and other psychoactive substances that drug warriors love to hate
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 18, 2022
he Drug War represents the preposterous unscientific notion that if a psychoactive substance can be misused by American young people (and what substance can't?), then it must not be used by anyone, anywhere, ever, for any reason whatsoever.
Do what?
Question: How did Americans ever convince the entire world to adopt this childish but fanatical Christian Science ideology toward amoral substances?
Answer: They did so by demonizing psychoactive medicine in every possible way (in movies, in television shows, in grade school DARE classes) and on the strength of the jaundiced mindset thus produced, they soon encouraged businesses to test American urine for traces of these politically despised substances to be henceforth derided as "drugs" (some of which had inspired entire religions in the past), with the goal of removing drug-war heretics from the American workforce. Mary Baker Eddy herself would be on cloud nine were she alive today, or at least on cloud 5, since she would no doubt be puzzled as to why Americans demonize mind drugs only, rather than eschewing drugs in general and so evincing ideological consistency in their otherwise religiously correct war on medicine.
Drug warriors generally justify their crackdown on heretics by saying: "If we can save one little Johnny Whitebread from dying of 'drugs,' the crackdown will have been worth it."
This attitude would only make sense (or at least be coherent) if substances really could be fairly classified as purely evil, without any potential positive uses whatsoever (as the DEA mendaciously maintains to this day), but that is just a Drug War superstition. Any substance can be used for good or ill. Any substance. Even Botulinum toxin, one of the deadliest neurotoxins on the planet, can work cosmetic and physiological wonders when used advisedly. Likewise, the supposedly evil drugs from which the Drug Warrior is forever rescuing Johnny Whitebread can be used for a wide range of amazing therapies. It's just that Drug Warriors have so successfully taught Americans to demonize psychoactive medicine, that almost no one in America (however otherwise enlightened) can even imagine such uses.
This blindness to godsend therapies is then exacerbated by the fact that the materialist medical mindset is never happy with drugs that simply make us, well, happy. The field of psychiatry has physics envy after all. They can only believe in drugs that work via some reductionist mechanism that can be clearly described and applied to human beings en masse. This is why Dr. Robert Glatter can write an article in Forbes magazine with the following laughable title: "Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment-resistant Depression"?
What? Only a materialist could ask such a question. Of course it would help. Common sense psychology tells us so. But materialists like Glatter are always blocking the depressed person's way to such godsend therapies. How? By pretending to doubt the glaringly obvious, namely, that N2O could help the depressed. Of course, what Glatter & Co really mean when they gainsay such a self-evident proposition is that they have yet to find a reductionist neurochemical proof of such therapeutic power, and so that means, from a materialist point of view, that N2O is not "really" helping the depressed - no matter how loudly the patient may laugh during therapy.
What such doctors should remember is that some of us depressed chappies are not materialists. We believe that it's more than enough that a substance like N2O merely works for us. We have no need or desire for it to REALLY work for us, in some way that would satisfy the reductionist onlooker. Indeed, the insistence on "real" reductionist cures for conditions like depression has sparked the greatest chemical dependency of all times, as 1 in 4 American women must take Big Pharma meds every day of their life thanks to the creation of SSRIs that purported to correct a chemical imbalance that they actually create. And so doctors, under the pay of Big Pharma, appear on Oprah Winfrey to remind Americans that they must "keep taking their meds." After all, the pills are made scientifically. They don't just crudely make you happy, like, say, N2O or opium. Anything can make you happy. These drugs REALLY make you happy because they are scientific, don't ya know? Or such was the original claim, although it's been 60 years since these "scientific" cures were first employed in psychiatry, and America is now the most depressed country on the planet - and the most chemically dependent to boot.
Once we remove the twin blinders of drug-hating Christian Science ideology and reductive materialism, the world is our oyster when it comes to mental therapies, not simply when it comes to treating the depressed but when it comes to pedagogy and teaching compassion, experientially, that is, not through mere words. Absent our superstitious aversion to psychoactive drugs, MDMA and psilocybin could be used therapeutically to help "haters" experience love, thereby preventing school shootings. Morphine could be used non-addictively to instil a deep appreciation of mother nature in the hitherto self-satisfied boor. Methamphetamine could be used non-addictively in group therapy in the open air, wherein emotional honesty and creativity could be therapeutically encouraged. The opium poppy could be used non-addictively to inspire creative dreams in struggling authors, followed in a week, perhaps, by a writing session in which said authors compose stories a la HG Wells with the mind-refreshing assistance of the coca plant.
These are just a few of the seemingly endless list of drug-fueled therapies that suggest themselves the moment that we stop demonizing drugs as somehow being bad in and of themselves, without regard for the circumstances of their use.
Of course, the effectiveness of these politically incorrect treatments would depend largely on the ability of the guide (whom I suppose to be a sort of "pharmacologically savvy empath") to establish an emotional and physical set and setting that conduces to the achievement of the therapeutic goals of the drug-aided activity in question. It must be remembered, also, that a significant part of the therapeutic value of such treatments would derive from the mood-elevating anticipation of the upcoming happiness that it engenders in the participant, although materialists generally pay short shrift to such intangible and, as it were, tangential benefits. Of course, it will be objected that we have no proof of the effectiveness of such treatment "modalities," but that's only because the Drug Warrior has done everything in their power to keep us from even IMAGINING such treatments, let alone implementing them.
Besides, we DO have proof of the evil that sober human beings can do to one another when they fail to transcend self (whether with the help of psychoactive medicine or not). Salvador Ramos was apparently sober as a judge when he gunned down 21 in Uvalde, Texas. Adam Lanza appears to have "just said no" in grade school like everybody else, and yet as an adult, he complacently mowed down 26 in Newtown, Massachusetts. Stephen Paddock could have passed a drug test with flying colors on the day when he killed 59 and injured over 500 in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2017.
Surely after such outrages, we have prima facie evidence of the necessity to put all gloomy loners on a solid regime of compassion-enhancing drugs - to say nothing of politicians who have their all-too-human fingers on the nuclear trigger.
But again, the mere thought of such treatment is impossible in a world that has been raised on the Drug Warrior lie, namely, that psychoactive drugs can be bad in and of themselves, without respect for why, how or when they are used.
Related tweet: June 2, 2023
"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau
Getting off some drugs could actually be fun and instructive, by using a variety of other drugs to keep one's mind off the withdrawal process. But America believes that getting off a drug should be a big moral battle.
The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
Drug Warriors rail against drugs as if they were one specific thing. They may as well rail against penicillin because cyanide can kill.
I wonder if Nixon knew what a favor he was doing medical capitalism when he outlawed psychedelics. Those drugs can actually cure things, and there's no money in that.
Many articles in science mags need this disclaimer: "Author has declined to consider the insights gained from drug-induced states on this topic out of fealty to Christian Science orthodoxy." They don't do this because they know readers already assume that drugs will be ignored.
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.
The addiction gene should be called the prohibition gene: it renders one vulnerable to prohibition lies and limitations: like the lack of safe supply, the lack of choices, and the lack of information. We should pathologize the prohibitionists, not their victims.
As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.
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, Smart Uses for Opium and Coca: and other psychoactive substances that drug warriors love to hate, published on June 18, 2022 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)
he Drug War represents the preposterous unscientific notion that if a psychoactive substance can be misused by American young people (and what substance can't?), then it must not be used by anyone, anywhere, ever, for any reason whatsoever. 
You have been reading an article entitled, Smart Uses for Opium and Coca: and other psychoactive substances that drug warriors love to hate, published on June 18, 2022 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)