an open letter to Iolanda Ganea, peer review assistant for the Academia Journal on Mental Health and Well-Being
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 28, 2025
Dear Iolanda:
I received a request to review "Psilocybin in Psychiatric Therapeutics" for the Academia Journal of Mental Health and Well-Being1. I would love to help, but I am afraid I do not qualify to be a reviewer according to your own criteria because I have no PhD.
I would add, however, that in a sane world, I WOULD be allowed to review such a paper given my personal history with both psilocybin and psychiatry and the fact that I have written hundreds of essays on this topic over the years. Unfortunately, there is a bias in the whole peer review process that ignores philosophical angles to such papers and that shows no interest in the views of the hoi polloi who are merely on the receiving end of psychiatric nostrums.
Again, I would love to provide a review, but it does not seem that academia today is open to the views of folks on the receiving end of psychiatric therapies.
They bar me from the discussion in the name of professionalism, failing to realize that by doing so, they are "reckoning without their host."
So I must leave the field to allow our credentialed scientists to carry on their private discussions amongst themselves, without input from those whom their policy decisions will ultimately affect. My only role, as my psychiatrist would tell me, is to "shut up and take my meds!"
AFTERWORD
My email to Iolanda was a trifle more diplomatic. I have fleshed out my grievances in the online version of my letter above in order to stress the problematic nature of the incestuous academic status quo, thanks to which our credentialed experts feel free to ignore all highly relevant insights unless those insights come from within the Ivory Tower itself.
Discussion Topics
June 02, 2025
Attention Teachers and Professors: Brian is not writing these essays for his health. (Well, in a way he is, actually, but that's not important now.) His goal is to get the world thinking about the anti-democratic and anti-scientific idiocy of the War on Drugs. You can stimulate your students' brainwashed grey matter on this topic by having them read the above essay and then discuss the following questions as a group!
Behaviorism and professionalism silence the voices of the 'patient.' Explain.
List the many reasons why Iolanda might be disinclined to respond to the above email.
Why does it sometimes seem like the patient's only role is to "shut up and take their meds"?
Author's Follow-up:
October 27, 2025
This is the whole problem with the so-called mental healthcare system. Doctors claim to be the experts on mind and mood, and so they live in their irrelevant world of journals and research papers and self-congratulatory conferences at the Bethesda North Marriott, where they discuss what they're going to do for people like myself -- without my input, of course, for what do I know? I am just a patient, after all, and they are the experts. This is the lucrative world that doctors created for themselves when they destroyed the reputation of cocaine by judging it only by its worst possible uses 23 , exactly as if they had determined the utility of alcohol by studying only alcoholics! No one asked the depressed what they thought about the drug. No one mentioned the fact that cocaine could end depression for literally hundreds of millions of people.
And yet those emperors were wearing no clothes. For it takes no materialist doctor to solve the problem of human depression. There are plenty of drugs which can do just that, and in real-time, virtually all of which are far less dependence-causing than Big Pharma drugs. Of course, when I say "works," I mean that they work as far as the user is concerned -- whereas the materialists mean something quite different. They insist on establishing efficacy by looking under a microscope, not by listening to any mere patient. You remember in high-school how the teachers told you that you should be honest about your feelings, and that feelings were neither right nor wrong in themselves? Well, doctors beg to differ. You may SAY that you feel great thanks to a given drug, but doctors will be the judge of that, thank you very much! This is why materialist doctors like Robert Glatter write articles in Forbes magazine in which they doubt the power of laughing gas to help the depressed: laughing gas, for God's sake 4 .
Freud himself knew that cocaine was a cure for depression for most people 5 -- and, of course, that scared doctors to death. They made a living treating people for depression after all. They could not stand by and let this drug put them out of business. So they evaluated cocaine based on worst-case scenarios only 6, exactly as if they were to judge alcohol by only looking at alcoholics. They then proceeded to launch a media campaign to demonize the drug, writing op-ed scare pieces in which they referred to the drug's worst possible uses, never even noting the fact that the depressed themselves considered cocaine to be a godsend. Nor did these doctors ever acknowledge their vested interest in demonizing cocaine, the fact that the drug was a threat to their very business model. And so they destroyed the reputation of the drug, thereby making it easy for demagogue politicians to outlaw it. It was a win for doctors and racists and authoritarians and Christian Scientists, but not for the hundreds of millions of the depressed who were thereby denied their right to heal.
Those hundreds of millions continue to suffer unnecessarily today thanks to drug prohibition -- while health care "experts" like those on Academia.edu sit in their ivory towers and talk about biochemical pathways and antidepressants and therapies that take a LIFETIME to bear meager fruit, if any. And I can have no say in the matter for the materialist doctors are the experts 7. They will not even TALK to a mere patient, let alone invite him to a big important conference -- not even if a patient has been on their drugs for 30 years and so might have been supposed to have something important to say on the subject. No, patients are children in the age of drug prohibition 8 . Our job is to stay at home and see what second-best cures the doctors can come up with for their captive audience: namely, the depressed who have been rendered hopelessly dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life thanks to the drug prohibition that the doctors themselves so zealously helped to bring about 9.
CONCLUSION
It was the category error par excellence to place materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. In a sane world, the experts would be the drug users themselves -- not the drug-demonizing doctors who wish to scare us into using only their "scientific" drugs. I have been on those "miracle cures" now for over 30 years and so I have some experience on their effects; in a sane world, my views would be purposefully solicited by the "experts." I would be invited on purpose to submit articles to their journals and to attend their ritzy conferences as a guest of honor. Doctors would be waiting, as it were, with bated breath to hear my informed verdict on their nostrums. Hence my excitement when I first received a letter from Academia.edu soliciting a paper on the subject of mind and mood medicine; hence also my subsequent disappointment when I discovered that the solicitation had been sent in error: it had been delivered automatically thanks to a computer algorithm that had yet to learn the difference between a high-and-mighty doctor and a mere patient like myself.
Folks like Sabet accuse folks like myself of ignoring the "facts." No, it is Sabet who is ignoring the facts -- facts about dangerous horses and free climbing. He's also ignoring all the downsides of prohibition, whose laws lead to the election of tyrants.
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.
In fact, there are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks: J'excuse! People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!
Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!
The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."
Ketamine is like any other drug. It has good uses for certain people in certain situations. Nowadays, people insist that a drug be okay in every situation for everybody (especially American teens) before they will say that it's okay. That's crazy and anti-scientific.
Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity. It is the outlawing of our right to take care of our own health.
The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that tells us that "shock therapy" is safe.
No substance is bad in and of itself. Fentanyl has positive uses, at specific doses, for specific people, in specific situations. But the drug war votes substance up or down. That is hugely anti-scientific and it blocks human progress.
Folks like Sabet accuse folks like myself of ignoring the "facts." No, it is Sabet who is ignoring the facts -- facts about dangerous horses and free climbing. He's also ignoring all the downsides of prohibition, whose laws lead to the election of tyrants.
