My name is Ballard Quass and I am the webmaster of AbolishTheDEA.com.
As the name of the site suggests, I am greatly bothered by the outlawing of natural substances in America, and therefore in the world. I think that the government has thereby made plants the scapegoats for societal problems while turning America into a penal colony and creating a whole new movie genre worth of violence, namely the Drug War movie. The result, I believe, is not only ruined lives, but stolen elections, since the Drug War results in tens of thousands of Americans being dropped from the voting rolls on account of felony convictions for drug offenses, thereby ensuring that the conservative Drug Warriors remain in power at election time, simply because their opponents cannot vote.
I am further motivated on this topic because I have spent over 40 years on what turned out to be mind-numbing and addictive LEGAL medicines, going a lifetime without self-actualization, all because my government has decided that I could have no recourse to psychoactive medicines from the rain forest, because, in effect, my government has outlawed the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet. This is why I tell everyone who will listen that the Drug War is not just a war against minorities, but it is a war against patients everywhere - even a war against DEA agents themselves, many of whom will get old someday and find themselves lonely and depressed in a "home for the aged," wanting to die, perhaps - a condition that could so easily have been remedied by the intelligent use of the entheogenic substances that the agent has spent a lifetime confiscating and burning.
With this backstory in mind, I wanted to share my views about the treatment of addiction. I believe I have some common sense ideas that have never been considered, because, in my opinion, modern thinkers on both the left and the right are so in thrall to a myriad of unfounded assumptions of the Drug War.
One of these assumptions is that we should automatically be disdainful of treatments that involve a patient getting "high." Even this terminology itself, "high," is a drug-war pejorative, since it describes what one person may think of as a life-changing religious experience as something tawdry and cheap. In the works of Poe and De Quincey, we find that "highs" can bring about a deep appreciation of nature and the opera respectively, but the Drug Warrior dismisses all that positivity in favor of the metaphysical assumption that "highs" are bad in and of themselves, period, full stop.
But I agree with these authors that "highs" do not have to be seen that way, that certain kinds of "highs" can be put to work in the treatment of addiction, despite our Protestant-inspired conviction that addiction treatment must be a hideous experience from which one learns life lessons.
IN PRAISE OF DOCTOR FEELGOOD
Consider an alcohol, cocaine, or opium addict who visits a "drug dealer" instead of a psychiatrist to "get off' of their favorite poison. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that this "dealer" is extremely empathic and has access to (and deep knowledge of) every psychoactive plant in the world, as well as the ritual uses which best enhance their therapeutic value. I believe that, in theory, such a shaman-like figure could cure the patient's addiction in a relatively painless way (perhaps even a psychologically insightful way) using a wide variety of what the Drug Warrior would dismiss as "happy pills" or "happy plants," but plants which, viewed rationally, would be seen as nature's godsends, not demons in disguise.
What is the main problem with addiction, after all? It is the fact that the body is crying out for a status quo metabolism, so to speak, screaming bloody murder when a certain substance is suddenly absent from the bloodstream. One obvious but seldom considered response to this metabolic panic is to take a cue from Google and fight bad drugs with more drugs, in the same way that the search engine fights bad speech with more speech. In other words, the therapeutic goal of the shaman would be to drown out and/or override the body's panic signals with a host of positive messages brought about by the clever and strategic use of various psychoactive plant compounds. Such treatment would be continued, at least until the body has made its metabolic peace with the absence of the original addictive substance.
Here is where the Drug Warrior would charge the dealer in question with being a "Doctor Feelgood." But what exactly is wrong with being a Doctor Feelgood? A Doctor Feelgood is bad only to the extent that he or she prescribes treatments that are addictive*. But I am advocating the strategic use of a wide variety of highs (or, less pejoratively, entheogenic states), chosen and administered according to a schedule such that no addiction is created, the point of the highs being to shout down the negative metabolic messages of the withdrawal process, to incentivize the addict to hold firm during that process, and to ideally even learn something about his or herself through the ritual use of the therapeutic plants thus employed.
