How materialist dogma gives a veneer of 'science' to the DEA's lies about drugs
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 18, 2026
The goal of this essay is to answer some recent objections to my attacks on materialism. Perhaps some of the confusion arises from my use of the word "materialism" without the proper qualifications. When I write of materialism, I am referring to the philosophy behind science as it is practiced today in the west, which is to say reductive materialism: the belief that the truth about the world is to be found in studying small constituents of matter, a-contextually, while scrupulously limiting variables (aka the Baconian Method). This approach works wonders as a paradigm in the inorganic realm, as the tech revolution has demonstrated, and yet it is a recipe for disaster when applied to the psychological states of human beings. When we assume that the method gives us the truth in that latter realm, we are basically saying that scientists know more about our emotional states than do the people who experience them -- and this is precisely the claim that is implicitly being asserted every time that researchers in the government tell us that time-honored panaceas have no positive uses whatsoever.
Scientists only "get away" with this obvious lie because they insist that the efficacy of psychoactive substances is to be determined by looking under a microscope, not by considering common-sense psychology (i.e., not by considering virtuous circles created by drug-inspired success or the knock-on health benefits of happiness and anticipation, etc. etc.). Otherwise, materialists like Dr. Robert Glatter would have been laughed out of his profession when he questioned in Forbes magazine in 2021 whether laughing gas could help the depressed: laughing gas, for god's sake. Common-sense psychology tells us that substances like laughing gas could be a HUGE help for the depressed and even prevent suicide and that the potential protocols for its effective use are limited only by the imagination! The gas is already shamefully unavailable, as a practical matter, to the depressed. In a sane world, one in which we actually used drugs for human benefit, we would give laughing-gas kits to the suicidal in the same way as we now give epi pens to those prone to allergic reactions.
This is why the poet Rimbaud said that "science is too slow for us": because reductive materialist scientists take decades -- sometimes centuries -- to catch up to common sense when it comes to the emotional and mental lives of organic beings.
Nor is this some hair-splitting philosophical obsession of mine. This attitude on the part of reductive materialists has a body count. It has kept chronic depressives like myself from using godsend medicines for an entire lifetime. How? By serving to give a veneer of "science" to the drug laws of xenophobic and racist politicians. Science is thereby lending support to the massive lie of the DEA that time-honored panaceas have no positive uses whatsoever! And so materialist science (at least as practiced today) is hand-in-glove with the prohibitionists.
And this has made a muddle of all scientific research on subjects related to mind and mood and consciousness itself. As just one example, the mainstream science magazines still write as if depression is a tough nut to crack, while steadfastly refusing to point out that we have outlawed substances that could end the problem for most people in a trice -- albeit without the help of the scientific establishment and the healthcare industry whose livelihoods consist in treating depression as if they alone were the true experts on the topic.
So this is how materialist science functions today as a practical matter. It lends a veneer of "science" to Drug War prejudices, thereby helping to bamboozle a public for which science is considered the new god. This helps explain why 1 in 4 American women have no problems with being dependent upon Big Pharma drugs for life: because they have the naive idea that they are thereby being "scientific," that they are thereby truly "taking care of their health." This is what materialist scientists today are telling them, both implicitly as noted above and explicitly on talk shows like "Oprah," on which Americans are reminded to "keep taking their meds."
Let me remind the reader here that I am not objecting to reductive materialism per se; it is obviously a very productive hypothesis for creating gadgets and controlling the world.
Even here, however, there is room for spirited debate. Reductive materialists will tell us that appliances, cars and the Internet are all signs of the progress brought about by science (although they will not be in a hurry to add the atomic bomb or global warming to this list). But it can be asked: Is this really progress? Is efficiency really some kind of summum bonum for human beings? Is not the goal in life to experience it, to sensually become involved in it, not to be isolated from it with ever-new forms of virtual reality and appliances? Should not our real goal be the improvement of our own consciousness and a greater understanding of where we stand in the universe? Should we not be heeding the Delphic Oracle's advice to "know thyself" rather than to elevate human beings to a new cyborg version of Ozymandias? I am not suggesting that the latter three questions must be answered in the affirmative, only that they raise issues that must be faced by those who would elevate reductive materialism from a working hypothesis to a normative philosophy that is supposed to be valid for all Homo sapiens.
It has been objected, "but we live in a materialist world."
Yes, I reply, but of what does that material consist? The insights of philosophers like Kant, Whitehead, Bergson, and James (not to mention Einstein himself) render this objection very ambiguous indeed. James would argue that we see only a sliver of the raw data of reality in our so-called "sober" state of consciousness, and that there are many worlds of consciousness in which that "raw data" is selected and presented to us quite differently. Were philosophers ready to follow up such forbidden "leads" (rather than cravenly submitting to anti-academic drug laws which prevent them from doing so) they would now be questioning Kant's assumption of a one-size-fits-all consciousness that he tacitly defined as the sober state according to the definition of sobriety of his time and place. The main point here, however, is that none of these philosophers believed that the material world could be discussed meaningfully without reference to the individual and their experiences, and these are precisely the considerations that today's materialists ignore when they assume that human beings are biochemical machines amenable to one-size-fits-all treatments with mind and mood medicine.
Here we are focusing on the philosophy of materialism (or at least the current philosophy of materialism) in contradistinction to materialism as a productive paradigm in the physical realm. I have focused thus far on the working hypothesis because of its role in denying me godsend medicines and thus denying me the right to heal. But we should not expect the current philosophy of materialism to be sound when it inspires such demonstrably false ideas about the real world, like the idea that laughing gas does not "really" help the depressed, which is nothing but a bald-faced metaphysical claim denying ontological status to non-materialist causation, i.e., causation that could not be observed under a microscope or at least be seen to accord with a pre-existing theory about biochemical causation.
