How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 24, 2025
Modern psychologists are living in a world of make-believe. A case in point is the Academia.edu website. It has published 91 research papers since 2023 under the category of Mental Health and Well-Being, and not one of the papers even mentions drug prohibition. Not one of them mentions the fact that politicians have taken the unprecedented step of outlawing all substances that could help one take CARE of their own mental health and well-being. Indeed, there is only one article that even concerns so-called "drugs," and that one casts drugs in an exclusively negative light. It is somewhat problematically titled "Evaluability assessment of drug prevention programs." (How do you prevent a "drug"? And what drugs are they trying to "prevent"? Are they trying to "prevent" penicillin?) Clearly, the academic world is toeing the party line that drugs have no positive uses whatsoever. Take opium , for instance. The famed doctors of the past -- Avicenna, Galen, and Paracelsus -- considered opium to be the closest thing in nature to a panacea, and yet today's academics connive in the Drug War lie that opium has no positive uses, for anybody, anywhere, ever! In a sane world, our academic journals would refuse to publish any author who implicitly promoted such willful obscurantism on the subject of drugs.
These authors are amazingly naive about simple human psychology. They take a very pompous and condescending view toward those who suffer needlessly because of drug prohibition. THEY are the experts on mind and mood, thank you very much, not those who suffer -- not those who could have their problems relieved in a moment by the intermittent use of the time-honored godsend medicines that the west has demonized and outlawed. And so we live in a world in which we actually prefer that the depressed commit suicide 1 than use drugs, that they undergo brain-damaging shock therapy rather than use drugs. But then what can we expect? The very jobs of these academics depend on drug prohibition. The outlawing of near-panaceas like opium 2 and coca has resulted in a thriving industry for academics whose mission is to study all the "illnesses" brought about by said prohibition -- to treat them and to speculate with clueless (and often politically correct) extravagance about their origins: always ignoring, of course, the 6,400-pound gorilla in the room, the fact that these so-called illnesses were brought about by drug prohibition itself.
Our academics, at least in the field of psychology, have come to believe that profundity lies, not in honesty and insight, but rather in the use of "academic speak" and the amassing of endless footnotes. They have come to believe that form is more important than substance, or rather that form IS substance. And so they isolate themselves from the depressed hoi polloi, ensuring that their papers are critiqued only by colleagues who are playing the same academic game of make-believe, colleagues who will either flatter their fellow pedants or else criticize them in such a verbose and heavily footnoted fashion that the sting of any reproach will be obliterated. But then, merely to take modern academics seriously in the field of psychology today is to sign off on their willful indifference to human suffering. Every chronic depressive knows that the needlessly prolix papers of modern psychologists are diversions, mere games, with no meaning in the real world of striving and passion. The academics prove their irrelevance by completely ignoring the one thing that truly matters to real people with real psychological suffering: the fact that the government has outlawed every medicine that could actually WORK for the depressed and the anxious! Every single one of them!
Speaking of irrelevance, consider this typically titled academic paper published in 2024 on Academia.edu: "Existential wellbeing may be of utmost importance to many people." Well, there is no "may be" about it: Wellbeing is of utmost importance to many people, whether we call it existential or not -- but surely the real issue is the fact that it is illegal for us to take CARE of our own wellbeing, existential or otherwise -- and any authors who ignore that fact while writing on such subjects are clearly trying to gaslight their readership -- or else they themselves have been brainwashed by the relentless gaslighting 3 of others, for what is the whole project of the War on Drugs but an ongoing attempt to gaslight the world about the many glaringly obvious beneficial uses of psychoactive medicines, by claiming that such time-honored and psychologically obvious benefits do not even exist?
It is clear that Drug war censorship has completely brainwashed these academics into believing the Big Lie of the prohibitionists, that substances that have been identified (or rather disparaged) as "drugs" by racist politicians have no positive uses for anybody, at any dose, for any reason, ever.
And so academia today, in its cowardly silence about drug prohibition, helps to promulgate the anti-scientific algorithm of the Drug War: that a substance that can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason, must not be used by anyone at any dose for any reason.
And so academia today collaborates in the drug prohibition that has destroyed minority communities around the world, shredded the American Bill of Rights and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America, meanwhile repealing our time-honored right to take care of our own health as we see fit.
And so the suicidal and the depressed must go without medicines that could give them reason to live -- all because psychologists -- and materialist scientists in general -- are dogmatically blind to common sense, to the power of elation and anticipation, to the idea that happiness is indeed happiness -- and that being happy -- yes, even with the occasional help of drugs -- is actually better than being dead!
