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Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs



by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher







November 6, 2024

2025 update




I've been on beta blockers for anxiety for years now and I recently decided that I finally wanted to quit.

How naive of me.

I found out that quitting may be impossible. Why? Because we have outlawed all alternatives to Big Pharma meds of this kind. Meanwhile, the daily use of a beta blocker has changed my body's biochemical baseline such that my body "panics" when it no longer senses the drug in its system.

DOGMATICALLY BLIND PSYCHIATRISTS

In researching this issue online, I was surprised to find a lot of glib praise for anxiolytic beta blockers from psychiatrists... and almost no talk about the difficulty of withdrawal, except for the usual sanctimonious and self-serving spiel admonishing us to see one's doctor for help in getting off such meds. Yes, they want us to "get help" from the same doctors who got us hooked on these drugs in the first place. This is "all of a piece" with the psychiatrist's support for dependence-causing antidepressants. Psychiatrists see no problem with mucking about with a patient's biochemical baseline, provided that they can do so in a way that turns that patient into a client for life.

Such indiscriminate praise for beta blockers is not just bad science, it's bad philosophy: it conveys the idea that drugs should be used merely to make life livable and not to help a person thrive. In fact, both beta blockers and antidepressants seem designed to KEEP a patient from thriving.

A WAR ON CREATIVITY

I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing "Howl!" while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like "Howl!", which is a caustic lament against the unimaginative materialism of Americans-- nor do they want authors like HP Lovecraft writing opium-inspired stories like "Celaphais," in which the homeless protagonist wanders through "the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams," nor do they find any benefit whatsoever in the exquisite appreciation of nature provided by the use of drugs like morphine, as described most particularly by Edgar Allan Poe in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains."

So when materialist psychiatrists approve only of psychiatric drugs that neither elate nor inspire (in contradistinction to time-honored plant medicines, for instance, which often do both), they are not giving us some scientifically objective verdict about what actually works in this world: they are telling HOW they think we should go about curing ourselves: namely, in a seemly way that does not conduce to undue happiness or excitement on our part.

In short, "Everything as it should be, just like good Christians," as the phlegmatic old nanny wistfully remarks in "Uncle Vanya" by Anton Chekov.

But such assumption-laden pharmacological beliefs can be philosophically gainsaid by ordinary people without a medical degree... unless, of course, we legally require Americans to approach the world from a materialist viewpoint. How? By outlawing all substances that would help us approach the world of spirituality, healing and medicine from an holistic point of view, the nature-friendly viewpoint that is both explicitly and implicitly adopted by indigenous credos around the world, as in the Cosmovision of the Andes.

ALLEN GINSBERG V MATERIALISM

Speaking of Allen Ginsberg, he was way ahead of his time in diagnosing the materialistic tyranny of the War on Drugs, as is demonstrated by the following citation from the beat poet as referenced by editor Oliver Harris in "The Yage Letters Redux" by William Burroughs.

"A materialist consciousness is attempting to preserve itself from dissolution by restriction and persecution of experience of the transcendental. One day perhaps the earth will be dominated by the illusion of separate consciousness, the bureaucrats having triumphed in seizing control of all roads of communication with the divine and restricting traffic. But sleep and death cannot evade the great dream of being and the victory of the bureaucrats of illusion is only an illusion of their separate world of consciousness." -- Allen Ginsberg 1


Unfortunately, almost all the "movers and shakers" in the war against the Drug War are materialists and work in environments where the funding comes ultimately, directly or indirectly, from the pockets of chemically dependent Americans like myself. (Where else do you think that Big Pharma gets its enormous budget for studying psychiatric meds?) I'm talking about authors like Rick Strassman2, Rick Doblin3, DJ Nutt4 and Carl Hart5. They are dogmatically incapable of understanding the full injustice of the materialistic War on Drugs, at least to the extent that they are true to their materialistic bona fides and remember upon which side their toast is buttered. And why? Because as materialists, they are obliged to ignore all glaringly obvious and time-honored benefits of drugs (all uses that make sense merely because of common sense psychology) and to search instead for proof of efficacy under a microscope and/or in studies that attempt to meticulously ignore all the contextual psychological "biases" that are crucial in making holistic drugs effective in the first place.