*Note: addiction is another concept whose meaning and significance has been muddled by Drug Warrior assumptions. No one is in a hurry to remind us that HG Wells and Jules Verne were strategically habituated to coca wine or that Benjamin Franklin was an habitual user of opium, since to acknowledge these facts would violate a central strategy of the Drug Warrior, which is to never say anything positive about banned substances. The Drug Warrior also fails to distinguish between the problems caused by addiction to a given substance and the problems caused by an interruption of the supply of that substance. Finally, the use of the term "addiction" often involves a subjective judgment: thus a Drug Warrior will call a heroin user an addict (even a bounden slave) to the drug, but he or she will describe a daily SSRI user as someone who is simply "taking their meds."
{^According to psychiatrist Julie Holland, one in four American women are addicted to SSRI anti-depressants, many of which are harder to quit than heroin. Why? Because heroin rapidly leaves the system while SSRIs screw up one's brain chemistry for months if not years at a time -- by causing the very chemical imbalances that they purport to fix. (See Robert Whitaker's "Anatomy of an Epidemic" for more.) Yet our most addicted country demonizes non-addictive therapeutic godsends from Mother Nature.}{
Here I possibly part company with your viewpoint, but to be clear, I am not saying that addicts do not have deeper issues. But I do dispute the assumption held by many Americans that the withdrawal process has to be a living hell - one that leads at best to livable lives but only very rarely to self-fulfillment.
The idea that withdrawal has to be hell is, I believe, an unexamined philosophical tenet more than a fact.
It may well be a scientific fact, as well, given current drug law which outlaws all mood-improving medicines - but we should not draw conclusions about what's possible by taking an aberrant legal system as a given. We should state what would work - and then point out the fact (loudly and clearly) that drug law is standing in the way of the proposed solution.
Unfortunately, psychiatrists are not always this honest. I have read many stories of cases in which psychiatrists say they used ECT as a "last resort." But this is misleading, because the psychiatrist is thereby ignoring the fact that thousands of potentially harmless alternatives were outlawed by our government, namely almost every psychoactive plant and fungi in the rain forest. It would therefore be far more honest to say, "I used ECT as a last resort, but it would not have been necessary except for our drug laws." That would be a helpful statement, too, because it would remind the reader of the still unrecognized truth: that the Drug War is anti-patient.
In short, I think the outlawing of ayahuasca cures is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to drug-war outrages. The real story is the outlawing of Mother Nature itself, a despotic government power grab which has deprived would-be mind healers of a vast arsenal of natural therapeutic substances, some of which appear to have been custom-made by Mother Nature to bring about the precise sort of fundamental healing that psychiatry has always claimed to have as its ultimate goal.
SOLUTION TO ADDICTION:
I think the long-term answer to all these problems lies in the re-legalization of Mother Nature's plants, possibly requiring an amendment stipulating that the government cannot outlaw plants at all, this flora being the birthright of every citizen. (Jefferson and Locke clearly would have said that Natural Law already covered this proscription, but apparently nothing in the world is so obvious that it cannot be denied by racist and power-hungry politicians.)
Folks then ask me, how would I ensure public safety?
First, I'd have to stop laughing in order to answer this question. After all, the Drug Warriors, as mentioned above, have created so much violence by outlawing Mother Nature that they have single-handedly created a whole new movie genre: the drug-war genre, in which DEA agents gleefully subvert the US Constitution in order to stop Americans from using the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet. They have militarized local police forces and created civil wars overseas.
When I succeed in controlling my laughter, I would point out that it is not my responsibility to say how I would ensure public safety. If someone takes away my right to free speech, I am not under the obligation of telling the tyrant how my free speech can be restored without causing problems. My free speech was taken from me unconstitutionally and must be restored NOW.
Likewise, when the government has criminalized plants and fungi - some of which may naturally grow on my very own real estate - I am under no obligation to explain how the natural state of affairs can be restored without problems.
But in the hopes of getting my rights back sooner than later, I will condescend to reassure the tyrant as follows:
First, you might stipulate that natural substances cannot be distributed for profit. This will stop any ridiculous ads from encouraging ill-advised plant consumption.
Second, why not crack down as always - but this time on actual behavior, not on substances. Stop punishing a supposititious "pre-crime" (the mere possession of substances) and start punishing REAL crimes (rape, murder, undue rowdiness, etc.) - whether they were inspired by substance use or not? Indeed, crack down still further for crimes in which drugs were involved, since the offender's actions threaten the rights of reasonable substance users everywhere, in the same way that gun-related violence puts rational gun owners on the defensive about their own gun ownership.
