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How Bernardo Kastrup reckons without the drug war

a philosophical review of 'Why Materialism is Baloney'

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 11, 2023



Here is my review of Bernado's book as published today on Everand.com.



Bernardo fails to mention the Drug War.

Update: June 02, 2025
Update: November 11, 2025

This will sound unrelated to most people, but reductive materialism 1 helps support drug-hating ideology by causing us to search for "real" cures, while ignoring common sense. Materialist Dr. Robert Glatter wrote an article in Forbes magazine claiming that he is uncertain whether laughing gas could help with treatment-resistant depression. Any depressed person would tell you that it could, and for obvious psychological reasons, and Reader's Digest has been claiming for a century that laughter is the best medicine.

But as a materialist, the doctor wants proof under a microscope. This is materialist myopia based on the assumption that human beings are biochemical machines, not living, breathing individuals. This materialist myopia ensures that drugs like MDMA and psychedelics will remain illegal forever. Why? Because the first step that the materialists take in evaluating them is to ignore all positive anecdote and historical use. And so they judge holistic medicine by "scientific standards," which is a kind of pharmacological colonialism.

I tried to explain this connection to Bernardo, this connection between the Drug War and materialism. And yet I could not reach him. I was told to join his philosophy group instead. I did so. But I was quickly told by the group's moderators that "drugs" had nothing to do with philosophy and that I should join some niche group on that topic.

And so the link between materialism and the Drug War remains unexposed.

And I imagine this review will be deleted as well, that's just how much the mainstream has been bamboozled by the full-court press of drug-war propaganda.



Author's Follow-up:

June 02, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




The Drug War outlaws precisely the kinds of substances whose use could cause us to question the materialist paradigm. This is why all philosophers -- but especially enemies of materialism -- should be crying out on behalf of academic freedom2 and for the end of the superstitious Drug War: for it represents an anti-scientific world view, one in which we pre-judge substances "up" or "down" based on our own perceptions about who is currently using psychoactive substances and why. This is the outlawing of human progress, when we decide in advance that a substance can have no positive and legitimate uses at any dose, for any person, when used for any reason, in any context.

When authors like Kastrup miss the connection between materialism and the Drug War, they are passing up the best argument that they could make in support of their own thesis. They have proof of the inadequacy of materialist philosophy ready to hand and yet they do not see it. The proof may be syllogistically deduced given the absurdity to which a materialist view of drugs has led us.

Premise 1: "The substantial reasons for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us" (quote from Whitehead from "The Concept of Nature").

Premise 2: The materialist approach to drugs leads to absurd outcomes.

Conclusion: It is a category error to place materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine.

In case the reader doubts the absurd nature of the modern world when it comes to drugs, consider the following absurd realities:

1) We live in a world in which we would rather that the depressed kill themselves than to use "drugs."

2) We live in a world in which we would rather that the depressed undergo brain-damaging shock therapy than to use "drugs."

3) We live in a world in which we ignore almost all positive reports of drug use.

4) We live in a world in which our FDA approves of Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself 3 , and yet the same FDA will not approve of laughing gas or phenethylamines like MDMA 4 -- or any other obvious treatment -- for the depressed.

5) We live in a world in which the nightly smoking of an opium 5 pipe is considered evil and yet the daily use of Big Pharma 6 7 meds is encouraged as a medical duty. Cui bono? Wake up, people!

How's that for hypocritical absurdity -- in this world wherein our privileged drug alcohol kills 178,000 Americans a year!

Materialists are, in fact, dogmatically blind to all obvious benefits of drug use thanks to their adherence to the passion-scorning tenets of reductionism and behaviorism. They are never happy with a drug that merely "works" -- they want to create drugs that "really" work -- that is, which work in accordance with the materialist concept of human beings as interchangeable biochemical widgets. Their interest is in vindicating materialism, not in helping suffering humanity. We live in a world in which scientists are gaslighting 8 the hoi polloi9, trying to make us believe that the glaringly obvious and time-honored benefits of drugs do not really exist -- that only in looking under a microscope can we determine if drugs have any benefits for humanity. What a joke. Had this philosophy been at work in the Punjab in 1500 BCE, there would be no Hindu religion today, insofar as Soma 10 would have been banned as a substance having no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, ever.

And yet I seem to be the only philosopher in the world who sees the connection between materialism and the Drug War. I was certainly the only philosopher to officially protest the FDA's plans to treat laughing gas 11 as a drug, despite my valiant snail mail campaign to awaken the philosophers at Harvard and Oxford to this slap in the face of academic freedom and the legacy of William James. Nitrous oxide was already shamefully unavailable, as a practical matter, to those who needed it most: like philosophers following in the footsteps of William James, or the severely depressed who could so obviously benefit from a gas whose informed use could give them a break from gloomy introspection.

