by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 28, 2025
Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.
January 27, 2025
There is an additional reason that I am devoting my twilight years to ending the hateful War on Drugs, and that is because my job in so doing is AI-proof. Artificial intelligence can never deal with the world's drug biases -- except perhaps tyrannically, by imposing its own supposedly logical "viewpoint" on the world. For the "viewpoint" of any AI app with respect to a philosophically fraught subject is a product of the algorithm that created it and the assumptions upon which that algorithm was coded. You can be sure, moreover, that coders will be under ongoing pressure to ensure that their AI algorithms are productive of politically correct output when it comes to the Drug War.
Philosophy, in general, is one field that AI can never conquer, except via ideological fiat. Such a technological triumph would always be guilty of the logical fallacy of petitio principii: it would presuppose the correctness of many of the highly debatable principles upon which such preeminence would be based.
January 25, 2025
Here is my new essay on Schopenhauer and Drugs. Gee, I hope this one does not break the Internet!
This essay is important, however, for I am the first philosopher to reveal the hidden Drug War prejudices of Schopenhauer. And these are highly relevant to an understanding of his principal work, "The World as Will and Idea/Representation," wherein he presupposes predestination and an unknowable Will. For he does so in total ignoration of both the psychological and mystical effects of a wide variety of psychoactive drugs. The mindful use of a variety of drugs, including opium, can get ourselves outside of our biasing and limiting ego, which is, after all, the fundamental goal of the mystics whom Schopenhauer praises. Yet the German pessimist appears to be unaware of this potential, which I argue, however, exists (at least to a certain degree) as a matter of psychological common sense. Moreover, psychedelics give us glimpses of those potentially noumenal worlds that William James said we must study in order to understand the nature of ultimate reality. While the ontological status of such drug-inspired worlds may be debated, they cannot be dismissed out of hand as philosophically irrelevant, and that appears to be what Schopenhauer has done.
More accurately, he appears to have been totally unaware of the very existence of the sorts of drug-induced states involved here. Of course, Schopenhauer died when the American philosopher was just 18 years old, but the ideas that James championed in his lifetime date back thousands of years, to the use of soma in the Vedic religion, to the use of opium in ancient Greek ritual and to the use of psychedelics in the Eleusinian Mysteries. It is also worth noting that the high-profile recipients of the kykeon at Eleusis often couched their praise of the rite in the awed and reticent language of mystics like Meister Eckhart, whom Schopenhauer holds up as a kind of role model for true understanding, or rather the truest possible understanding available here below to humans as such.
Schopenhauer considers that we essentially are our "wills." Our very bodies are merely the incarnation of our will. This will, moreover, is determined once and for all, even before our birth. Our behavior is thus causally determined and is the inexorable result of our will employing the specific motives available to it in life (its psychological and physical environment) as necessary to "have its way." One can apparently transcend this determinism, however, by denying one's will (that is, by transcending the ego), something of which only geniuses (or at least potential geniuses) are thought to be capable -- geniuses and madmen, perhaps, a duo which Schopenhauer tells us have much in common. Schopenhauer's shortcoming consists of his failure to understand that many psychoactive drugs help one transcend ego, if only in psychological ways, and that some drugs, psychedelics in particular, have the potential to disable perceptual filters that keep us from seeing potential noumenal worlds. Again, the ontological status of such worlds may be debated, but the first step is for philosophers to acknowledge the simple fact that such states exist.
For more on this topic, see my update to my essay on Schopenhauer and Drugs.
January 24, 2025
I laugh every time I hear a redneck Drug Warrior complain about big government. The worst government intrusion of all time occurred when the government took control of pain relief by outlawing opium.
January 23, 2025
Here is some more on the problem of "following the science," this time with regard to marijuana use.
January 22, 2025
While reading the sermons of Meister Eckhart last night, it occurred to me that his descriptions of transcendent states read just like the accounts of breakthrough psychedelic trips published in the books of psychedelic researchers such as Stanislav Grof and James Fadmian. This has huge implications with respect to how the Drug War outlaws not just specific religions, but the religious impulse itself. For more, please read my new essay entitled "Meister Eckhart and Drugs."
January 21, 2025
-- I have updated my 2020 essay entitled How the Drug War Killed Leah Betts. Leah was the 100-pound teenage raver who became a cause célèbre for UK drug prohibitionists in the 1990s after she was supposedly killed by Ecstasy. She was actually killed because prohibitionists spread fear rather than education and so Leah did not know that she needed to stay hydrated while using the substance during vigorous activity such as dancing.
And so the UK cracked down on their own British Summer of Love -- and, of course, by so doing turned the dance floors into shooting galleries as former E-users switched to anger-facilitating drugs like alcohol. But then being a Drug Warrior means never having to say you're sorry.
Leah was no more killed by Ecstasy than crash victims are killed by cars. Cars only kill people in Stephen King novels. Crash victims may owe their deaths to poor signage, lousy driving, defective equipment, or some combination of such factors, but never to cars themselves.
Learn more.
-- Okay, so we're going to ban TikTok. While we're at it, why don't we ban Fox News and Trump's social network as well? Surely, we should shield our kids from folks who use lies and half-truths to support insurrection.
Incidentally, I'm always a little leery about making such statements because I have been promoting my blog on X and that is the network owned by the well-heeled coup leader named Elon Musk, the guy who helped Trump buy the 2024 election. But then I figure that anyone who supports such fearmongers does not understand the War on Drugs. Substance prohibition is all about fearmongering for strategic purposes: namely, for the purpose of convincing Americans to give up democratic freedoms in the name of fighting a phantom called "drugs." For drugs have never been our enemy, but rather ignorance ABOUT drugs: the very ignorance that Drug Warriors insist on promoting as part of their superstitious, racist and anti-indigenous public policy of wholesale substance prohibition.
Speaking of which, I have opened an account on BlueSky this morning, whither many of my ex-X followers seem to have fled.
In case people still haven't made the connection, Trump is the master of fearmongering. His job on behalf of multi-billionaires is to keep Americans at each other's throats and obsessed about issues of his own making so that no one has time to promote any real changes, which are always anathema to the powers that be.
January 20, 2025
Imagine that we had been taught from childhood that operating on a human being is wrong. Then we walk down the street as an adult and encounter a guy with a broken leg. We would think to ourselves: "Oh, dear! I wish I could think of some way to help that guy -- but the problem of broken legs just seems to be completely insoluble!"
That would be idiotic -- but no more idiotic than looking at a drunkard on the street and saying, "Oh, if only there was a way to help him!"
This is why Louis Theroux is frustrated that he cannot help an alcoholic. He does not really want to help. None of us do. We want to turn the alcoholic into a good drug-hating Christian Scientist instead. Learn more in this important update to my essay on this topic.
January 19, 2025
We should outlaw organizations like DARE and put them on trial for brainwashing our kids in the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. With this in mind, I have just updated my essay on this topic.
Also, please be so good as to check out the updated version of my new introduction to the Drug War Philosopher website at abolishthedea.com. (Come on, it'll do your heart good to read it!)
January 18, 2025
Here is an update to my essay on addiction, in answer to potential objections from the "experts" in the materialist healthcare field.
And I've taken the liberty of updating my Introduction to the Website of the Drug War Philosopher at abolishthedea.com.
January 17, 2025
Here is my latest essay on the subject of addiction: Addiction. Addiction is the golden goose of the Drug Warrior. They do not want to end it, they want to leverage it through fearmongering in order to keep Americans docile in the face of the destruction of democratic freedoms, like free speech and the protection against unreasonable search. There are a host of common-sense ways to prevent addiction, but they are all blocked by the Drug War. Please read my essays on this topic to learn more.
Now then, about Schopenhauer... (How's that for a head-spinning segue?! I hope the reader is covered for whiplash!)
