Rationality self-destructs in the face of authoritarian abuse of power
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 24, 2020
You've heard of Rome burning while Nero played the fiddle? Well, how about human rights floundering while philosophers examined their metaphysical navels?
Do we still need morality?
Yes, this was a recent topic of discussion among a learned body of panelists at the IAI (the Institute of Art and Ideas, artandideas.org), leading me to conclude that modern philosophy is, indeed, dead (though not for the reasons that Stephen Hawking speculated, since philosophy is really just playing dead out of cowardice) -- and that philosophy is useless when it comes to fighting back against the authoritarian tendencies of our time.
This is one case where my response to the IAI topic had to be about the topic itself, rather than the no-doubt brainy way with which it was discussed, parsed and philologically categorized by the esteemed panel convened for that purpose.
My response:
The very fact that modern philosophy is asking this question shows that rationality, pursued in the abstract, leads to self-destructive madness. The United States was created on the notion of natural law, that there is indeed something more important than the arbitrary decisions of despots. Instead of fretting whether this natural law (and hence basic human rights) even exists, philosophers should be engaged in an all-out struggle to castigate tyrants for replacing the natural law with common law, as has been done in the case of the Drug War. The Drug War is the triumph of contingent common law over natural law, imposing arbitrary limits on a human being's right to Mother Nature's plants, and thereby massively incarcerating minorities and keeping a myriad of godsend psychoactive plants not merely from 'druggies' but also from depressed patients and soldiers with PTSD, even blocking research on such godsends. So if we want to see the results of considering morality to be illusory, we have to look no further than America's overcrowded prisons or the record-breaking instances of depression in America, or the Drug War-created violence in impoverished cities. Please, philosophy, stop counting angels on a pin and start dealing with the real world: take natural law (and hence human rights) as a given so that you have a leg to stand on when confronting tyrants such as Donald Trump, who now plan to start executing the minorities that the common law has allowed America to throw in jail for the last 50 years.
Meanwhile, if you're starved for good philosophical topics, how about the following: Resolved: that the Drug War is the enforcement of Christian Science Sharia?
The natural law is premised on the idea that an ultimate morality exists. Once we start questioning that assumption, then any tyrant can justify any action based on force and expediency. Slavery, under such a view, is never fundamentally wrong, but only wrong insofar as it does not prove expedient and/or is incapable of being maintained by force of arms.
Author's Follow-up: March 9, 2025
Of course, philosophy is not to be spurned merely because it is often indecipherable at first glance. I do not deny the occasional importance of using specialized vocabularies to express abstruse concepts. But surely there is also a place in philosophy for pointing out glaringly obvious injustices, and this is something that almost no philosopher is doing these days when it comes to the War on Drugs, even though those injustices can be clearly traced to false premises. Surely, the philosopher as such is the expert in flagging false premises. The fact that they do not do so when it comes to the War on Drugs is frustrating, though, alas, understandable, since one can get fired and/or ostracized for being a Drug War heretic in academia.
I conclude I am on my own here because I am the only philosopher in the world who lodged a protest with the FDA over its recent plans to regulate laughing gas as a 'drug.' I alone seemed to recall that anesthetics like laughing gas 1 gave William James his view of reality and that he had conjured his fellow philosophers to use such substances to study new worlds:
'No account of the universe in its totality,' wrote James, 'can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.'
I alone seemed to notice that the FDA's plans were a slap in the face of academic freedom and an insult to the memory of the great American psychologist.
The truth is the Drug War represents all that is wrong with America, philosophically speaking. We are all familiar with its connections with racism2 and militarism. But the Drug War is also based on what philosophers call a category error: namely, the idea that materialists are experts when it comes to matters of mind and mood. It follows that the failure for philosophers to push back here against substance prohibition is not entirely cowardice but is also motivated by the recognition by modern materialists that the Drug War serves to outlaw precisely those kinds of drugs whose use conduces to a non-materialist understanding of the world. From this point of view, the materialist philosopher says, 'Good riddance to drugs!' because substance prohibition lets them win their case for materialism 3 by default, by outlawing the opposition.
Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.
I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.
No wonder the "Justice" Department relies on plea deals; otherwise juries could use nullification to free those charged with mere drug possession.
If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.
Alcohol makes me sleepy. But NOT coca wine. The wine gives you an upbeat feeling of controlled energy, without the jitters of coffee and without the fury of steroids. It increases rather than dulls mental focus.
Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.
In 1886, coca enthusiast JJ Tschudi referred to prohibitionists as 'kickers.' He wrote: "If we were to listen to these kickers, most of us would die of hunger, for the reason that nearly everything we eat or drink has fallen under their ban."
Two weeks ago, a guy told me that most psychiatrists believe ECT is great. I thought he was joking! I've since come to realize that he was telling the truth: that is just how screwed up the healthcare system is today thanks to drug war ideology and purblind materialism.
To treat opioid use disorder, we should re-normalize the peaceable smoking of opium at home as an alternative to drinking alcohol.
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
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