These are the kind of authors who talk about "treatment-resistant depression," thereby implying that SSRIs and SNRIs have "sorted" depression,, as the Brits would say, but that there are a minority of folks whose finicky biochemistry does not accept these wonderful cures, in the same way that 30% of milk drinkers are lactose intolerant and cannot enjoy the blessings of milk.

But if materialists have "sorted" depression, I never got the memo. Was I happy and did not know it? No. It's just that my definition of an effective antidepressant is one that allows me to live large, not one that merely makes my gloominess survivable, which is the low bar set by materialist science for such drugs.

Besides, the use of the term "lactose intolerant" is just a linguistic exercise in blaming the victim: it is used by PR firms to whitewash the downsides of milk. This is a linguistic indulgence that we never dispense for demonized drugs. Far less than 30% of cocaine users are "cocaine intolerant," since the vast majority of drug users use responsibly, as Carl Hart reports in "Drug Use for Grownups," but we never blame users for their misuse of psychoactive substances but rather the substances that they misuse (bearing in mind that the term "misuse" is often just a synonym for mere "use" in the fanatically biased Christian Science lexicon of the Drug Warrior).

BLAMING DRUGS

This is the whole anti-scientific problem with substance prohibition: it blames drugs for problems that are caused by human beings and their bad social policies (including fearmongering, a refusal to educate, and a refusal to provide regulated product for desired substances). The Drug War is therefore superstitious and anti-scientific and just plain silly: it is as ignorant as outlawing fire because it can burn our fingers. And the worst part about it is: the Drug War is an eternal war. Agencies like the DEA do not want to end drug problems -- to do so would be to end their perceived relevance in the world and jeopardize their shamefully large multi-billion-dollar budget. They want to keep screaming "drugs" (PCP, ICE, crack cocaine, oxy, fentanyl!) thereby promoting their use by rebellious young people whom we refuse to educate about safe use (and whom we refuse to supply with regulated product), with the hope that more young people will die and that the agency can then turn around and blame these new DEA-caused deaths on drugs themselves, thus "justifying" still more obscene allocations of money on behalf of locking up American minorities and killing socially conscious protestors in Latin America (see, for instance, "Drug War Capitalism" by Dawn Paley6). What an enormous and seemingly never-ending scam!

In short, the Drug War kills far more Americans than would have ever died had the country not taking the unprecedented step of outlawing mother nature, a step which is so palpably anti-democratic and anti-Christian that the mind boggles, especially when so many of the defenders of this policy claim to be Christians themselves -- Christians whose ancestors came here to escape religious persecution, the same persecution that these "Christians" now lavish upon those who find spiritual and emotional support in time-honored plant medicines and fungi, substances which the Judeo-Christian God himself told us were good.

THOMAS SZASZ WAS RIGHT

Thomas Szasz was right: Americans just need to grow up when it comes to drugs7. This means, first and foremost, that we need to stop holding drug use to safety standards that we do not apply to any other risky activity on planet Earth, no, not even to free-climbing or swimming with sharks -- or to driving a car, for that matter! If we had the same risk sensitivity for these latter activities, Americans would still be riding horses -- and even that activity would have been banned after the well-publicized death of Christopher Reeves, which would have scared us into renouncing horseback riding once and for all.

To repeat: the claim that antidepressants "work" is a philosophical claim, not a scientific one, since the veracity of that claim depends entirely on how one defines the word "work," that is, on what one believes would or should constitute a "cured" state for the depressed. For folks like myself, a cure for my depression would mean that I would be allowed to "live large" and be the kind of person I want to be in life, but if antidepressants "work," they do not do so in that fashion. To the contrary, they hold me back from being all that I can be -- and the most that I can say for them after 40 years' worth of use is that they make depression livable, which is faint praise indeed, especially when we consider that outlawed drugs can exceed that stinting result by leaps and bounds.