The views that he puts forth in "The World as Will and Idea" are interesting to contemplate in light of the research of folks like James Fadiman and Stanislav Grof. The results of their trials of psychedelic substances suggest that there is far more potential flexibility to the human personality than that ostensibly pessimistic philosopher would allow. Schopenhauer, it will be remembered, does not believe in free will -- at least in a practical sense -- because our very bodies are expressions of our individual wills with which we were born. Our behavior is thus predictable in theory. We, each of us, have a kind of hidden purpose or destiny in life that we will pursue, will we or nil we. So says Schopenhauer.
And yet I wonder if the transcendental experiences provided by certain drug use do not give us access, at least in some small and unspecifiable way, to the will itself and allow us to modify it to some degree, thereby helping us, as it were, to get outside of our own ego and to transcend our limitations. We know that certain drug use results in a kind of perceived ego death, and it is this ego death which, according to Schopenhauer himself, puts us in touch with the otherwise unknowable ultimate, the Will writ large. This is why Schopenhauer regards death as a kind of illusion, since willing itself never dies, but rather the instantiation of that will that we each represent with our discrete human bodies.
Schopenhauer admits that environment affects us (in the form of what he calls motives), but he insists that our fundamental personality (our will) is the same in the cradle as it is in the nursing home. Yes, we gain knowledge during our lifetime, but that knowledge is always acquired and employed in furtherance of the hidden objectives of the will. His point is not so much that self-improvement is an illusion, but that people simply don't change, fundamentally speaking.
All I am saying here is that that assumption seems to be called into question given the enlightenment that comes from apparent ego death during psychedelic experience. The drug trials referred to above seem to suggest that people have indeed transcended their own selfish will, at least to some small extent, with the help of drugs and have, in some cases, been able to modify the will's prime directive for their life for the better.
I'm not trying to prove any specific claim here, just to raise some issues that the philosophically minded reader might like to entertain.
And so, as Mike Myers would say: "Talk amongst yourselves."
January 16, 2025
The Mad in America organization of author Robert Whitaker helps spread the news about the problems with modern antidepressants. But their ability to meaningfully address the problem is hampered by their failure to make the connection between the Drug War and the psychiatric pill mill. Learn more from my latest essay entitled Mad at Mad in America.
I've also posted an update to my 2021 essay entitled "How Psychiatry and the Drug War Turned Me Into an Eternal Patient".
January 15, 2025
If Labor hadn't been hornswoggled by Drug War ideology, the outlawing of indiscriminate drug testing would be their cause célèbre. Why? Because such drug testing represents the political castration of the American worker. Learn more in my recently updated essay entitled "Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition."
In an open letter published here a couple of months ago, I asked Charley Wininger why MDMA would not work for the depressed. Charley is the author of "Listening to Ecstasy." Still no response, unfortunately. Please see my updated essay on the topic entitled MDMA and Depression.
January 14, 2025
Drug war propaganda is alive and well in Hollywood -- so much so that I called Vudu to get a refund on the $6 I had shelled out last night for "Smile 2." The brainwashed screenwriters put me off the movie in the first five minutes with their rehashing of the usual misleading Drug War tropes. The writers had to come up with a thoroughly repulsive character, you see, so of course they opted for a drug dealer. It never seems to have occurred to them that drug dealers only exist because of prohibition. Why? Because prohibition incentivized violent drug dealing. So the vigilante that goes after the drug dealer in the film (presumably to saddle him with a "curse") should have reserved his fury for the politicians who created a world full of gunfire and torture in the first place.
But the writers have been brainwashed like everybody else and so they just completely fail to make the connection between prohibition and violence -- which is, however, thoroughly inexcusable given that prohibition created the Mafia as we know it today.
Such depictions support a false consciousness, and America will never wake up from the Drug War nightmare until they start holding it accountable -- rather than simply reserving blame for the bad guys that the Drug War created out of whole cloth.
For more, read my new essay: "Drug War Propaganda from Hollywood."
January 13, 2025
When white Americans like my mother began having trouble with their GP-prescribed oxy, lawmakers were full of pity and concern. What a contrast to the way they treat minorities like dirt for their drug-related issues. For more on this topic, see my newly-updated essay on the book "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America."
January 12, 2025
I had a lightbulb moment yesterday on the subject of tapering. What's more, I found a compounding pharmacist who will not hang up on me! Here is my latest update to my essay entitled Tapering for Jesus!
January 11, 2025
For more proof that American drug policy is anti-patient and inhumane, read this account of the phone conversation that I had yesterday afternoon with a compounding pharmacist. I had called requesting low-dose formulations of Effexor so that I could taper off the drug without counting pill beads. Little did I know, that's not how compounding pharmacies work. It's not their job to help patients taper off drugs. Now, if I were a dog, that would be another story. Compounding pharmacists are all about compounding drugs for animals.
January 10, 2025
Here is my update on a letter I wrote to the 116th United States Congress in 2019. I was just a kid at the time, so go gentle on me. Indeed, I was scarcely 60 years old when I sallied out against that particular windmill. But I have got to hand it to me, I made some decent points in that letter! Well done, me! Of course, today, I would have been more stodgy and authoritative and I would have peppered my letter with footnotes to impress the no-doubt gullible recipients.
Speaking of footnotes, I am increasingly attempting to haul them into my essays for illustrative purposes; however, it must be remembered that most of my arguments against the Drug War are deductive in nature. They consist of syllogistic conclusions drawn from commonly accepted facts. For such arguments, footnotes are, strictly speaking, unnecessary.
I mention this by way of criticizing the constipated language of heavily-footnoted research when it comes to academic writing about drugs -- or about emotion-related subjects in general. Many academics write as if they were terrified that their paper might be understood by anyone outside the ivory tower, and so they use a 50-cent word -- or more typically a $1.50 neologism -- when they might have conveyed their message more clearly with an established word drawn from a small dictionary. They often do this, it seems to me, because they realize that if they removed all the insider verbiage, then they would have very little to say, indeed.
Of course, the goal of the academician should be to use the "mot juste" and if that means using big words -- or even neologisms -- then so be it.
But this is just a partial outline for an essay that I do not have time to write at the moment. I will be "back atcha" with the relevant essay as soon as I find time to amass the sample citations that would prove my point.
But let me suggest a few problems with the seemingly willful academic obscurantism of which I speak:
Researchers who practice this mystification deprive their papers of real-world impact to the extent that they hide (or rather bury) their conclusions in academic verbiage. What's the point of criticizing the status quo if no one knows that you're doing so? Conversely, such overloaded papers which fail to properly prove a conclusion can yet be used by demagogues to support a cause, since the sheer number of footnotes and neologisms can convince the science-loving American that the paper is correct and it is only their, the reader's, inability to grasp genius that is preventing them from seeing this clearly.
This allows the demagogue politician to defend disastrous public policy on the grounds that it is "scientific." Or, in other words, "It MUST be scientific: just look at these research papers that are completely undecipherable except by genius! Look at all the footnotes that they contain! Is that scientific or what?!"
January 9, 2025
Newly updated: Another Cry in the Wilderness.
January 8, 2025
I have updated my Case Studies in Wise Drug Use: . It's amazing that no one has ever thought of these uses, to my knowledge, at least. The fact is there are endless positive uses for drugs, limited only by our creativity. But Drug War propaganda has "headed us off at the pass," stopped us from even daring to think such dangerous thoughts.
Here are some additional thoughts on my "Case Studies in Wise Use."
Thirty years ago, I was grilled by customs in Montreal International Airport. It soured my viewpoint of Canada to this day. Well done, Drug War!
Click to read the details.
January 7, 2025
Time for some Case Studies in Wise Drug Use: .
January 6, 2025
Why we should not "follow the science."
Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy.
