Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass
blog icon orange rss icon with stylized radio waves bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter substack icon


back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow


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)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!

AI is inherently plagiaristic technology. It tells us: "Hey, guys, look what I can do!" -- when it should really be saying, "Hey, guys, look how I stole all your data and repackaged it in such a way as to make it appear that I am the genius, not you!"

Healthline posted an article in 2021 about the benefits of getting off of antidepressants. They did not even mention the biggest benefit: NO LONGER BEING AN ETERNAL PATIENT -- no longer being a child in the eyes of an all-knowing healthcare system.

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?

The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.

The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."

Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.

There is something wrong with a country that thinks it can decide what human beings around the world are allowed to ingest.

Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.

Many people take antidepressants believing their depression has a biochemical cause. Research does not support this belief. --Dr. Noam Shpancer, Psychology Today


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow
Book Cover

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..."

Purchase Your Copy
Book Cover

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.

Purchase Your Copy



No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).


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.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.


Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP (up)