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Sartre and Speed

a review of essay number 4 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 26, 2025



The following remarks are part of a series of responses to the essays contained in the 2001 book "Hallucinogens: A Reader," edited by Charles Grob1. The comments below are in response to essay number 4: "Two Classic Trips: Jean-Paul Sartre and Adelle Davis" by Thomas Riedlinger


Riedlinger relates how Sartre "gobbled" massive quantities of amphetamines in order to write "at least three times my normal rhythm." This is the kind of enormous and obvious drug benefit that no one dares acknowledge in the age of drug prohibition. We do not hear about this ability of "speed" to improve mentation because drug law frightens all of those who use drugs in this way into complete silence about their use of this biochemical hack. As a result, we only hear about "speed" in connection with law enforcement and arrests and "meth labs." This is how the Drug Warrior keeps otherwise smart people like Ralph Metzner in a perpetual tizzy about drugs -- or at least about non-psychedelic drugs. They do this by shutting down all positive talk of drug use -- and the Metzners of the world then mistake the resulting silence on the topic as a sign that no positive uses exist for demonized medicines. The fact is, however, that most people actually use drugs wisely, as Carl Hart explains in Drug Use for Grown-Ups. It is just that members of this silent majority have no incentive to talk honestly about their drug use -- and plenty of reasons not to. The Drug War is all about the strategic branding of drug use as good or bad. Speed is good when we call it Ritalin and use it to increase the concentration level of grade schoolers. Speed is evil when we call it meth and use it to increase the concentration level of adults.

Unfortunately, it would seem that you can fool all of the people all of the time with Drug War propaganda -- or at least all of the non-indigenous peoples -- considering how many Drug War pundits are themselves bamboozled by various Drug War lies.






Notes:

1: Hallucinogens: a reader Grob, M.D., editor, Charles, Penguin Putnam, 2002 (up)








Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing.

Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.

His answer to political opposition is: "Lock them up!" That's Nazi speak, not American democracy.

Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.

Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful.

Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.

"There has been so much delirious nonsense written about drugs that sane men may well despair of seeing the light." -- Aleister Crowley, from "Essays on Intoxication"

There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.

Wade Davis wrote in Rolling Stone that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?! 178,000 people die from alcohol every year in America alone.

Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.


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