PAUL STAMETS' CURE FOR STUTTERING

Paul Stamets cured his teenage stammering problem in one single afternoon with the help of a handful of psilocybin mushrooms, but the materialist does not consider such cures to be "real."8 Why not? Because the materialist expects to find proof of efficacy under a microscope or in studies so controlled as to ignore the potential for holistically inspired healing entirely. The best we can expect from them is for them to eventually schedule a clinical trial in which psilocybin is specifically studied for its power to end stuttering -- which will be decades from now, however, since the piecemeal approach of the materialist means that they must first study psilocybin for treating PTSD, then depression, then anxiety.... all under the absurd assumption that these conditions have nothing whatsoever to do with each other and are as causally unconnected as an ankle sprain and a headache. But again this is not objective science at work: it is dogmatic materialistic presumption which imposes separation where there is none in order to produce the shameless disease-mongering of the DSM manual.

CONCLUSION

It's no wonder that psychiatrists would be slow to jettison their materialist assumptions about drugs, however. They stand to lose a lot of money once they accept the proposition that drugs like psilocybin can be used holistically to achieve actual cures. Just think how much money the healthcare industry could have gotten out of Paul Stamets over the years had they gotten to him before he ingested those mushrooms. They could have diagnosed his problem as anxiety and put him on beta blockers for life. The money in psychiatry comes from TREATING the problems of patients, after all, not from curing them.



Author's Follow-up: January 4, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up





Note that I am not saying that beta blockers are bad. To the contrary, they may have some good uses and may, for aught I know, be the best thing that's available for certain heart patients. I am not a Drug Warrior, and so I do not believe that drugs are bad in and of themselves, no, not even beta blockers and antidepressants. I may believe that we have not yet found a sensible use for these drugs -- or that most uses are ultimately negative in that they unnecessarily turn the user into a patient for life -- unnecessarily, given that we have outlawed better options. We must, of course, also distinguish between symptomatic use and daily lifetime use in making such judgments. It is far easier to sign off on symptomatic use, whereas daily lifetime use requires a much stricter standard of evaluation.

The main point is this: While prohibition is in force and it outlaws so many potential alternatives to the modern psychoactive pharmacopoeia, our evaluation of such drugs is "rigged." We may find that beta blockers, for instance, are the best thing out there for conditions A, B, and C -- but this is a false statement in the age of prohibition -- or at least it is a conclusion that we have no right to draw in light of prohibition, which has outlawed so many potential alternatives and rendered them difficult to even study.

Meanwhile, we cannot help but be suspicious about the fact that the nostrums continually advanced by big pharma for our mind and mood always seem to require us to take them daily for life. The fact that psychiatrists do not even acknowledge this as a downside shows how little value they place on human independence and self-respect. In some ways, I would rather be dependent on a drug dealer than a psychiatrist, for the former does not require me to be a "patient" but rather just a customer. The former does not consider me sick. The former does not ask me about the last time I considered suicide. The former just charges me for the drugs, not for the privilege of being catechized on my emotional condition.

And yet even lifetime dependency is not bad in and of itself. What is bad is UNWANTED lifetime dependency. And therein lies the problem of prohibition. One may say that they are happy with a lifetime dependency on big pharma meds, but this declaration can only be made in ignorance. Why? Because one just has to assume that the vast pharmacopoeia of outlawed substances has nothing better to offer one. That's all too easy to assume, however, in the age of prohibition since the Drug War has discouraged precisely the kind of research that might convince us otherwise. The media encourages this ignorance by refusing to publish movies and articles that illustrate the positive use of demonized drugs.

And yet the Drug War focuses all talk about drugs on downsides, clearly demonstrating that the Drug Warrior is a hypochondriac by proxy when it comes to drugs. That is one particular world view, a neurotic one at that, not an objective view with which all rational minds must consent.

The answer is to re-legalize substances so that folks can self-prescribe for mood and mind medicine based on their own values and their own ideas about the meaning of life -- self-prescribe, that is, with the ever-available help of pharmacologically savvy empaths that can teach them drug use strategies that have been proven to be effective in helping a would-be user to achieve the psychosocial outcomes that they desire -- that THEY desire, mind, not their doctors nor the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.


Fearmongering






The drug war is the ultimate case of fearmongering. And yet academics and historians fail to recognize it as such. They will protest eloquently against the outrages of the witch hunts of yore, but they are blind to the witch hunts of the present. What is a drug dealer but a modern service magician, someone who sells psychoactive medicine designed to effect personal ends for the user? They are simply providing an alternative to materialistic medicine, which ignores common sense and so ignores the glaringly obvious value of such substances.

