can be proven to "really" work, at some molecular, atomic or genetic level. In this way, scientists today help normalize drug prohibition, by pretending that the DEA is somehow right when they say that time-honored medicines have no positive uses whatsoever: for they have not yet shown up under a microscope. In other words, this complicity is collaboration in a BIG LIE. (up)




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The outlawing of opium eventually resulted in an "opioid crisis"? The message is clear: people want self-transcendence. If we don't let them find it safely, they will find it dangerously.

Brits have a right to die, but they do not have the right to use drugs that might make them want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of the many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world.

The goal of drug-law reform should be to outlaw prohibition. Anything short of that, and our basic rights will always be subject to veto by fearmongers. Outlawing prohibition would restore the Natural Law of Jefferson, which the DEA scorned in 1987 with its raid on Monticello.

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.

When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!

The evidence has been in for well over a century now: people want to use psychoactive substances to transcend the rational mind. It's about time we stopped punishing them for that.

That's why I created the satirical Partnership for a Death Free America. It demonstrates clearly that drug warriors aren't worried about our health, otherwise they'd outlaw shopping carts, etc. The question then becomes: what are they REALLY afraid of? Answer: Free thinkers.

I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.

Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!

Saying "Fentanyl kills" is philosophically equivalent to saying "Fire bad!" Both statements are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as safely as possible for human benefit.


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Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

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Diary of a Drug Fiend

This is the only full-cast recording of Aleister Crowley's 1922 classic paeon to common sense. It is the first book -- and so far almost the only book -- to stake out a philosophy of drug use that is compatible with human freedom, one in which we learn to use drugs as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. This recording was produced by the Drug War Philosopher and your purchases help support his effort to push back against the tragically counterproductive policy of drug prohibition, in the name of human freedom and of humanity's right to heal.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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