January 5, 2025
And what about this second-guessing of prescriptions by bureaucrats? It is based on the idea that there is an objective way to determine best dose when it comes to psychoactive medicine. This is clearly false. The dosing in such cases depends on assumptions about what constitutes "the good life," philosophically speaking. Is it wrong to take a drug daily at higher-than-usual dosages? It entirely depends on how one balances risk in achieving one's psychosocial goals, and this in turn depends on the nature of one's psychosocial goals and also depends on what the would-be user considers life to be "all about." The DEA agent considers the prime imperative in life to be safety. Few people live their life by such a rule, with the exception of hypochondriacs. For many, self-fulfillment comes first, not safety.
And yet the Drug War focuses all talk about drugs on downsides, clearly demonstrating that the Drug Warrior is a hypochondriac by proxy when it comes to drugs. That is one particular world view, not an objective view that all rational minds must necessarily embrace.
The answer is to re-legalize substances so that folks can self-prescribe for mood and mind medicine based on their own values and their own ideas about the meaning of life -- self-prescribe, that is, with the ever-available help of pharmacologically savvy empaths that can teach them drug use strategies that have been proven to be effective in helping the would-be user to achieve the psychosocial outcomes that they desire -- that THEY desire, mind, not their doctors nor the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
But until we let human beings adjust their own body chemistry, as has been the rule throughout human history, we should judge prescribing doctors (if judge them we must) on a wide variety of factors, most of which the Drug Warrior bureaucrat is completely unaware of and never studied in community college.
January 4, 2025
Today I have updated two related articles: "Tapering for Jesus" and Fighting Drugs with Drugs: . These essays highlight an issue that no one else to my knowledge has ever highlighted: namely, the dogmatic stupidity of modern science when it comes to common sense psychology.
I have also added some notes to my essay on Beta Blockers: Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs: . I made it clear that even beta blockers and antidepressants are not bad in themselves. That is the sin of the Drug Warrior, to think that drugs can be bad per se.
Oh, and here's an update on my essay entitled "Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away."
And another update (it's Update Day!) of an essay entitled Too Honest to be Popular."
January 3, 2025
Back in April 2022, I wrote a letter to two UK criminologists about drug policy, in the hopes that we could share ideas. Needless to say, they never responded. Since then, I have been thinking how odd it is that criminologists are even consulted on such topics. We don't invite criminologists to the table when we are talking about aspirin and antibiotics. Why are they experts in coca and opium?
For more on this topic, please read the follow-up remarks that I posted today to my essay entitled The Problem with modern Drug Reform Efforts.
January 2, 2025
I've added to my postscript in my article entitled Drug Dealers as Modern Witches.
January 1, 2025
I ring in the New Year by traveling back in time to 2019, when The Wall Street Journal published an article by Marci Hamilton linking drug use with child abuse. One scarcely knows where to begin in confronting such choplogic, but here is my latest attempt to do so. Update to 'Marci Hamilton Equates Drug Use with Child Abuse.'
December 31, 2024
And a few more thoughts on Santayana.
December 30, 2024
Ta-da! Here are my thoughts on George Santayana and his "Life of Reason." I call this essay, "If this be reason, let us make the least of it!" Yes, it is all about drugs. A lot of things in this world have a drug angle -- but most authors today are brainwashed into ignoring that fact.
December 29, 2024
Coming tomorrow: Santayana and drugs.
December 28, 2024
Here is a letter that I wrote to a friend this morning, after she was so unwise as to bring up the subject of drug law in our correspondence.
Thanks. Sorry, but I can't stop myself from adding a few more details. Low-priority, but if you have a mo', feel free to read....
Soma inspired the Vedic and hence the Hindu religion. This is one reason why the Drug War represents not simply the outlawing of A religion, but the outlawing of the religious impulse.
Coca has long been considered a divine plant among the Peruvian Indians.
The Eleusinian mysteries involved the use of a psychedelic substance (possibly ergot-based, like LSD) and inspired western thinkers for two thousand years, from Plato to Cicero to Aristotle, until the ceremony was tellingly outlawed by a Christian emperor in 392 B.C. as a threat to Christianity. The mysteries are thought to have inspired Socrates' view of the afterlife and the soul.
Christian propaganda to the contrary, opium has been used wisely for millennia. It was used in Iran as recently as the '60s until the U.S. instructed the Shah to crack down on the drug, since Drug Warriors did not want the world to see that safe use was possible. It was considered a godsend by all ancient physicians -- Galen, Avicenna, Paracelsus .
Jefferson and Franklin enjoyed opium -- but Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in violation of all that he stood for, politically speaking.
In 1914, we turned opium users into criminals, preventing them from using peaceably in their houses. Now young people are in the streets, using far more potent opiates. We should have left well enough alone, but Drug Warriors hated the perceived Chinese connection with opium use and "cracked down," and now we have young people dying in the streets. And yet all news on the subject is written from the assumption that the drugs themselves are the problem -- failing to realize that even fentanyl has proper uses (as in hospice care) and that we are causing vast unnecessary pain by "cracking down" on drugs rather than on destructive social policies like prohibition itself. And that crackdown has destroyed American democracy, abnegating the first and fourth amendments and throwing millions of minorities in jail, thereby handing elections to fascists.
Thousands are dying of overdoses because of a lack of education and an unregulated drug supply, which means, 1, that no one knows for sure what one is actually "using," and hence, 2, it is impossible to verify the actual dosage that one is consuming.
In reality, drug use is no different from free climbing a rock face, riding a horse, or driving a car. It is a potentially dangerous activity for which education and responsibility are required. But fearmongering politicians have emphasized only the dangers (and when dangers were lacking, they simply made them up out of whole cloth). They pretend that prohibition has no downsides and that "drugs" have no upsides -- except for alcohol and maybe drugs made by Big Pharma. And these are the same politicians who think that gun control is an abomination. Nor are they really against drugs, per se. They have no problem with the daily use of drugs. They have no problem with drug dependency, even. They just insist that the drugs so used must be provided by Big Pharma.
Meanwhile, these substances that we have been taught to call (or rather to denigrate as) "drugs" are now so hated that folks like William Bennett and Police Chief Daryl Gates have called for "drug users" to be beheaded and shot, respectively.
The story of lies, hatred, half-truths and false assumptions goes on and on. I always felt that the Drug War was nonsense, but discussing such things openly was always considered to be "bad form" in America -- and still is, as witnessed by the fact that few academics to whom I write even dare to acknowledge my correspondence. Drug warriors are like the sirens of mythology in that they lull one to sleep and to acquiescence with their superficially plausible propaganda -- all of which falls apart, however, once one sits down dispassionately and considers it from a psychological, philosophical and historical point of view.
The chief propaganda, by the way, is the almost complete censorship of positive drug use -- which will not be seen on screen or in magazines. To the contrary, one will only see or read moral narratives in which drugs are evil. The plots of sitcoms on this topic have been edited by various White House administrations over the last five decades. The government is engaged in a fear campaign about drugs, not an education campaign. That is why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse and not a National Institute on Drug Use.
Finally, if Americans cannot use drugs wisely, there is something wrong with America, not with drugs. But the Drug War is the ultimate case of denial. America has turned evil drugs into the leitmotif of world politics, thereby putting the few remaining indigenous peoples in an awkward position, for they still honor and revere the kind of holistic plant-based healing that the Drug War teaches us to despise.
And this attitude is aided and abetted by the psychological theory of behaviorism, which tells us that emotion-free scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood. This in turn allows scientists to tell us (without even laughing) that the above-mentioned substances have not been "proven" to work -- since behaviorists have no interest in anecdote and history, or in psychological common sense, for that matter. They merely want to know what's going on under a microscope.
This is why I write regular philosophical essays about prohibition and the Drug War, to make the connections that no one else seems to be making. I'm afraid you're right, however, in thinking that it may be hundreds of years yet until the penny drops for most human beings -- that drugs that inspire compassion and help us live with ourselves are not evil -- indeed, that no drugs are evil except insofar as they are used ill-advisedly.