  • 'Intoxiphobia' by Russell Newcombe
  • Addicted to Addiction
  • America's Blind Spot
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away
  • Disease Mongering in the age of the drug war
  • Drug Dealers as Modern Witches
  • Fentanyl does not kill! Prohibition does!
  • Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • Ignorance is the problem, not drugs
  • Intoxiphobia
  • Kevin Sabet and What-About-Ism
  • Marci Hamilton Equates Drug Use with Child Abuse
  • Matthew Perry and the Drug War Ghouls
  • More Weed Bashing at the Washington Post
  • Oregon's Incoherent Drug Policy
  • Partnership for a Death Free America
  • Stigmatize THIS
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts
  • What Goes Up Must Come Down?
  • Why Kevin Sabet is Wrong
  • Why Kevin Sabet's approach to drugs is racist, anti-scientific and counterproductive
  • Why the Drugs Reddit should not exist

    • Getting Off Drugs






    NOVEMBER 2024

    I have written dozens of essays about antidepressants and the Drug War, but it is important to read this one first, for it contains the most up-to-date info on my battle to get off such drugs. This reading order is important because I declared premature victory against the SNRI called Effexor in recent essays, only to discover that the drug is far more insidious than I gave it credit for. It turns out withdrawing, at least for me, eventually led to deep feelings of abject despair, far greater than the depression for which I started taking the "med" in the first place.

    The frustrating thing is, these feelings could be combatted by a host of drugs that we have outlawed in the name of our anti-scientific and anti-patient war on drugs. That much is just psychological common sense. But we have been taught to believe that there are no positive uses for opium, nor for cocaine, nor for coca, nor for MDMA, nor for laughing gas, nor for peyote, nor for the hundreds of inspiring phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, etc. etc. etc.

    The truth is, rather, that Drug Warriors (and the millions whom they have brainwashed) do not WANT there to be positive uses for such drugs. No, they want me to "keep taking my meds" instead and so to enrich their investment portfolios in the pharmaceutical sector. Meanwhile, those without a vested financial interest have been taught that antidepressants are "scientific" and so they cannot understand my desire to get off them. They cannot understand the hell of being turned into a patient for life and having to make regular expensive and humiliating pilgrimages to psychiatrists (who are half one's own age) to bare one's soul for the purpose of obtaining an expensive prescription for a drug that numbs one's brain rather than inspiring it - and a drug which seems to counteract, dampen and/or repress most of the positive effects that I might have otherwise obtained by the few semi-legal alternatives to antidepressants, such as psilocybin and ayahuasca.

    But it is just psychological common sense that I could withdraw successfully from Effexor with the advised use of a comprehensive pharmacy, including but not limited to the demonized substances listed above. But materialist science is not interested in common sense. And so they tell me that such drug use has not been proven to "work." But materialist doctors are not experts in what motivates me as a living, breathing, unique individual. The heart has its own reasons that reductionist science cannot understand. If I could look forward, at this moment, to relaxing with an opium pipe tonight, my mood would improve NOW, not just tonight. I would have something to look forward to. I would not feel the need to reach for that bottle full of Effexor pills that I was hoping to foreswear. Likewise, if I could use a drug to laugh and "touch the hand of God" (as with laughing gas and phenethylamines respectively), I could laugh at the pangs of despair that Effexor tries to throw my way.

    Science's eternal response to such ideas is: "There is no proof that such things work!"

    No, nor will there ever be in the age of the Drug War, in which such common sense use is punished by long jail terms and would never be favorably publicized, even if successful, since America's prime imperative in the age of the Drug War is to demonize psychoactive medicines, under the absurd assumption-laden idea that to talk honestly about drugs is to encourage their use.

    Well, we SHOULD be encouraging their use in cases where they actually work, in cases, for instance, when they prevent guys like myself from killing themselves thanks to the knowledge that they are a bounden slave to the combined forces of the Drug War and Big Pharma's pill mill.

    Besides, there is no proof that hugging works, but we do not need Dr. Spock of Star Trek to launch a study into that issue: we all know that hugging works by bringing two souls together both physically and spiritually. We do not need a map of brain chemistry to figure this out: the proof is extant, the proof is in the pudding.