Strangely, Americans sign off on the daily use of drugs -- as long as they do not inspire and elate. They are fine with a lifetime dependency on brain-numbing Big Pharma drugs -- a dependency that simply CANNOT be kicked in many cases. And this hypocrisy is breathtaking. Only 5% of soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam had trouble getting off the drug when they returned to the States4; meanwhile, the antidepressant called Effexor5 has a 95% recidivism rate 6 for long-term users after three years. 95%!
But Americans -- academics included -- are ridiculously uneducated about drug facts. They live in a world full of censorship and propaganda: a world that is determined not to teach them about drugs, but rather to make them feel a certain way about drugs: namely, to hold them in unbounded contempt.
In response to this cradle-to-grave brainwashing, I will conclude this essay with some quotes depicting positive drug use, lest the indoctrinated reader be so bamboozled as to believe that the very term "positive drug use" is an oxymoron.
Sir Humphry Davy on the use of laughing gas :
"I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas."7
NOTE: What a blessing this would be for the chronically depressed in moments of brain-numbing despair! Imagine the OBVIOUS beneficial uses for those with deteriorated brain function! And yet the FDA wants to criminalize this substance, a gas that is already shamelessly unavailable on a practical basis for those for whom its intermittent use would be a godsend!
Mike Jay on the use of laughing gas :
"To breathe the gas was, simply and literally, inspiration."8
NOTE: We should be making laughing gas available to the depressed in the same way as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies. Instead, the FDA is proposing to treat the gas like a "drug" -- this despite the fact that William James encouraged philosophers to use laughing gas 9 to study the nature of reality itself! (Incidentally, I was the only philosopher in the world who formally protested to the FDA on behalf of academic freedom with regard to their plans to criminalize nitrous oxide.)
Albert Hofmann on the use of LSD:
"The world was as if newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity, which persisted for the entire day."10
NOTE: These are the kinds of medicines that our clueless and brainwashed academics are helping to keep out of the hands of the depressed.
Mike Jay on the use of Harmaline:
"I think Harmal is an imagination-enhancer, rather than a true hallucinogen."11
My comment: An imagination-enhancer! Just imagine! In a sane world, the fact that such drugs actually exist would be the big story! Instead, racist fearmongers have convinced us to think only of the potential misuse of such drugs by the white young people whom we refuse to educate about safe drug use!
AFTERWORD:
Freud realized that cocaine could be used wisely by most people to end depression 12. To end it! And he had no problem getting off the drug after three years of beneficial use. Unfortunately, the doctors of his time judged the use of cocaine 13 by standards that they did not hold for any other activity on earth. They were determined to ignore all the benefits and focus only on the potential rare downsides. Had they judged aspirin in the same way, it would have been removed from the shelves at once. Had they judged alcohol in the same way, they would have insisted on immediate liquor prohibition.
In reality, of course, it was not our health that the doctors were worried about. They were threatened with the loss of entire careers if human beings could learn to use a drug that actually destroyed depression. The money was to be made in "treating" conditions like depression, not by curing them!
Freud was ambitious and he saw which way the wind lay. So he switched his focus from cocaine to psychotherapy. Ever since then, the fields of psychology and psychiatry have been all about creating jobs for healthcare professionals, while permitting the depressed to suffer needlessly. Even philosophers joined in the game, like Merleau-Ponty, speculating quite profoundly on Freudian theories -- while completely ignoring the real insight of Freud altogether: the fact that drugs like cocaine actually work -- although not in the simplistic causal fashion demanded of the purblind behaviorists. They work because they are FELT to work -- which is all that matters in the psychological realm. And yet materialists have the nerve to second-guess the happy -- telling us that they are not "really" happy! Apparently, one can only be scientifically "happy" if they are dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life -- drugs justified by materialist considerations -- though that justification was always a sham, as psychologists now admit that no one knows why those drugs work14 -- to which I would add that no one knows that they DO work, if by "work" we mean to bring about self-actualization in life and to truly end depression.
ADDENDUM...
Freud got off cocaine easily. I am on a Big Pharma 1516 antidepressant that has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users!
Something is WRONG with this picture.
America's drug prohibition is inhumane. It is a crime against humanity 17.
"My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine18
The International Observer says the "core issues" causing Mexican drug violence are: "corruption, inequality, and the demand for narcotics in the U.S." Wrong, wrong, wrong. The core issue is DRUG PROHIBITION.
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
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?
Almost every mainstream article about psychology and consciousness is nonsense these days because it ignores the way that drug prohibition has stymied our investigation of such subjects.
Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
In a compassionate world, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.
Psychedelics and entheogens should be freely available to all dementia patients. These medicines can increase neuronal plasticity and even grow new neurons. Besides, they can inspire and elate -- or do we puritans feel that our loved ones have no right to peace of mind?
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
We don't need people to get "clean." We need people to start living a fulfilling life. The two things are different.
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