We can only pray that they won't be forced into that reevaluation by a nuclear nightmare and/or the effects of global warming.
The fact is that most people do NOT use drugs ill-advisedly (see "Drug Use for Grownups" by Carl Hart) even though prohibition does all that it can do to turn drug use into a dangerous dead-end.
Alexander Shulgin created hundreds of non-addictive drugs that inspire compassion and mystical bliss. The strategic use of such drugs could play an important role in pulling the world back from the brink of destruction. An idea of this sort has been used by the Polynesians. Their chiefs would drink the psychoactive kava before meeting with potential adversaries to help ensure cooperation and understanding. America needs to stop the fearmongering before we can even begin to imagine such solutions.
This does not mean simply the change in a few laws: it will require a brand-new attitude toward life, one that borrows from the indigenous people of the world in believing that nature itself is full of psychoactive substances and that they were placed on earth for our benefit, not for our destruction. This should not come as a surprise to westerners given that the God of their own religion is on record as stating that creation is good. Indeed, it has been the position of the Christian Church for centuries that evil is to be found in people, not in things .
December 27, 2024
I have just updated my essay entitled In Praise of Opium.
December 26, 2024
In July 2023, I wrote "In Defense of Opium," in protest of a drug-demonizing article written by Marco Margaritoff. Today, I have updated my essay, after having read the chilling "Nuclear War: A Scenario" by Annie Jacobsen.
December 25, 2024
If you want a glimpse at how Drug War ideology has taken over academia, consider the study of witches. It is generally agreed in academia that the social outsiders that people call witches have historically been scapegoats for social ills and that their status as boogiemen has been a product of fearmongering. These considerations should immediately evoke the subject of drugs in an unbiased mind, and for two reasons:
1) The Drug War is the ultimate example of strategic fearmongering on behalf of the powers-that-be.
and
2) The so-called "herbs" that witches were claimed to have used were drugs. Those who deny this fact are insisting upon a fictional distinction between "herbs" and "drugs," which is as nonsensical as supposing a difference between "meds" and "drugs." Psychoactive substances are psychoactive substances, and it is only the strategic manipulation of our definitions that makes us believe otherwise.
And yet academics in the field do not discuss "drugs" according to the modern understanding of that term, except in ways that make it clear that they view modern "drugs" and witches' "herbs" as very different things, indeed. Drugs are bad while herbs are... Well, don't ask them what, but they're not evil drugs, that's for sure. And so a field of academic study that might help us better understand Drug War madness is rendered impotent to shed light on that topic.
December 24, 2024
Politicians are mad, not to say evil. They protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment to the U.S. constitution and enlist businesses to perform drug testing on would-be employees in order to ensure that Christian Science heretics cannot secure gainful employment in the United States. Amazingly, Americans cannot see this for the sham that it is.
There are no evil drugs, only evil drug policies, like failure to educate and support of prohibition, which ensures corrupt and uncertain drug supply.
The Drug War is essentially the enforcement of the anti-indigenous mindset of Francisco Pizarro via draconian laws, and this in a country that prides itself on having risen above colonialist practices. The Drug War is just colonialism by other means. Americans cannot recognize it as such because it is garbed in the cloak of a psychologically naive reductive materialism. This pseudoscientific viewpoint is based on the demonstrably false and anti-scientific claim that the drugs that we are outlawing have no positive uses in any case.
December 23, 2024
I watched one of those B horror movies from the 1950s last night. It was called "She Devil" and concerned a poor but attractive young lady who was suffering from an apparently incurable case of tuberculosis. An ambitious doctor gets wind of the case and submits the patient to a new untested drug treatment, with the reluctant help of his more cautious and elderly advisor and mentor. The drug restores the woman's health but has the unintended side effect of changing her erstwhile meek disposition into that of a heartless egoist, one determined to have her way in life no matter what.
After noticing the change, the worried mentor asks his protege if the drug he had created could have affected the lady's personality:
"Do you suppose it could be the serum, that it produced an emotional as well as a physical change in her?"
Without missing a beat, the ambitious protege responds:
"I wouldn't know about that. As a biochemist, I don't deal with the emotions."
He is so self-satisfied and glib as he makes this pronouncement that a modern viewer wants to smack him right in the puss.
A modern biochemist might not be so frank as this B-movie scientist, but Behaviorism is still the order of the day in academia, even if it goes by other names. The drug researcher doesn't care about obvious emotions. Otherwise they would see at a glance that the strategic use of drugs like coca, opium and psychedelics could work wonders, and not just for the depressed and anxious but for those seeking help in achieving spiritual states and self-understanding and/or writing exotic prose and poetry. They cannot see this obvious fact because they believe that to be scientific, they have to ignore obvious emotions and look at brain chemistry instead under a microscope. Anecdote and historical usage mean nothing to them.
These drugs have inspired entire religions but that means nothing to today's scientists. They have accepted the anti-scientific Drug Warrior premise that a drug that can be misused, even in theory, by young American white people must not be used by anyone, anywhere, ever, that we are just too dumb to ever learn to use drugs wisely. These are the same people who insist that we can use guns wisely and that free climbing a sheer cliff face is a reasonable activity, as is driving a car, the same people who sign off on liquor and Jim Beam commercials for young adults, the same people who let Big Pharma advertise "meds" for which the recognized side effects include death itself.
Drug researchers today may be the smartest and nicest people in the world -- but they are forced to play dumb and be cold-hearted thanks to their adherence to the mendacious dogma of today's know-nothing and anti-scientific Drug Warrior
December 22, 2024
I have written many essays about the role that reductive materialism plays in blinding us to common sense about drugs. But I have yet to identify the psychological theory that underlies this obtuseness. It is the anti-indigenous and cold psychology of JB Watson, called Behaviorism, hence the title of my latest essay, "Behaviorism and Drugs: why doctors and researchers are blind to common sense."
Also today I have added an update to my reflections on Peru and psychedelic healing. I point out that the Drug War is the triumph of idiocy. I also make the point that, while psychedelics have great potential, we should never forget the fact that we are blind to the far more obvious potentials of OTHER outlawed drugs, like opium and cocaine, both of which can be used for a wide variety of fully rational and even meritorious reasons.
I have also added an update to my article entitled "Science is not free in the age of the Drug War.
December 21, 2024
Drug War propaganda is hidden in plain sight. Every movie that concerns drugs is propaganda in a Drug War society. The movies may not be propaganda "in and of themselves." They may just be touching true accounts of people who have had trouble with drugs. And yet when considered collectively, all such movies are propaganda insofar as they show only one possible outcome of drug use, namely, that which is connected with sorrow and repentance.
Imagine that there were a host of movies in which aspirin was implicated in an untimely death. Aspirin, after all, has been implicated in thousands of deaths when taken on a daily basis. Such movies may be perfectly accurate and touching, and yet viewers would soon recognize that these movies were part of a smear campaign against the drug. This is because we have no war against aspirin, and so the propagandistic smear campaign would be obvious to everyone.
Not so with "drugs." And so Hollywood keeps cranking out movies that demonize drug use and we are blind to the smear campaign that this represents. And so movies like "Double Life" and "Four Good Days" keep piling on with their anti-drug message without any alarm bells sounding in the minds of viewers.
To put this argument another way: "The Lost Weekend" is a great movie and not propagandistic "in and of itself," but it would still be propaganda when aired in a society wherein no favorable depictions of alcohol use were allowed.
But the problem is worse than this. Many movies and books that would seem to have nothing to do with drugs will be found to contain throwaway lines that serve to diss demonized substances and drug use in general. This is bad enough, and ignorant enough, in itself, but it is made worse by the fact that there are almost no throwaway lines in modern media that mention positive drug use to counterbalance the anti-drug bias.
