by privileging materialists with unearned victories
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 20, 2025
I have been striving over the last few years to wrap my mind around the insights of Kant1, especially as filtered through the persnickety criticisms of the infamous pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer2. While I am not yet qualified to either gainsay or approve the specifics of their various approaches to epistemology, I believe that I can safely offer some constructive criticism about their attempts to speak ex-cathedra concerning what we can know and how we can know it as Homo sapiens. Let us take for starters the generalized premise upon which the duo seem to be in agreement: namely, that we are not fitted out as a species with the perceptual tools necessary to see Reality writ large. To the contrary, our perceptual equipment forces us to see the world in a specific way and so we are biased from the get-go when it comes to formulating ideas about such a suppositious ultimate reality. Schopenhauer lauds this as an earthshaking achievement, and in some ways it surely is so. And yet it bears mentioning that this is a fact that indigenous people have always "known" experientially, through the use of the kinds of godsend medicines that the west abhors: the fact that words and concepts created by "sober" human beings are not up to the task of describing ultimate realities, no, not even in theory.
Indigenous people have been strides ahead of us in this area. Indigenous people have always known , moreover, that there is no single way to experience the world. Each psychoactive "drug" (or drug combination) provides users with a different experience of the world, some of which come with their own feeling of fundamental and seemingly undeniable veracity, as if the drug users were trespassing during their "inebriation" on the tantalizing outskirts of a great universal truth and/or power and/or cause. (I say nothing here of the contextual changes -- the various sets and settings -- that can be consciously manipulated by an indigenous society to render the use of the self-same drug productive of a wide range of specific outcomes in its users. During my ayahuasca session last year, the Spanish-language vocals of curandero Taita Jhon put me in mind of the Andes jungle, but I assume that the use of another musical style might have centered the experience in a maritime or desert environment, etc.3)
Now, of course we could argue about the precise meaning of such substance-inspired experiences. In fact, that is what William James counseled us to do: to use substances like laughing gas 4 and then to discuss what their use might tell us about the nature of reality and human consciousness. But the point here is that the Drug War forbids such investigations.
Do you see the problem here? The intoxiphobia of the west first causes our philosophers to privilege a supposed "sober perception" as the only type of perception available to human beings - and then the Drug War forbids us from even investigating alternative ways of perceiving the world. In other words, there is a bias at work here that neither Kant nor Schopenhauer noticed: the bias against perception as mediated through the use of psychoactive medicine. Their approach seems to be rather to assume in advance of all investigation that non-sober states are productive of nonsense feedback, as it were, via definition. And yet this is not a logical proof at all, but rather a sentiment based on the intoxiphobic predilections of the west. Certainly indigenous communities have never started from the assumption that drug-inspired visions were necessarily false and nonsensical. They rather believed that a variety of advisedly leveraged drug use could bring about a wide range of beneficial visions in a user - everything from insights about cosmic truth to the location of a lost set of car keys.
Even my own drug experiences have conformed with that understanding. During my "trip" on peyote some years ago, I "saw" (in my mind's eye, Horatio) a bright neon-green slideshow of Mesoamerican imagery, containing potentates and snakes and symbolic icons stylized in the manner of a Mayan codex. This was clearly not a nonsensical outcome of drug use. It was a series of highly significant visions, fraught with potential meaning about the nature of consciousness and the cultural archetypes of Joseph Campbell. Of course, a materialist might still try to dismiss the visions as meaningless, but that is the point: they would have to try to do so, there would have to be a discussion. Whereas, right now the materialist view of such visions is privileged by American drug law, which refuses to allow us to even have the sort of visions that violate behaviorist orthodoxy.
We see then that the Drug War outlaws research into the nature of perception and reality. And yet when I try to point these things out in various philosophy forums, I am told to go elsewhere. Why? Because philosophers are like everybody else in America: they think that the battle for re-legalizing drugs is a niche concern, of interest only to hedonists and Libertarians. They fail to see that the Drug War outlaws philosophical research. Or perhaps they just do not care. Most philosophers are materialists, after all, and so they are happy to live in a world wherein drug law privileges their naïve realism by effectively outlawing other ways of seeing the world.
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could disbelieve it.
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.
I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.
Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.
We need a few brave folk to "act up" by shouting "It's the drug war!" whenever folks are discussing Mexican violence or inner city shootings. The media treat both topics as if the violence is inexplicable! We can't learn from mistakes if we're in denial.
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.
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!"
According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.
When is the Holocaust Museum going to recognize that the Drug War has Nazified American life? Probably, on the same day that the Jefferson Foundation finally admits to having sold out Jefferson by inviting the DEA onto his estate in 1987 to confiscate his poppy plants.
The massive use of plea deals lets prosecutors threaten drug suspects into giving up their rights to a fair trial.
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