This was the "party line" for denying me drugs like cocaine when I truly needed them in life as a depressed young adult: I was told that they were not "real" cures. No, the "real" cures were the ones that purported to work scientifically -- the ones that were verified, not by the laughter of the users or their reports of happiness, but rather by the scientist's ability to connect the drug's actions with known chemical pathways, even if, as in the case of modern antidepressants, those alleged connections later turned out to be non-existent. The point that was drilled home to me by my psychiatrists at the time was this: that a psychoactive drug must do more than simply work: it must work according to existing biochemical understandings of human emotions.
The fault here, strictly speaking, is not so much with materialists as such but rather with their refusal to follow the Baconian method to which they claim fealty, for Bacon told us to observe the world that we find around us rather than to limit our study to phenomena that seem to flatter our personal understanding of how the world should work. Materialists had presupposed, basically, that human beings were biochemical widgets and that their real motivations would be found under a microscope, where they would be susceptible -- at least in theory -- to dispassionate analysis and quantification. As such, they resolved to ignore the living, breathing human being when investigating the world around them and to establish the efficacy of psychoactive medicines by looking under a microscope instead.
Let me explain here how a drug like cocaine would have worked for me in my youth -- and the reader will immediately see why these psychologically clueless scientists (gazing downward at their microscope rather than upward at my face) would have no expertise in judging the therapeutic value of such a drug.
My problem at the time was my encounter with what Edgar Allan Poe called "the imp of the perverse" in his story of that name. It is a desire in the overly reflective mind to act against one's own interests simply BECAUSE one knows that one should not. "Beyond or behind this," wrote Poe, "there is no principle that men, in their fleshly nature, can understand; and were it not occasionally known to operate in furtherance of good, we might deem the anomalous feeling a direct instigation of the Arch-fiend." This may sound like an exotic malady, but it is essentially nothing more than what we moderns would refer to as stage fright or choking -- or rather it is the masochistic pathology that is motivating such behavior, a condition that Poe diagnoses as "a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt."
Now, I had no formal training in psychology at the time, but I knew very clearly what I needed back then. I needed a drug that would silence this "imp of the perverse" so that I could succeed in the job in which I excelled -- and would keep excelling if only I would ALLOW myself to do so. I needed a drug that would work NOW to help me transcend self-doubts -- not a drug that would "kick in" in five years, after I had turned failure at my job of choice into a habit! I needed to continue being successful NOW -- not sometime over the course of a lifetime full of expensive drugs and talk therapy. I needed, in short, to be allowed to use drugs like cocaine, and to use them NOW!
Of course, I was too bamboozled to even think of mentioning the naughty word "cocaine" at that time, but I did attempt to stress the urgency of immediate and powerful pharmacological action. And what was the result of my naive protestations? I was told that if I kept it up, my prescribing doctor would class me as an addictive personality! What irony! But then they were right, of course: I WAS addicted: I was addicted to the need to be successful in life!
But let me end by posing the following question: Is materialism itself to blame for the problems cited above or is the problem that materialism is being misapplied today?
I would argue that materialism is being misapplied today. Materialistic reductionist approaches, when limited to their proper sphere, have produced marvels. And what is their proper sphere? Answer: virtually anywhere in which understandings of mind and mood and consciousness are not primary concerns.
But I had better end this essay here lest I displease the materialists with the disclaimers which, by rights, should accompany the latter concession. We may say, for instance, that materialist approaches cure many diseases, but we must also ask, how many of these diseases might not have existed in the first place were we to approach health from an holistic point of view, like the Cosmovision1 of the Andes, according to which the world, human beings included, is to be understood as an interconnected whole and not as a stockyard full of unrelated parts?
We have to ask, moreover, how many of these insurance-covered illnesses (even physical ones) would be less problematic (or even non-existent) were we allowed to use drugs to leverage the power of the human mind to transcend them? Consider opium, for instance. As Jim Hogshire notes, the drug has no more analgesic power than aspirin; it works by changing the user's PERCEPTION of pain. In other words, drugs like opium have the potential to turn an ordinary human being into a sort of stereotypical yogi, one who can leverage the power of the mind to creatively reimagine a disease and so to transcend it.
Even materialist scientists now acknowledge the power of the human mind to cause a therapy to work or to fail. And while everyone no doubt has their own opinions about where the limit of our mental powers lies in controlling our health, we can know nothing certain on the subject until drug prohibition ends and we are thereby empowered to plumb the depths of our mental abilities as a species -- for the first time -- with different people, with different education levels and different interests, using different protocols, in different contexts, for different reasons, with different drugs and combinations of drugs that improve various aspects of mood and mentation, etc. etc. etc. This is a task that humanity has never undertaken before but one which will naturally suggest itself to a self-interested species once it throws off the mental shackles of both prohibitionist ideology and its preconceived limits about the powers of the human mind.
Before we can undertake that task, however, we need to claw back our right to take care of our own health as we see fit. How? By rejecting the self-interested claims of scientists (materialist or otherwise) that they are the experts about how laypersons like ourselves should think and feel in this life!
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.
When Americans "obtain their majority" and wish to partake of drugs safely, they should be paired with older adults who have done just that. Instead, we introduce them to "drug abusers" in prerecorded morality plays to reinforce our biased notions that drug use is wrong.
Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.
It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.
Trump supports the drug war and Big Pharma: the two forces that have turned me into a patient for life with dependence-causing antidepressants. Big Pharma makes the pills, and the drug war outlaws all viable alternatives.
Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."
Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.
There are no merely recreational drugs. All drugs that elate have obvious potential uses for the depressed.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
Had the FDA been around in the Indus Valley 3,500 years ago, there would be no Hindu religion today, because they would have found some potential problem with the use of soma.
(up)