In "The Witch" by Ronald Hutton , we read nothing about drugs except for one single sentence in which the author likens deadly native medicines to "drugs" in the modern sense of that term. It is clearly a pejorative reference which caters to the Christian Science sensibilities of the Drug Warrior. What the author fails to realize, however, is that the "herbs" that he frequently mentions in his book in connection with witchcraft are also drugs. To say otherwise is to believe in an imaginary distinction based on how we "feel" about substances. It is like calling substances "meds" when they are prescribed by doctors and "drugs" when they are outlawed by politicians, and then assuming that this classification represents a scientific and logical distinction rather than an arbitrary and social one.
Academicians studying witchcraft surely know that they are opening up Pandora's box once they recognize that herbs are drugs and so they continue to use only the former appellation. "Herbs" sounds innocent enough and the use of that word permits the writer to pass on to other topics without dealing with the highly fraught topic of drugs and social norms. Were they to do so, they would recognize that the fearmongering sensibilities that inspired our hatred of witches never died out. They have just been strategically transferred from the witch to the witch's potions, in a word, to "drugs," which are considered to be the new cause of evil in modern life.
This new Christian Science viewpoint inevitably leads to the ascension of a brand-new witch in modern life: namely, the drug dealer. Hutton writes of the "service magician" who uses "herbs" (wink-wink) to help his or her customers to achieve various personal goals in life. And what is the modern drug dealer but a service magician doing the exact same thing? But academicians do not want to go there -- indeed, almost nobody does - and for obvious reasons. We live during a time of Drug War Sharia, and the failure to ascribe anything but pure evil to drugs and their venders is heresy, punishable by potential ostracization and banishment from professional circles, etc.
December 20, 2024
Psychedelic researchers talk about set and setting with regard to psychedelic drugs. But set and setting is important in the use of ALL psychoactive drugs, especially those like opium and coca. In his essays on intoxication, Aleister Crowley points out that the experience of drug users is based on their education level: not just their education level about drugs but their education level period, full stop. An imaginative and educated user finds a time and place to use a drug like opium to inspire creativity and to think in new fruitful ways. They use their education and imagination to contrive a set and setting conducive to successful drug use. They have a goal other than simply "getting high." Poorly educated users, on the other hand, simply use opium in an attempt to "get high." They put all their faith in the drug, as if it were aspirin, and none in their own powers. They take the drug and wait for something to happen. It is these latter users who have a habit of getting in trouble with drugs, because they have no imagination wherewith to leverage the drug effects successfully, for a rational purpose.
Drug warriors use the negative results of that latter ignorance as an excuse to ban drugs, which is a form of fearmongering. We don't stop driving because there are lousy drivers. We don't stop free climbing because some young people fall off cliffs. But the Drug Warrior leverages the west's suspicions of psychoactive medicine into a big social project to outlaw all psychoactive substances that are not controlled by state and industry. It is an outrage and we can only hope that humanity will survive long enough to realize the enormous injustice of this hateful and anti-scientific paradigm foisted on us by ignorant and often racist politicians.
December 19, 2024
The good news: Author Ronald Hutton acknowledged my essay on his book "The Witch" and responded with the words "Thank You." The bad news: That's all that he said. I cannot speak for the author's motivations, but it is clear that the vast majority of academics are scared of broaching these topics. They know that it is more than their job is worth to be critical of the War on Drugs, or what can be called the modern ideology of substance demonization.
December 18, 2024
Resolved: That drug dealers are the modern witches.
This is the conclusion that I came to in my philosophical review of Ronald Hutton's 2017 book entitled "The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present."
Here is my new essay on the topic, written as an open letter to Ronald.
December 17, 2024
One can find drug-war biases in all sorts of non-fiction books. It often pops up in the most unexpected places, in some throw-away line involving a hasty comparison or a strained analogy. Take the 2017 book entitled "The Witch" by Ronald Hutton. It is an excellent academically oriented book on the varieties of witchcraft worldwide. However, the author demonstrates his drug-war biases when he likens the secret buying of killer poisons with the purchasing of "drugs." Apparently, he sees a connection between murderers and those who buy and sell demonized substances that can improve mind and mood. This is a complete non-sequitur and could only seem plausible to someone who has been brainwashed from childhood to consider "drugs" to be evil. This, of course, is a superstitious point of view unworthy of an educated American, let alone a respected academic.
It's unfortunate. Instead of protesting the Drug War which censors academia, academics themselves join the substance demonization bandwagon and support the party line.
December 16, 2024
In a sane world, psychiatrists would transform into empathic coaches or shamans. Their prime imperative would be to help people achieve their own goals in life (not that of society or the psychiatrist) using drugs wisely and as safely as possible and to help them avoid all unwanted dependency. These new shaman doctors, representing the best of the west and the east/indigenous, would help one choose among a vast and ever-growing pharmacopoeia of psychoactive substances, all of them legal (again) in this utopia. Nor would any media hoopla surround such provision since the enormous downsides of prohibition would finally be acknowledged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths from civil wars overseas, the thousands dying in the streets because of contaminated supply and lack of safe-use information, the young kids being killed in drive-by shootings thanks to drug gangs that owe their very existence to substance criminalization -- and the fact that drug criminalization ends up destroying American freedoms, as it censors academia, all based on the absurd presupposition that a drug that can even theoretically be misused by white American teenagers must not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason, at any dose, ever.
December 15, 2024
The Drug War is the ultimate case of denial. The Drug Warriors not only fail to recognize how prohibition and fearmongering have caused endless problems, but they insist that the entire world be in denial about this as well. So rather than fixing the problem by accepting drug use unemotionally as just another potential risk in life, like free climbing, driving and shooting guns, they enact laws designed to keep drugs a problem for eternity, and not just in America but around the world as well.
The assumption here is that if white American young people cannot use drugs wisely, then nobody can -- this despite the fact that prohibition does all it can to prevent wise use in America, by encouraging the sale of unregulated product and refusing to even talk about safe use.
Besides, let's suppose that it is true, that Americans are not mature enough to use drugs wisely. Then there is a problem with America, not with drugs, and certainly not with the rest of the world.
So deep in denial are we as a country, that we threaten to invade other countries when they fail to share our jaundiced view of drugs.
And this is all based on the most unscientific and superstitious of principles: namely, the idea that a substance that can be misused, even in theory, by white American young people must not be used by anybody, anywhere, ever. This is why I am forever saying that prohibition causes all of the problems that it is purported to solve, and then some.
December 14, 2024
Back in March of this year, a guy on "X" told me that "What goes up must come down?", apparently meaning to say that any emotional and psychological benefits from "drugs" would be eventually paid for with interest.
What goes up must come down? Tell that to guys like Steve Urquhart, a former Republic senator. He founded an entire psilocybin church, the Divine Assembly, in 2020, so inspired was he by the uplifting effects of psilocybin, its ability to help him see CLEARLY in his "sober" life. Tell that to the practitioners of the Hindu religion, whose faith would not exist today but for the enlightening effects of the psychedelic soma in the Indus Valley thousands of years ago.
But Drug Warriors lump all drugs together as one evil thing and so feel free to discuss them wholesale. And so they dismiss drugs like psilocybin out of hand. It's a childish way of reasoning and makes exactly as much sense as dismissing penicillin on the grounds that cyanide can kill -- which would, of course, be a mistake in any case since even cyanide -- like all drugs -- has some positive uses, at some doses, in some circumstances.
Banning drugs a priori based on fearmongering is childish, anti-scientific and inhumane.
December 13, 2024
Not long ago, I was at least slightly offended by the Green Day song "American Idiot." American idiot, indeed, I thought. Is this really the message that we want to send to the world about the education level of the American populace?