That said, with full legality, users will have the opportunity to correct their drug-related errors - say their accidental addiction to coca consumption - by using more benign and non-addictive psychoactive plants under expert guidance, in such a way as to transcend their unwanted addiction.
Finally, my number one suggestion for curing America of its addictions and drug obsessions:
The psychiatrist of the future must be an empathic shaman with legal access to all the psychoactive substances in the world - rather than a handful of addictive nostrums that have been misleadingly popularized by psychiatrists on the Oprah Winfrey show, psychiatrists and other opinion leaders who were being paid for that endorsement by the pill makers themselves.
Yours Truly,
Ballard Quass
PS Speaking of addiction, there are two kinds that psychiatrists seem to ignore:
1) Effexor (like many modern anti-depressants) causes such chemical dependency that it has a 95% recidivism rate for those who attempt to "kick it," and this is according to the NIH. Yet, perversely, psychiatrists say that this somehow proves that it works! If so, my brain chemicals never got the message. If so, then heroin works too, probably even better.
2) Secondly, no one seems to realize the negative effects of turning a depressed person into a lifelong patient. This is what happens when they are put on SSRIs and SNRIs. After spending 40 years on the receiving end of psychiatry's pill-pushing paradigm, there is nothing that bothers me more than having to visit a doctor every three months of my life and tell him or her how I'm feeling. This has made me a patient for life, which is the exact opposite of "empowering" me as a normal human being. But psychiatry as an institution does not even acknowledge this situation and the way that it damages patient morale (meanwhile driving some of us into the poorhouse as it does so).
APRIL 30, 2022
Drug War ideology is so pervasive and based on so many hidden assumptions and half-truths that it takes constant rigorous philosophical thinking to grasp the totality of the hydra-headed beast. This is why I have long maintained that the Drug War is the great philosophical problem of our time (a problem that is more relevant than ever given the fact that "cuddly" psychoactive drugs like Ecstasy could help end school shootings and avert the nuclear-Armageddon toward which hate-obsessed humanity seems to have been heading ever since it first began using pronouns like "us" and "them"). But with perseverance, I hope that I am making myself, if not perfectly clear on this topic, then at least perfectly clearer as time goes by. With that in mind, I would like to point the interested reader toward my article entitled Heroin and Alcohol. It's more than a year old itself, but I recently appended an editorial comment to it that I hope will clarify my views on the topic of addiction and how Drug War ideology itself bars us from dealing with the problem effectively -- and without glaring hypocrisy, I might add.
My uncle received ECT therapy as a supposed "last resort," but it was nothing of the kind. It was the only legal treatment available because the US had outlawed almost all psychoactive medicines that could have cheered him up. Are we so disdainful of "getting high" that we would prefer to knowingly injure a brain rather than help one achieve such a state? The answer, incredibly, is yes in drug-war America. In fact, we'd rather let children suffer extreme pain rather than give them morphine on their deathbed. And we'd never even THINK of using MDMA to treat "haters" so that the world will not end in nuclear war -- or at least that there will be fewer school shootings.
Addiction Comix
Getting Off Drugs
NOVEMBER 2024
I have written dozens of essays about antidepressants and the Drug War, but it is important to read this one first, for it contains the most up-to-date info on my battle to get off such drugs. This reading order is important because I declared premature victory against the SNRI called Effexor in recent essays, only to discover that the drug is far more insidious than I gave it credit for. It turns out withdrawing, at least for me, eventually led to deep feelings of abject despair, far greater than the depression for which I started taking the "med" in the first place.
The frustrating thing is, these feelings could be combatted by a host of drugs that we have outlawed in the name of our anti-scientific and anti-patient war on drugs. That much is just psychological common sense. But we have been taught to believe that there are no positive uses for opium, nor for cocaine, nor for coca, nor for MDMA, nor for laughing gas, nor for peyote, nor for the hundreds of inspiring phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, etc. etc. etc.
The truth is, rather, that Drug Warriors (and the millions whom they have brainwashed) do not WANT there to be positive uses for such drugs. No, they want me to "keep taking my meds" instead and so to enrich their investment portfolios in the pharmaceutical sector. Meanwhile, those without a vested financial interest have been taught that antidepressants are "scientific" and so they cannot understand my desire to get off them. They cannot understand the hell of being turned into a patient for life and having to make regular expensive and humiliating pilgrimages to psychiatrists (who are half one's own age) to bare one's soul for the purpose of obtaining an expensive prescription for a drug that numbs one's brain rather than inspiring it - and a drug which seems to counteract, dampen and/or repress most of the positive effects that I might have otherwise obtained by the few semi-legal alternatives to antidepressants, such as psilocybin and ayahuasca.
