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THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG

combatting drug war propaganda and lies, one post at a time

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher




oday I discuss The Bill Clinton Fallacy -- which is the mad idea that prohibition saves lives. I have also updated my January essay entitled Case Studies in Wise Drug Use. I have added thereto a variety of examples of positive drug use from... from a religious text! That's right! From the Rig Veda itself. I am being honest in a way that no one else is about drugs.

In the former essay, I make it clear that if Bill is saving Roger Clinton from cocaine, he is only doing so by killing 13-year-old's like Karon Blake with drive-by shootings.





I also make it clear that the Rig Veda is full of positive reports of drug use. Yet Hindus themselves use Drug Warrior terminology and terms of the Drug War apartheid of Julian Buchanan to say otherwise. They too are bamboozled by Drug War terminology. The fact is that a psychoactive substance is a psychoactive substance is a psychoactive substance. Until we recognize this fact, we will never be able to indict Drug Warriors for one of their worst crimes: which is the outlawing of new religions. For more on this latter topic, please read my essay entitled How the Drug War Outlaws Religion.




March 31, 2025




It's been almost five years since I sent a plea via snail mail to the Washington, D.C. Holocaust Museum urging them to protest the Drug War on the grounds of the hatred that it has inspired. Any regular readers of this site, should there be such, will not be surprised to learn that I have received no response to that request, no, not even so much as an acknowledgement of receipt.

For readers who are so bamboozled by Drug War propaganda as to not see at once why the Holocaust Museum should speak up against it, please to read the following essay of mine from back in September 2020, while paying special attention to the 2025 update that it includes:

Why the Holocaust Museum must denounce the Drug War

--

Had William James connected the dots between his use of laughing gas and the Hindu's use of Soma, the Drug Warrior might not have been able to persuade us that drugs were evil. The use of both substances provide the user with glimpses of entirely new realities. Instead, the Drug Warriors have succeeded so well in associating drugs with evil that James's alma mater, the Harvard Psychology Department, does not mention either laughing gas or Soma -- or even the "anesthetic revelation,1" as James calls it, in their online biography of the man. That is just another example of the sad fact that American academia is under the thumb of the Drug Warriors. Drug War heresy will not be tolerated, even in the name of academic freedom.

Thank God for non-tenured philosophers like yours truly, who are in the rare position where they can speak truth to prohibitionist power and not lose their jobs.

Speaking of which, here are several of my recent essays on such topics:



I call your attention in particular to that latter essay: How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James, which has been updated with some timely speculations about the discomfiture that I have no doubt occasioned by my request for some honest parley on the verboten topic of drugs in academia.



March 29, 2025




Here is my 2025 update to my 2022 essay entitled Time to ACT UP about the racist drug war.

Oh, and remember how I was censored by the Internet Archive for my Drug War heresy. Learn more below...

Internet Archive Censorship






The Internet Archive runs censorship algorithms on autopilot. They flagged my criticism of a NIDA article as 'spam.' They could not even tell me why the algorithm called it spam, but they refused to overrule the algorithm. They apparently fail to realize that algorithms are written by real people based on real assumptions -- and that an algorithm is clearly wrong when it trashes legitimate opinion as 'spam.' Here is the letter that I wrote to the staff to complain of their censorship. I sent this letter to at least 20 separate staffers, to give it at least some chance of being attended to -- for experience shows that the vast majority of people at such organizations will ghost you should you bring up a drug-related topic.

I paste the letter below now without further comment....



Amir Esfahani et al. 3-30-25
c/o The Internet Archive
300 Funston Ave
San Francisco, CA 94118

Dear Mr. Esfahani:

I am writing to protest the Internet Archive's use of algorithms to censor free speech about drugs.

I recently wrote a review of a NIDA article on Internet Archive entitled "Research Report Series 2017 MDMA (Ecstasy) Abuse." In my review, I pointed out the biases of NIDA and how they ignore all glaringly obvious benefits of psychoactive substances. The review was blocked by your algorithms as "spam."
Spam? I am used to being banned and blocked for speaking the truth about drug policy, but how exactly do my comments (see below) qualify as spam? Perhaps you could ask the programmer who wrote the algorithms and get back to me?

When I protested to IA, I received no response until I threatened a lawsuit -- even though I had received same-day service when my questions concerned donating to your site. An anonymous member of your "Internet Archive Team" finally got back to me by email and told me that they themselves were uncertain why my review was blocked. This alone should have been grounds for permitting my review to be published! Instead, they seemed to think that the algorithm that blocked me was infallible and should not be second guessed. In fact, they said that IA made a point of not intervening personally in censorship decisions and relied totally on their algorithms.

WHAT? Do you not realize that algorithms are written by actual people based on actual assumptions? Your censorship algorithms should not be on autopilot. You should be tracking down the algorithm maker and asking them why they are flagging free speech about drugs as "spam."

The team member speculated that my review might have lacked specifics about the article in question, but that is a sham excuse for censoring me. There are plenty of reviews on IA that do not mention specifics but rather praise the authors. Why then am I blocked for suggesting that the authors of an IA article are biased on the subject about which they write?