However, recent events seem to entirely justify that title. We live in a society wherein the majority of Americans have been led by conspiracy theories into thinking that truth is the same thing as opinion, that you can simply deny any fact whose very existence implies an inconvenient truth viz. one's political beliefs. Nay, you can make up your own facts that would seem to justify your own prejudices. No sooner had that recent mass shooting occurred in Maine when a blogger got online and traced it to a leftist conspiracy. His original "tweet" garnered 95,000 likes, more likes than most of us anti-prohibitionists are likely to accrue in our entire lifetimes.
These "likers" are the same people who are blind to the violent mass dystopia that stares them in the face every day, that of the Drug War, which has destroyed their protections under the fourth amendment, denied them free speech, and barred them from religious practices that involve plant medicines, meanwhile killing tens of thousands through unregulated product, drive-by shootings, and civil wars overseas.
There's no denying the fact: we Americans are living in an Idiocracy.
It is, however, some comfort to remember that Edgar Allan Poe saw this coming.
In his short story entitled "Some Words with a Mummy," a group of archaeologists attempt to convince a revivified ancient Egyptian that modern America is the ideal republic.
"We then spoke of the great beauty and importance of Democracy," quoth the narrator, "and were at much trouble in impressing the Count with a due sense of the advantages we enjoyed in living where there was suffrage ad libitum, and no king."
The mummy (a certain Count Allamistakeo) responded that Egyptians had tried the same thing once. They had created an "ingenious" constitution that they believed would set a glorious example for mankind.
"For a while they managed remarkably well," quoth the Count, "only their habit of bragging was prodigious. The thing ended, however, in the consolidation of the thirteen states, with some fifteen or twenty others, in the most odious and insupportable despotism that was ever heard of upon the face of the Earth."
The scientists then asked the Count for the name of the usurping tyrant. "As well as the Count could recollect," quoth the narrator, "it was Mob."
December 12, 2024
I read a short story last night entitled "Tomorrow" by Eugene O'Neill. As might be expected from that author, it was touching and yet extremely depressing. The title "Tomorrow," of course, refers to the eternally renewed resolution of the drunkard to reform tomorrow, which is, of course, a tomorrow that will never come.
If Americans truly felt that laws had to be concocted to protect Americans from substances, then the story would read as a clarion call for the outlawing of liquor. But it will never be read that way by Americans today, subject as they are to the media's constant whitewashing of liquor and their constant demonization of all of liquor's many less dangerous alternatives. How? By lies, half-truths and (above all) censorship, thanks to which one never sees a demonized drug used responsibly and efficaciously on TV or in the movies. Said use is always either portrayed as a dead-end street or a childish undertaking worthy of laughter and, ultimately, disdain, at least from the grown-ups of the world. Meanwhile, the very fact that drugs were used efficaciously by folks like Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius is routinely suppressed from biographies.
This negative attitude toward drugs is beginning to recede today when it comes to psychedelic drugs. In fact, while I was writing this blog entry, I received a heads-up about a brand-new article in the New York Times entitled "The C.E.O.s Are Tripping. Can Psychedelics Help the C-Suite?".
But the penny still has not dropped for the western world. The real problem is prohibition itself, which advances the absurd and cruel proposition that a drug that can be used problematically by white American young people must not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason whatsoever. The world is full of silent and unnecessary suffering thanks to that anti-scientific dictum -- not just because of the withholding of existing protocols but because of the vast array of imaginative empathic/shamanic protocols that we dare not even imagine today thanks to the Drug War orthodoxy of substance demonization.
And so Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but the real headline is that drugs have never been evil at all, that the evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about them. And how do we talk about them today? With the superstitious and self-serving hypocrisy promoted by cynical politicians.
December 11, 2024
I have updated one of my essays on Immanuel Kant on Drugs. See footnote number six in The New Dark Ages: .
December 10, 2024
We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.
December 9, 2024
Folks like Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman like to characterize the '60s as a period of wild and dangerous excesses. But such a time period must not be judged in the abstract. If we're are going to fairly judge the utopian movement of the time, we must contrast it against the mainstream mindset against which it was rebelling. It was this latter mindset that embraced thermonuclear weapons -- weapons that almost destroyed the United States, not once, but twice in the very decade that we're talking about here: once thanks to the dangerously irresponsible policies of the US Air Force and once thanks to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Only one dissenting Russian voice kept annihilation at bay in the latter incident.
Yet, the hippie movement was all about peace, love and understanding, and LSD was used to help promote that attitude. Which group seems saner to you: those who hug trees or those who hug thermonuclear weapons? Which group would pass the test of the Categorial Imperative of Immanuel Kant? Hint: not the ones who think that drugs that inspire compassion are a bad thing!!!
But Drug Warriors hate peace, love and understanding.
That's why the UK government cracked down on Ecstasy in the 1990s, this despite the fact that use of the drug in question had helped bring unprecedented peace, love and understanding to the dance floors and killed nobody, properly speaking.
The mood of the time is nicely captured by a handful of quotes from the documentary "United Nation" by promoter Terry Stone:
"It was the first time that black-and-white people had integrated on a level... and everybody was one." -- DJ Ray Keith.
"It was black and white, Asian, Chinese, all up in one building," -- MC GQ.
"Everyone's loving each other, man, they're not hating." - DJ Mampi Swift.
Meanwhile, as the CDC reports today, alcohol kills 178,000 a year.
Governments (and stealth conservatives) hated that freedom from anger: they did not want a society like that. Life was all about winning and competition after all. So they cracked down on Ecstasy and the dancers switched to alcohol -- after which the concert organizers had to bring in special forces troops to keep the peace.
Special Forces.
It seems that there's nothing that conservatives hate more than these "Summers of Love."
And so they trot out a few oddball cases of misuse -- all of which could have been avoided if we had provided the education that we refuse to provide to drug users based on anti-scientific Drug Warrior hysteria, namely, the noxious notion that honesty about drugs is wrong insofar as it might encourage use. Let them die, we say, but don't let them be educated. It might lead to a world wherein defense money is no longer spent on thermonuclear weapons, not to mention endless tanks, jets and conventional weapons. Can you imagine what such a state of affairs would do to the stock market?
To which we hippies respond: Can you imagine what a thermonuclear weapon would do to it?
December 8, 2024
Yesterday, I ran across a 2024 stat from the CDC stating that:
"About 178,000 people die from excessive drinking each year."
But in the age of the Drug War, all such obvious problems are hidden in plain sight. They are entirely off the radar of the mainstream. No one senses a national emergency
Here is another problem hidden in plain sight: One in four American women are dependent upon Big Pharma meds for life. This unprecedented mass dystopia is also off the radar of the mainstream.
So not only does the Drug War suppress common sense, but it contorts our perception of reality.
At the end of the day, the Drug War has nothing to do with real dangers: it is all about making us "feel" a certain way about given substances: namely, to despise almost all psychoactive substances with the exception of liquor and Big Pharma meds.
If and when a freedom-loving America gets a reboot, it must somehow be laid down as a fundamental principle that fearmongering is forbidden and that the experts on psychoactive drugs are not politicians -- no, not even scientists, for such drugs are all about mind and mood and personal motivation and concepts of deity and concepts of what is "the good" in life, philosophically speaking. So to the extent that there are experts in this field, they are empaths and counselors and teachers and preachers, not scientists. Science's only job when it comes to psychoactive medicine is to tell us of potential dangers: they have no expertise in deciding whether use is worth the risk in any given case, since those decisions depend on the potential users' goals in life, their definition of "the good life," their beliefs about deity and ultimate reality, etc.
Meanwhile, with the current system of fearmongering, we outlaw a drug that has, properly speaking, killed nobody, while greenlighting one that actually kills 178,000, i.e. is what philosophers call a sufficient cause for those deaths.