But it is just psychological common sense that I could withdraw successfully from Effexor with the advised use of a comprehensive pharmacy, including but not limited to the demonized substances listed above. But materialist science is not interested in common sense. And so they tell me that such drug use has not been proven to "work." But materialist doctors are not experts in what motivates me as a living, breathing, unique individual. The heart has its own reasons that reductionist science cannot understand. If I could look forward, at this moment, to relaxing with an opium pipe tonight, my mood would improve NOW, not just tonight. I would have something to look forward to. I would not feel the need to reach for that bottle full of Effexor pills that I was hoping to foreswear. Likewise, if I could use a drug to laugh and "touch the hand of God" (as with laughing gas and phenethylamines respectively), I could laugh at the pangs of despair that Effexor tries to throw my way.
Science's eternal response to such ideas is: "There is no proof that such things work!"
No, nor will there ever be in the age of the Drug War, in which such common sense use is punished by long jail terms and would never be favorably publicized, even if successful, since America's prime imperative in the age of the Drug War is to demonize psychoactive medicines, under the absurd assumption-laden idea that to talk honestly about drugs is to encourage their use.
Well, we SHOULD be encouraging their use in cases where they actually work, in cases, for instance, when they prevent guys like myself from killing themselves thanks to the knowledge that they are a bounden slave to the combined forces of the Drug War and Big Pharma's pill mill.
Besides, there is no proof that hugging works, but we do not need Dr. Spock of Star Trek to launch a study into that issue: we all know that hugging works by bringing two souls together both physically and spiritually. We do not need a map of brain chemistry to figure this out: the proof is extant, the proof is in the pudding.
But I haven't given up yet despite the setback in my most recent plan. I'm going to search the world for a place where I can get off antidepressants in a way that makes some psychological common sense.
Right now, all I see in terms of resources are a bunch of companies who, for large fees, will help me go cold turkey on antidepressants., or companies that claim to have found the right combination of legal herbal formulas that should make withdrawal easier. But to me, these are all what Percy Shelley would call "frail spells," concocted under the watchful eye of the Drug Warrior to make sure that nothing potent and obviously effective will get added to the mix. In fact, if a space alien came to earth and asked what sort of psychoactive drugs were outlawed, one could honestly answer: "Anything that obviously works."
Meanwhile, drug laws make it impossible for me to visit psychiatrists remotely online, requiring me instead to physically visit my doctors, thereby limiting rural residents like myself to accessing hayseed psychiatrists whose one area of expertise seems to be the writing of prescriptions for antidepressants. Talk to them about anything else, and their eyes glaze over. "That's all unproven," they'll say, "Or, no, we have yet to fully study such things." As if we have to study in order to realize that feeling good helps and can have positive psychological effects.
I'm sure that part of the problem with my withdrawal scheme is that I tried to get off the drug too quickly. But I only tried that because I can find no doctor who will compound the drug for me in a way that makes psychological common sense, namely, with daily miniscule reductions in dosage. My current psychiatrist told me that such compounding was unheard of and that I should drop doses by 37.5 mg at a time, since that is the lowest dose that the pharmaceutical companies create. He said I could start "counting pill beads" once I am down to a 37.5 mg daily dose if I wanted to taper still further.
I did find a compounding company that said it could compound Effexor in the way that I desire. But there's a big catch: they have to receive a prescription for that purpose. And I can find no doctor in the world who is willing to write me one. Even those who sympathize with my plight want me to become their full-time patient before they will even consider writing such a prescription.
So those who warned me against trying to get off Effexor were right in a way: it is extraordinarily difficult. But they feel to realize WHY this is so. It is not just because Effexor is a toxic drug, but also because the drug war has outlawed everything that could help me get off it.
This is why those pundits who sign off on the psychiatric pill mill are clueless about the huge problem with the war on drugs: the way it humiliates and disempowers millions. For it turns out that the phrase "No hope in dope" is true after all, but only when the dope in question is modern antidepressants.