    But I haven't given up yet despite the setback in my most recent plan. I'm going to search the world for a place where I can get off antidepressants in a way that makes some psychological common sense.

    Right now, all I see in terms of resources are a bunch of companies who, for large fees, will help me go cold turkey on antidepressants., or companies that claim to have found the right combination of legal herbal formulas that should make withdrawal easier. But to me, these are all what Percy Shelley would call "frail spells," concocted under the watchful eye of the Drug Warrior to make sure that nothing potent and obviously effective will get added to the mix. In fact, if a space alien came to earth and asked what sort of psychoactive drugs were outlawed, one could honestly answer: "Anything that obviously works."

    Meanwhile, drug laws make it impossible for me to visit psychiatrists remotely online, requiring me instead to physically visit my doctors, thereby limiting rural residents like myself to accessing hayseed psychiatrists whose one area of expertise seems to be the writing of prescriptions for antidepressants. Talk to them about anything else, and their eyes glaze over. "That's all unproven," they'll say, "Or, no, we have yet to fully study such things." As if we have to study in order to realize that feeling good helps and can have positive psychological effects.

    I'm sure that part of the problem with my withdrawal scheme is that I tried to get off the drug too quickly. But I only tried that because I can find no doctor who will compound the drug for me in a way that makes psychological common sense, namely, with daily miniscule reductions in dosage. My current psychiatrist told me that such compounding was unheard of and that I should drop doses by 37.5 mg at a time, since that is the lowest dose that the pharmaceutical companies create. He said I could start "counting pill beads" once I am down to a 37.5 mg daily dose if I wanted to taper still further.

    Count pill beads? Surely that's why compounding pharmacists exist: to count pill beads. (UPDATE: I was wrong about this. See my article on "Tapering for Jesus.")

    I did find a compounding company that said it could compound Effexor in the way that I desire. But there's a big catch: they have to receive a prescription for that purpose. And I can find no doctor in the world who is willing to write me one. Even those who sympathize with my plight want me to become their full-time patient before they will even consider writing such a prescription.

    So those who warned me against trying to get off Effexor were right in a way: it is extraordinarily difficult. But they feel to realize WHY this is so. It is not just because Effexor is a toxic drug, but also because the drug war has outlawed everything that could help me get off it.

    This is why those pundits who sign off on the psychiatric pill mill are clueless about the huge problem with the war on drugs: the way it humiliates and disempowers millions. For it turns out that the phrase "No hope in dope" is true after all, but only when the dope in question is modern antidepressants.



    OCTOBER 2024

    Here are some of the many articles I have written about the philosophy of getting off drugs. Bear in mind that I am in the process of getting off Effexor myself and am exploring the power of "drugs to fight drugs" in so doing. And this is not a straightforward path given the sweeping limits that are imposed by drug law. So the question of exactly what might work (and how and when, etc.) is still wide open and I am advocating nothing, except the common sense notion that we can benefit from euphoria and mood boosts, yes, and that "drugs can be used to fight drugs," and in a safe way too -- a way that will prove far safer than prohibition, which continues to bring about daily deaths from drive-by shootings and unregulated product while causing civil wars overseas.

    I guess what I am saying here is, this site is not purporting to offer medical advice. I avoid using such wording, however, because so many authors refuse to talk honestly about drugs, especially about positive drug use, for fear of being seen as giving medical advice, and this, of course, is just how drug warriors want matters to remain. It lets them shut down free speech about drugs.

    Besides, I reject the idea that materialist doctors are the experts when it comes to how we think and feel about life. The best they can do as materialist is to tell us the potential physical risks of using holistically-operating drugs, but individuals are the experts on what motivates them in life, on their own particular hopes and dreams and on what risks they deem necessary to obtain them, to pursue happiness, that is, which objective our legislators outlawed when they outlawed all substances that can help facilitate happiness in the properly motivated and educated individual.

    The real answer is not for authors to give groveling apologies for being honest, however: the real answer is for kids to be educated about the basics of wise substance use -- and for America to come to grips with the fact that we will always be surrounded by "drugs" -- and that the goal should be to ensure safe use, not to keep endlessly arresting minorities and removing them from the voting rolls on behalf of the clinically insane idea that we should outlaw mother nature to protect our kids -- and this in a purportedly Christian country whose very deity told us that his creation was good.