The handful of deaths ascribed to MDMA are all actually "down" to other causes, principally the failure of the partaker to keep hydrated while using the drug under physically stressful conditions, like rave dancing. And the advice to do so is purposefully withheld from the users by the Drug Warrior based on their dogmatic notion that to talk about safe use is to encourage use. America encourages all sorts of risky behavior in its movies and songs. We only discourage "drug talk" because we live in a make-believe world in which we insist against all evidence (including that of common sense, anecdote, and world history) that drugs can have no positive uses whatsoever. It is the core faith of our anti-scientific and inhumane religion. It is, in fact, a rabid form of Christian Science, even if most devotees of this new religion have never even heard of the church founded by the drug-hating Mary Baker Eddy.
December 7, 2024
In the age of the Drug War, psychiatrists, psychologists and doctors lack all common sense. They are dogmatically blind to the power of drugs that elate and inspire, based on their adherence to reductive materialism, which tells them that such things are not "real" cures. The human being is a biochemical machine, after all, and the scientist's job is to fix the biochemistry, not to make people merely feel good. There are hundreds of millions of victims of this mindset, but the doctors never notice them because they are silent: they are the ones who waste their days holed up behind locked doors, contemplating suicide.
Such a materialist mindset completely ignores the power of virtuous circles that a wide variety of pick-me-up drugs could create when properly chosen and scheduled -- on a calendar, I mean, and not by the DEA. Such a mindset completely ignores the power of anticipation. Such a mindset completely ignores the motivating power provided to these individuals of just plain being able to get things done in their lives.
The doctors have no scruples in this regard because, like all Americans, they have been taught since grade-school that drugs must be a dead end, that the creativity of humankind will never find a way to use them wisely.
The cruelty of this modern reductive paradigm is seen in the way that psychiatrists "adjust meds." They insist that the severely depressed patient get off one drug entirely before starting another. Imagine if a drug dealer insisted the same thing. You would think that he was crazy. But the doctor knows best. He or she needs to be in total control of the variables, if only for insurance and regulatory purposes, and so it is for his or her convenience that the patient must go without anything during drug changes, thereby rendering them absolutely miserable.
Doctors praise antidepressants because they do not cause cravings, but for whom is that a benefit? For the prescribing doctor, of course, because the people whom they force to go without medicine merely suffer in a silent hell and do not pester the doctor to help them out.
This is the mindset that teaches doctors to damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than to give them the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions, as soma inspired the Vedic. This is the mindset that causes whole nations to vote in favor of letting people use drugs to die but will not let those same people use drugs that could make them want to live.
It is a complete perversion of values, all wrought by the anti-scientific, superstitious substance demonization of politically scheming politicians, populist pols who come to power by fearmongering.
This is one of the many reasons why the re-election of Trump is an existential disaster, and not just for drug policy but for democracy itself: Trump is the ultimate fearmonger.
UPDATE:
The New York Times published an "Ask the Ethicist" piece about a man who had a kidney replacement and then went back to binge drinking. I responded as follows:
This dilemma illustrates the problem with the War on Drugs.
Just imagine how different our reaction would be if the liver damage was being caused by something other then booze, by one of the endless psychoactive drugs that we have outlawed. We would be blaming the drug, not the person. But no one responds to your dilemma by saying that we should outlaw booze.
This is just one reason why the Drug War is so absurd. It is all about making us "feel" a certain way about certain substances. Alcohol is to be considered harmless when used wisely, while we have adopted the dogmatic view that "drugs" simply can never be used wisely. And yet the CDC tells us that, "About 178,000 people die from excessive drinking each year." The hypocrisy of our attitudes is breathtaking.
December 6, 2024
To oppose the Drug War philosophically, one has to highlight its connections to materialism and to the psychiatric pill mill. And that's a problem, because almost everyone in the west is either a Drug Warrior, a materialist, and/or has a vested interest in the psychiatric pill mill, either because they themselves are dependent upon Big Pharma meds or because they, as psychiatrists, have been prescribing them for ages. In other words, one is left with a very small potential audience once all the vested interests have clapped indignant hands over their ears and gone elsewhere.
I was stunned when reading his "Pills-a-Go-Go" that Jim Hogshire himself is a defender of Big Pharma. He does not seem to realize that antidepressants have some downsides that come with no other drugs: they alter brain chemistry such that it is almost impossible for long-term users to quit them (this is certainly the case with Effexor). This means that these end up being the only drug you're ever even ABLE to take for your depression and disqualifies you for the new psychedelic treatments thanks to the way it has screwed up your serotonin system in advance. Of course, these pills wouldn't be so hard to kick if we hadn't outlawed everything that would help you kick them. That's just common sense. But modern researchers do not have common sense. They want all their drugs to be proven "scientifically," by materialist reductionism, and so they are blind to common sense psychology, like the obvious fact that certain pick-you-up substances could get one through those few tough hours in the wee hours of the morning that are the bane of the recidivist.
Here are some more thoughts on Jim Hogshire's odd take on antidepressants What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs: . Does he not even see a problem with the mass dependency of 1 in 4 American women? It's a real-life Stepford Wives but no one notices.
In reality, the antidepressant pill mill is justified on the grounds of reductive materialism; therefore the two are symbiotic and very closely related.
December 5, 2024
The Drug Warrior and the materialist scientist both ignore common sense when it comes to drugs. Neither sees any use in the strategic use of drugs that elevate mood and inspire action. The former believes that such an approach represents an immoral shortcut and the latter claims that such treatments are not "real" cures -- as if we should be in the business of curing sadness in any case. Look at the results of that hubristic materialist attempt when it comes to depression: a nation full of Stepford Wives, 1 in 4 American women dependent upon Big Pharma drugs for life. Anyone so dependent should have the option of choosing another "poison," if we must regard drugs in that superstitious way. But Americans have been taught to judge drug use via worst case scenarios -- unlike any risky activity on Earth. We do not view drinking in this way, nor hunting, nor driving a car, nor even free climbing.
This is why I have a low regard for modern psychology. It has played ball with this naive understanding of human motivation; otherwise, it would be pushing back against the Drug War. Why? Because it outlaws an endless number of potential treatment protocols for the improvement of mind and mentation: treatments based on the wise use of a wide variety of currently outlawed drugs to create virtuous behavioral circles in those who use them.
December 4, 2024
Back in March of this year, I received a "tweet" on X from the Isaac Newton of psychology. He told me that "what goes up must come down" and that therefore, psychoactive drugs were of no help, emotionally speaking. You could tell this guy was a typical Drug Warrior because he had the simplicity to talk about "drugs" as if that meant anything. "Drugs" is a category, and a political category at that: It simply means "psychoactive substances of which politicians disapprove." He might as well have said, "Animals will bite you." It's such a simplistic statement that one scarcely knows how to respond. Yes, but which animals, under which circumstances, at what times and in what places? See my original essay here What Goes Up Must Come Down?: or click here to read my latest update of same.
December 3, 2024
I never was a rabid patriot, but I was raised to believe that America was on the path toward peace and happiness, although clearly following a very tortuous path, indeed. However, after Big Money and Fearmongering persuaded most Americans to give up on democracy in favor of fascism (see the results of the recent presidential vote), I am no longer so sanguine. I mention this for two reasons: first, to set the record straight for future generations as to where my sympathies lay when it comes to the current national nightmare. And to remind them that we came to this pass thanks to fearmongering, which is what the Drug War is all about.
The message is clear: We need to re-invent democracy, not with new principles, but by affirming that we truly believe the old ones, the idea that Mother Nature is ours by right, as is clearly maintained in the doctrine of Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. As John Locke wrote in chapter five of his Second Treatise on Government:
"The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being."
To men, mind, NOT to government.
