an open letter to Mitch Horowitz, author of Uncertain Places
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 2, 2025
i, Mitch!
My name is Ballard Quass and I have been studying the philosophy of the Drug War for the last ten years.
I am currently enjoying your book of essays entitled 'Uncertain Places.' 1
I am writing to suggest to you that the ultimate 'damned' facts today, in the Fortean sense of that word, are facts concerning the benefits of drugs. No facts are more totally damned. While UFOs and PEAR studies have been largely scorned by materialist society, one can now write about such things without being totally ostracized. But no one can write freely about common-sense drug benefits without being ghosted by mainstream society.
I have learned this the hard way over the last five years. During that time I have written hundreds of letters to top-ranked philosophers around the globe on this topic -- including many non-fiction authors -- and less than five have ever responded to me, and even then it was usually just a curt 'thank you' rather than the beginning of the productive discussion that I was hoping to facilitate by corresponding with them. Not only have my letters been ignored, but my posted comments have been blocked on websites that supposedly discuss drugs freely. Even a solicited autobiography of mine was nixed by Mad in America because it stated the true fact that I believe that there are benefits to the use of outlawed substances. The organization's editors claimed that doctors know best about such things -- the same doctors who are blinded by behaviorism into ignoring all psychologically obvious uses for drugs.
Here are just a few of the glaringly obvious drug benefits that no one is free to discuss these days without being totally marginalized:
1) The power of laughing gas to cheer up the depressed.
2) The power of MDMA to bring people together in peace and harmony.
3) The blatantly obvious power of opium to inspire and elate.
Indeed, before the west 'damned' upbeat stories about opium, the drug was considered an actual panacea.
This list of positive drug benefits could go on and on. Many of the benefits are just basic common sense, but again, materialists ignore common sense thanks to their adherence to behaviorist and reductionist principles.
When the FDA evaluates psychoactive drugs these days, it ignores all OBVIOUS benefits of drug use. Not only that, but it ignores all OBVIOUS downsides of prohibition. This is because society has 'damned' all facts that point to such truths. Why? Because Americans have a 'previous commitment' to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
Meanwhile, our science mags tell us that depression is a tough nut to crack -- but that is only true because we have outlawed everything that obviously works for depression.
So thoroughly have such topics of discussion been 'damned' that I doubt that you yourself are going to respond to this email. I say this with all due respect, not because I know the first thing about you personally, but because I have written literally hundreds of letters like this to established authors over the years and few have ever responded -- and even those few have ignored the substance of my comments.
Nevertheless, I am enjoying your book... and I hope that you will contemplate my proposition: namely, that today's most fiercely 'damned' facts are those that concern the positive uses for drugs, closely followed by those facts that concern the negative effects of prohibition.
Thanks for your valuable time!
PS Positive facts about psychedelics are slowly approaching mainstream status in academia, perhaps, but no one dares point out that opium and coca have obvious positive uses, let alone the hundreds of phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. Meanwhile, Americans have been taught to think of daily opium smoking as outrageous, while they tell us that we have an actual duty to 'keep taking our meds.' I would go so far as to say that Charles Fort 'didn't know from damned,' insofar as he wrote before America had damned psychoactive drug benefits wholesale. These kinds of drug-related facts are so damned that even Forteans themselves damn them, as is shown by their ongoing failure to respond to my letters to them on this very topic.
Charles Fort
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort compiled a long list of factual stories that science had "damned" (i.e., ignored). He focused almost exclusively on the many published reports of unusual substances "falling from the sky," including stones, axes, animal matter, resinous residue, blood, frog spawn, beef, coal, sulfur, limestone, etc.
"There are so many records of the fall of earthy matter from the sky," wrote Fort, "that it would seem almost uncanny to find resistance here, were we not so accustomed to the uncompromising stands of orthodoxy--which, in our metaphysics, represent good, as attempts, but evil in their insufficiency."
In other words, modern science is blind to the facts that do not serve to advance existing hypotheses and theories.
Why is this relevant to the topic of drugs?
Because Charles Fort did not know from damnation! He lived before the western world had damned all stories about the positive uses of drugs.
And why did the west do so?
Because scientists had their own beloved theories of behaviorism and reductionism, by which they felt they could understand the world. They therefore insisted that we must look under a microscope to decide if a drug has REAL beneficial uses. In other words, scientists could ignore all positive anecdotes about drug use, they could ignore all positive historical use, and they could even ignore psychological common sense. Their job was not to investigate reports of positive drug use, but to prove that positive drug use was impossible -- at least until such time as science found a non-obvious way to prove that drug benefits actually exist, one that could be quantified and shown in a PowerPoint presentation to research funders.
And so billions have to go without godsend medicine because modern science cannot wrap its materialist mind around the glaringly obvious fact that psychoactive drugs have benefits -- indeed, their benefits are only limited by our imaginations in employing them.
To repeat and reiterate, then: Charles Fort did not know from damnation! No facts have ever been more thoroughly and ruthlessly "damned" than those that suggest positive uses for outlawed psychoactive medicines.
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.
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.
It's rich when Americans outlaw drugs and then insist that those drugs did not have much to offer in any case. It's like I took away your car and then told you that car ownership was overrated.
"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
A law proposed in Colorado in February 2024 would have criminalized positive talk about drugs online. What? The world is on the brink of nuclear war because of hate-driven politics, and I can be arrested for singing the praises of empathogens?
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.
Now the US is bashing the Honduran president for working with "drug cartels." Why don't we just be honest and say why we're REALLY upset with the guy? Drugs is just the excuse, as always, now what's the real reason? Stop using the drug war to disguise American foreign policy.
The addiction gene should be called the prohibition gene: it renders one vulnerable to prohibition lies and limitations: like the lack of safe supply, the lack of choices, and the lack of information. We should pathologize the prohibitionists, not their victims.
I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.
Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.
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, Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation: an open letter to Mitch Horowitz, author of Uncertain Places, published on March 2, 2025 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)
i, Mitch!
You have been reading an article entitled, Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation: an open letter to Mitch Horowitz, author of Uncertain Places, published on March 2, 2025 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)