  • America's biggest drug pusher: The American Psychiatric Association:
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Drug Use as Self-Medication
  • Fighting Drugs with Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war
  • Getting off Effexor MY WAY
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Mad at Mad in America
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Sending Out an SOS
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • Taper Talk
  • Tapering for Jesus
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Mental Health Survey that psychiatrists don't want you to take
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • The War on Drugs and the Psychiatric Pill Mill
  • This is your brain on Effexor
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • What the psychiatrist said when I told him I wanted to get off Effexor
  • Why SSRIs are Crap

    • Materialism






    Materialist scientists collaborate with the drug war by refusing to see glaringly obvious drug benefits. They acknowledge only those benefits that they believe are visible under a microscope. The Hindu religion would not exist today had materialist scientists held soma to such a standard. But that's the absurd pass to which prohibition eventually brings us in a society wherein materialist science is the new god: scientists are put in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to imagine new religions or not.

    This materialist bias is inspired in turn by behaviorism, the anti-indigenous doctrine of JB Watson that makes the following inhumane claim:

    "Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic."

    According to this view, the hopes and the dreams of a "patient" are to be ignored. Instead, we are to chart their physiology and brain chemistry.

    JB Watson's Behaviorism is a sort of Dr. Spock with a vengeance. It is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it would seem to justify all their inability to deal with human emotions. Unfortunately, the attitude has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive usage reports or historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide how they are doing. It is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with drug war ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants.

    That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a bar chart.



  • A Quantum of Hubris
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Behaviorism and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Common Sense and the Drug War
  • Constructive criticism of the MAPS strategy for re-legalizing MDMA
  • David Chalmers and the Drug War
  • Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Scientific Materialism Keeps Godsend Medicines from the Depressed
  • I've got a bone to pick with Jim Hogshire
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Materialism and the Drug War
  • Materialism and the Drug War Part II
  • MDMA and Depression
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism
  • Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II
  • The Inhumanity of Drug Prohibition
  • The Poorly Hidden Materialist Agenda at Scientific American
  • Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk
  • William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas
  • Without Philosophy, Science becomes Scientism




    • Notes:

    1 Burroughs, William S, The Yage Letters Redux, edited by Oliver Harris, 2005 (up)
    2 Quass, Brian, Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman, 2024 (up)
    3 Doblin, Rick, Maps founder Rick Doblin, (up)
    4 Nutt, DJ, Drug Science, (up)
    5 Quass, Brian, What Carl Hart Missed, 2023 (up)
    6 Paley, Dawn, Drug War Capitalism, AK Press, Chico, California, 2014 (up)
    7 Szasz, Thomas, Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers, Anchor Press/Doubleday, New York, 1974 (up)
    8 Stamets, Paul, Fantastic Fungi: The Big-Screen Revival Tour, (up)


    Next essay: The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs
    Previous essay: Allen Ginsberg on the Drug War
    More Essays Here


    The latest hits from Drug War Records, featuring Freddie and the Fearmongers!


    1. Requiem for the Fourth Amendment



    2. There's No Place Like Home (until the DEA gets through with it)



    3. O Say Can You See (what the Drug War's done to you and me)






    computer screen with words DRUG WAR BLOG







    Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

    I passed a sign that says "Trust Trump." What does that mean? Trust him to crack down on his opposition using the U.S. Army? Or trust him not to do all the anti-American things that he's saying he's going to do.
    I looked up the company: it's all about the damn stock market and money. The FDA outlaws LSD until we remove all the euphoria and the visions. That's ideology, not science. Just relegalize drugs and stop telling me how much ecstasy and insight I can have in my life!!
    "The Legislature deliberately determines to distrust the very people who are legally responsible for the physical well-being of the nation, and puts them under the thumb of the police, as if they were potential criminals." -- Aleister Crowley on drug laws
    Katie MacBride's one-sided attack on MAPS reminds me of why I got into an argument with Vincent Rado. Yes, psychedelic hype can go too far, but let's solve the huge problem first by ending the drug war!!!
    All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.
    Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!
    I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.
    We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.
    Drug warriors abuse the English language.
    "Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
    More Tweets






    front cover of Drug War Comic Book

    Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans



    You have been reading an article entitled, Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs published on November 6, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)