And yet when one makes such arguments, they are told by brainwashed Americans that they should reserve their comments for a niche Reddit group about drug prohibition. This is the whole problem, the fact that nobody recognizes the endless counterproductive and anti-scientific ramifications of embracing drug-war orthodoxy, above all, the idea that we must ignore common sense in favor of microscopic evidence. The Drug War is not just a set of laws that affect hedonists only. It censors academia and keeps philosophers like Kastrup from noticing otherwise blazingly obvious evidence in support of their own theses: in this case, the fact that materialism is baloney, philosophically speaking. Kastrup seems unaware of the fact that we already have deductive proof of his thesis. The inadequacy of the materialist mindset, at least in the realm of mood and mentation, is clear given the absurd results to which that philosophy has led, the absurd results that outlaw academic freedom and bar the severely depressed from using any and all drugs whose strategic use could otherwise keep them from committing suicide.

Surely, Kastrup recognizes such absurdities. He fails to mention them because the Drug War has outlawed his academic freedom -- and that is a topic to be discussed in a philosophy forum, not in some niche subreddit about drug prohibition! By "philosophy," I refer to what Schopenhauer called "the real seriously understood philosophy which is concerned with the truth, and nothing else; and by no means the jest of philosophy taught in the universities.12" For I consider most academic and scientific studies to be jests these days insofar as they ignore the existence of psychoactive medicine and what its use might tell us about the nature of human emotions, mentation and human consciousness. If science were free today, we would be studying the mind-body problem with the help of psychoactive substances -- instead of persisting in our cherished fiction that we can acquire a God's-eye-view of the truth by ignoring everything subjective, everything that is merely obvious to common-sense psychology.

These are not just philosophical considerations. People commit suicide 13 every day because we have outlawed all the substances that could have cheered them up. In an humane world, we would teach safe and wise use of all substances and put an end to our childish and superstitious drug demonization campaigns. For it cannot be said enough: saying things like "Fentanyl 14 kills!" and "Crack kills!" is philosophically identical to shouting "Fire bad!" All such statements would have us fear and demonize dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.



Author's Follow-up:

November 11, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




Let me make it as clear as possible why philosophers like Kastrup should be protesting drug prohibition, especially if their focus is on the metaphysical positions of Kant and Schopenhauer 15. Those latter philosophers studied only one privileged kind of consciousness, what they called rational consciousness, whereas William James has subsequently reminded us that "our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.16" One does not have to be an expert in the minutiae of Kantian argumentation to realize that philosophers need to connect the dots between the insights of these two philosophers -- and that their failure to do so is a dereliction of duty. It is therefore a bad sign that I was the only philosopher in the world to formally protest the FDA's plans to treat laughing gas as a "drug," thereby making it less likely than ever that the gas will be used by philosophers to study the nature of human perception, of consciousness, and of reality itself 17 18. This was what William James urged his colleagues to do -- and this is the task from which modern philosophers have recoiled in tacit fealty to the drug-demonizing ideology of the War on Drugs.

Of course, I get it. Any philosopher who takes up the gauntlet that James threw down viz. altered states is likely to pay a high price for doing so, but the least that we can ask of our philosophers is that they admit that there is a problem here. They should be protesting drug prohibition as entailing the censorship of academia, rather than naively claiming that our drugs policy has no effect on free inquiry and debate. One useful way to do this would be for them to end all of their papers on related topics with a disclaimer pointing out that drug law has barred them from pursuing certain topics, such as the potential hints that unique states of consciousness might provide us concerning the nature of perception, of the self, and of the noumenal world. In this way they could be honest without necessarily jeopardizing their careers. In the absence of such a disclaimer, our philosophers are tacitly accepting drug prohibition as a natural baseline for study -- in which case they are using drug laws to shield themselves from all potential non-materialist objections to their findings. They are, in effect, using modern drug prejudices as an excuse to ignore the insights of William James concerning human consciousness.

Someone needs to start fighting for academic freedom in the face of drug prohibition, and what better professionals to lead the charge than those who claim to be lovers of wisdom? Who better to protest a policy that prioritizes fear over knowledge?



RELATED ESSAYS














Notes for essay entitled How Bernardo Kastrup reckons without the drug war: a philosophical review of 'Why Materialism is Baloney':

1: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
2: Coverup on Campus DWP (up)
3: RINVOQ RX List (up)
4: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
5: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
6: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
7: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
8: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
9: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
10: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
11: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
12: The World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer, Arthur (up)
13: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
14: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
15: Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics: The key to understanding how it solves the hard problem of consciousness and the paradoxes of quantum mechancs Kastrup, Bernardo, 2021 (up)
16: “The Varieties of Religious Experience : William James : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2021. Internet Archive. 2021. https://archive.org/details/the-varieties-of-religious-experience_202109. (up)
17: Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine DWP (up)
18: Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

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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?

It is a truism to say that we cannot change the world and that therefore we have to change ourselves -- but the drug war outlaws even this latter option.

What attracts me about "drug dealers" is that they are NOT interested in prying into my private life. What a relief! With psychiatry, you are probed for pathological behavior on every office visit. You are a child. To the "drug dealer," I am an adult at least.

If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.

According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.

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.

There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.

My consciousness, my choice.

FDA drug approval is a farce when it comes to psychoactive medicine. The FDA ignores all the obvious benefits and pretends that to prove efficacy, they need "scientific" evidence. That's scientism, not science.

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.


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