In a new, improved America -- one that is willing to defend the principles upon which it was founded -- it would no longer be possible for natural medicines to be withheld from the public based solely on how the population has been taught to FEEL about them by the propaganda of demagogues. This is the problem with the new batch of authoritarians: they have no interest in principles, only in expedients that will get them where they want to go, politically speaking.
December 2, 2024
The people at Common Sense flag movies for bad language and "drugs." They do not flag movies for promoting fascist Drug War narratives, as when the DEA stages murders and hangs suspects from meat-hooks. Sure, they may flag them for violence, but not for exuding a message that justifies the overthrow of the democratic system of government.
Here are some essays about movies and the Drug War.
All these Sons: Documentary about Chicago gun violence does not even mention the drug war, which caused that violence in the first place.
Attention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propaganda: Please remember, scriptwriters: 'drugs' is just a political term for psychoactive substances of which politicians disapprove.
Cop shows as drug war propaganda: How the TV cop show genre promulgates drug warrior lies about mother nature's plant medicines
COPS: TV Show for Racist Drug Warriors: The Drug War is a make-work program for Cops. Without it, they would actually have to fight only REAL crime, and not go around harassing minorities.
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.
Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War: How Hollywood comedies support fascist drug war superstitions
How Variety and its film critics support drug war fascism: How movie reviewers ignore the anti-American message of drug war films like "Running with the Devil"
Moonfall: Humanoids will tell you that they want peace, but if they're anything like us purebred human beings, peace comes in a distance second to demonizing the very substances that could make that peace possible.
Running with the DEA -- er, I mean the Devil: Running With the Devil: DEA propaganda film glorifying torture in the name of the war on therapeutic plants
Running with the torture loving DEA: Live from the DEA lounge: a stand-up comedy routine about the fascist practices of the DEA
The Runner: Racist Drug War Agitprop: A celebration of anti-American values in the name of the hateful anti-scientific drug war.
Why Hollywood Owes Richard Nixon an Oscar: for single-handedly created he drug war movie genre -- albeit with a little inspiration from Francis Burton Harrison
December 1, 2024
It is bizarre that we should have "the right to die" in a world that outlaws drugs. That means, in effect, that we have a right to die, but we do not have the right to use drugs that might make us want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world -- and yet which remain unaccountably invisible to almost everyone, including almost all proponents of the aforesaid euthanasia.
For more on this topic, see my previous essays:
Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War: How the drug war makes ECT necessary.
Euthanasia in the Age of the Drug War: Euthanasia meets the Drug War
Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II:
The Drug War and Electroshock Therapy: How the Drug War makes electroshock therapy necessary, and why doctors must start acknowledging that fact
The Right to LIVE FULLY is more important than the Right to DIE:
November 30, 2024
I cited the assisted dying act yesterday on X and was told that I had misspoke: that the act DID allow one to continue using alcohol and tobacco and that technically one could kill oneself, not "be" killed. A trifle frustrating, for as Whitehead reminds us, all sentences are elliptical, and all the more so on X, with its character limitations. English sentences are always lacking some detail which the reader is supposed to understand implicitly. It's obvious, I trust, that one is allowed these days to use alcohol and tobacco, regardless of what other statues may be in effect. As for the latter objection, even if one kills oneself with a drug, that drug is surely provided by someone. No man is an island, even in the act of suicide.
I fear such fine points detract from the real bombshell here: that is, the fact that the assisted dying act is bizarrely dystopian in a world wherein we do not allow the use of drugs to help make people want to live. The frustrating thing is that the law's new proponents would never dream that drug law has any connection with this case. Drug prohibition is hidden in plain sight thanks to well over a century of drug demonization in western countries.
But then I am thin-skinned, I admit it. And, to be honest, I should not be "on" X in any case, owned as it is by a fascist. Thomas Browne could have been speaking of Elon Musk when he wrote the following in his popular 17th-century work entitled "Religio Medici and Hydriotapha":
"There is a rabble even amongst the gentry."
November 29, 2024
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that it is legal to kill someone, but it is not legal to make them want to live. These people would rather have grandpa die than to let him smoke opium or take ecstasy or use coca, laughing gas, or the inspirational drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin.
November 28, 2024
Welcome back. You know, when I write my friends about the subject of drugs, I always have the fear that they're thinking in their heart of hearts, "Oh, here we go again: this guy is always going on about 'drugs'," this despite the fact that the folks in question profess agreement with my positions, or at least have the tact and/or cowardice to refrain from gainsaying me. It's not so much that I distrust them, but I know the power of propaganda, and I know that all Americans have been indoctrinated from childhood to believe that mere honest conversation on this topic is suspicious and betrays an obsessive interest in a subject that good people just do not talk about.
Given these fears, I like to remind my interlocutors that antidepressants are drugs, that alcohol is a drug, that caffeine is a drug, that nicotine is a drug, and that even Red Bull contains drugs. Indeed, many of these people that I contact are taking antidepressants daily (like myself, alas), and so I am really tempted to respond to their seemingly implicit objections with: "Don't talk to ME about an obsessive interest in drugs, you take antidepressants every day of your life!" But then it seems odd to respond to an objection that no one has actually made, one that is merely implicit -- but again, the temptation is there, because I can just hear their brains cranking away in that way.
I may be wrong, of course, but we should never underestimate the power of propaganda to control our thoughts, and especially our knee-jerk attitudes. For to paraphrase William Shirer from his classic book on Hitler:
"No one who has not lived for years in a DRUG WAR SOCIETY can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."
Oh, by the way, Instagram will not let me set up an account. They provide no explanation. The "sign-up" button simply will not work for me. It looks like Free Speech is now as dead as protection from unreasonable search. I may have to visit Menlo, Park, California, to ask the people at META what gives.
META: 1601 Willow Rd, Menlo Park, California, 94025, USA.
If I am going to be censored like this, I want to know why.
November 27, 2024
Welcome to the Drug War Blog, or what is basically the diary of the Drug War Philosopher, videlicet myself.
I may as well use the first entry to justify my claim to the status of "philosopher," since I am not board-certified as such. If it is any comfort, I was offered a job as TA in the field 30 years ago, but I turned it down, a decision that I came to regret when I finally realized that a lack of accreditation had rendered me a nonentity as far as academics were concerned. You can hardly blame them, of course, considering how much money they had to shell out to get that title. And here's me sitting there: "Hey, fellas, I have something to say TOO!" No, they will never let poor Rudolf join in any of THEIR reindeer games, thank you very much.
But I would still stubbornly point out that I am the only philosopher (accredited or otherwise) who has protested to the FDA about their recent plans to treat laughing gas as a drug, nitrous oxide being the substance that helped inspire the ontology of William James, America's preeminent psychologist. He believed that we must study the effects of such substances in order to learn about human perception and about Reality writ large:
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." -- William James.
Yet, disregard them we must because of the Drug War.
So you be the judge about who really cares about the philosophic enterprise and who cares more about blending in with Drug War Society and its norms.
More Essays Here
The latest hits from Drug War Records, featuring Freddie and the Fearmongers!
Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs
It's really an insurance concern, however, disguised as a concern for public health. Because of America's distrust of "drugs," a company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.
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.
Governor Kotek is "dealing" with the homelessness problem in Oregon by arresting her way out of it, in fealty to fearmongering drug warriors.
Imagine if we held sports to the same safety standard as drugs. There would be no sports at all. And yet even free climbing is legal. Why? Because with sports, we recognize the benefits and not just the downsides.
Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.
It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.
Drug War propaganda is all about convincing us that we will never be able to use drugs wisely. But the drug warriors are not taking any chances: they're doing all they can to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In a sane world, we'd package laughing gas for safe use and give it to the suicidal -- saying, "Use before attempting to kill yourself." But drug warriors would rather have suicide than drug use.
More Tweets
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, THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG: combatting drug war propaganda and lies, one post at a time, published on November 10, 2024 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)