OCTOBER 2024
Here are some of the many articles I have written about the philosophy of getting off drugs. Bear in mind that I am in the process of getting off Effexor myself and am exploring the power of "drugs to fight drugs" in so doing. And this is not a straightforward path given the sweeping limits that are imposed by drug law. So the question of exactly what might work (and how and when, etc.) is still wide open and I am advocating nothing, except the common sense notion that we can benefit from euphoria and mood boosts, yes, and that "drugs can be used to fight drugs," and in a safe way too -- a way that will prove far safer than prohibition, which continues to bring about daily deaths from drive-by shootings and unregulated product while causing civil wars overseas.
I guess what I am saying here is, this site is not purporting to offer medical advice. I avoid using such wording, however, because so many authors refuse to talk honestly about drugs, especially about positive drug use, for fear of being seen as giving medical advice, and this, of course, is just how drug warriors want matters to remain. It lets them shut down free speech about drugs.
Besides, I reject the idea that materialist doctors are the experts when it comes to how we think and feel about life. The best they can do as materialist is to tell us the potential physical risks of using holistically-operating drugs, but individuals are the experts on what motivates them in life, on their own particular hopes and dreams and on what risks they deem necessary to obtain them, to pursue happiness, that is, which objective our legislators outlawed when they outlawed all substances that can help facilitate happiness in the properly motivated and educated individual.
The real answer is not for authors to give groveling apologies for being honest, however: the real answer is for kids to be educated about the basics of wise substance use -- and for America to come to grips with the fact that we will always be surrounded by "drugs" -- and that the goal should be to ensure safe use, not to keep endlessly arresting minorities and removing them from the voting rolls on behalf of the clinically insane idea that we should outlaw mother nature to protect our kids -- and this in a purportedly Christian country whose very deity told us that his creation was good.
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
The problem for alcoholics is that alcohol decreases rationality in proportion as it provides the desired self-transcendence. Outlawed drugs can provide self-transcendence with INCREASED rationality and be far more likely to keep the problem drinker off booze than abstinence.
Researchers insult our intelligence when they tell us that drugs like MDMA and opium and laughing gas have not been proven to work. Everyone knows they work. That's why drug warriors hate them.
If MAPS wants to make progress with MDMA they should start "calling out" the FDA for judging holistic medicines by materialist standards, which means ignoring all glaringly obvious benefits.
That's so "drug war" of Rick: If a psychoactive substance has a bad use at some dose, for somebody, then it must not be used at any dose by anybody. It's hard to imagine a less scientific proposition, or one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering.
The drug war encourages us to judge people based on what they use and in what context. Even if the couch potato had no conscious health goals, their use of MJ is very possibly shielding them from health problems, like headaches, sleeplessness, and overreliance on alcohol.
Until we get rid of all these obstacles to safe and informed use, it's presumptuous to explain problematic drug use with theories about addiction. Drug warriors are rigging the deck in favor of problematic use. They refuse to even TEACH non-problematic use.
And so, by ignoring all "up" sides to drugs, the DEA points to potential addiction as a knock-down argument for their prohibition. This is the logic of children (and uneducated children at that). It is a cost-benefit analysis that ignores all benefits.
Here's one problem that supporters of the psychiatric pill mill never address: the fact that Big Pharma antidepressants demoralize users by turning them into patients for life.
According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate: ending the torture-friendly 12-step programs, published on November 6, 2019 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
ear Dr. Maté.
Do you know why I pulled you over? That's right, I wanted to give you some links to more essays about addiction and the Drug War. Oh, how about these two Addicted to Addiction: How the drug war leads to a morbid and hypocritical focus on addiction and Addicted to Ignorance: How the drug war prevents the effective treatment of addiction and withdrawal, forcing patients onto addictive Big Pharma meds while ignoring the godsend mind-changing medicines of Big Pharma, which are crying out to be used in psychiatric settings.. Oh, and what was the name of that movie in which wine-swilling Glenn Close manifests all the worst qualities of the brain-addled Drug Warrior? Oh, yes: Glenn Close but no cigar: Four Good Days reinforces all the usual Christian Science nonsense about plant medicines, advocating science as the way forward when all it offers is 'cold turkey' and a $3,000 bill for a three-day stay in a glorified flophouse. . But far be it from me to micromanage your browsing experience. Just search 'addiction' to find more. (Oh, and just between us, psst! your left rear signal light is out.)
You have been reading an article entitled, Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate: ending the torture-friendly 12-step programs, published on November 6, 2019 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)