It is "chilling" to have one's review blocked in real-time by a faceless algorithm. When you take such a drastic step, you have a responsibility to make the reason as clear as possible to the would-be posters and not to simply flag their comments with a mendacious catch-all term such as "spam." If you want some pointers for how to use censorship algorithms fairly, consistently, and in a user-friendly way, just ask and I will provide you with some common-sense suggestions.

Meanwhile, I ask you to please publish my review and to stop suppressing it for algorithmic reasons that you yourselves admit you do not understand.

Yours Truly...................

The following is my Banned Review of the NIDA article on the Internet Archive entitled "Research Report Series 2017 MDMA (Ecstasy) Abuse."

The government study of drugs is HUGELY biased. Their researchers ignore all the benefits of drugs as well as all the downsides of prohibition. Their only job is to demonize drug use by holding it to a safety standard that we apply to no other activity on planet Earth: not to free climbing, not to drag-racing, and certainly not to gun shooting or drinking alcohol. Speaking of alcohol, it kills 178,000 a year according to the CDC, and yet the government invites us to fear drugs like Ecstasy, which have killed no one. The only deaths related to Ecstasy are those caused by the Drug War, which refuses to educate about safe use and to regulate product.

Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace, love and understanding to the dance floors of Britain in the 1990s, but Drug Warriors do not like peace, love and understanding. And so Drug Warriors cracked down on the use of Ecstasy, after which violence SKYROCKETED at rave concerts as dancers switched to the anger-facilitating drug called alcohol, and concert organizers had to bring in special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces!

NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition, thanks to which America's inner cities have been turned into shooting galleries and the rule of law is now a joke in much of Latin America. 60,000 Mexicans have been "disappeared" thanks to the Drug War over the last 20 years, and yet NIDA wants to outlaw a drug whose only crime is that it brought about unprecedented peace, love and understanding.

We don't need a National Institute on Drug Abuse. We need a National Institute on Drug USE -- an agency that recognizes the benefits of drugs and the downsides of prohibition.


  • How the Archive.org Website Censors Free Speech About Drugs
  • How the Internet Archive Censors Free Speech about Drugs
  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG





    • March 27, 2025





    Ever wonder what the world would look like when we re-legalize psychoactive medicine?

    Then my latest essay is for you: After the Drug War.

    --

    Needless to say that the folks at the Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University2 ignored my pleas for them to cite the Drug War as a cause -- nay, THE cause -- of inner-city violence in their reports to media, insofar as the Drug War armed the 'hood to the teeth in the first place by incentivizing violence.

    "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."
    -Ann Heather Thompson, The Atlantic, 2014


    Needless to add that Jamal at The Philosophy Forum3 is ignoring my request to join his forum. He apparently wants the philosophers therein to be sheltered from truth when it comes to the Drug War. This is par for the course. I was the only philosopher in the world to object to the FDA's plans to treat laughing gas as a drug4. Laughing gas: the substance that inspired William James's view of reality5.

    Did I mention that Harvard University's bio of James does not even mention laughing gas, nor refer to his studies about ultimate reality in any way6?

    Philosophy today is fake news -- although obviously for none of the reasons that our new king in Washington would ever think of adducing. The reason is obvious: everyone knows on which side their bread is buttered. They know that to speak honestly about drugs is to incur the wrath of one's employers. Were this the only downside of the Drug War and substance prohibition, it would be ample reason to end both. And considering there is an entire book's worth of additional downsides, it is amazing that I am the only philosopher speaking truth to power on this subject in a way that has at least a faint chance of being understood by the hoi polloi.

    Philosophers are no doubt thrilled that I am not tenured -- for my lack of status gives them at least the semblance of an excuse to ignore me entirely.

    Any time I get depressed about the brainwashed status quo, I just think of coca advocate Angelo Mariani, the maker of Coca Wine. He wrote a book in 1896 entitled "Coca and Its Therapeutic Applications7." In the process of doing so, he sent letters far and wide to academics who might be presumed to know something about the coca plant -- and guess what? His letters were mostly ignored. This was over a decade before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, and yet the idea was already prevalent among scientists that drugs could be bad in and of themselves and that Americans needed to be protected from the truth about them. One of his few respondents actually criticized Mariani for writing honestly about the subject. This is why I insist that the end of the Drug War requires a new philosophy of life on the part of Americans: one that places knowledge and education ahead of fearmongering and arrest -- one which believes that the truth will set us free and not ignorance8.

    You can listen to my audio production of Mariani's book about the benefits of coca here: Coca Wine. Be sure to listen before the book is outlawed -- for that is the direction America is headed absent a principled change in our superstitious and dogmatically uninformed outlook on the subject of so-called "drugs."

    --

    I've also made so bold as to update my essay entitled How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987. Check out the ironically idiotic comments I provoked from one drug hater.







    March 25, 2025





    Here is a new important essay:

    How the Drug War Outlaws Religion
    (Well, important only if you believe in religious liberty.)

    --


    Ring the bells! I have updated my 2020 essay entitled Heroin versus Alcohol!

    --



    Now checkest-thou-out an update to an even older essay of mine, indited in 2019, no less: How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Drug War.


    --

    The library shelves are full of censored books. They have not been censored by government, but by the authors themselves. This is because the authors have been brainwashed by Drug War propaganda to believe in the evil of "drugs." This cradle-to-grave brainwashing has been so successful that the authors do not even recognize that they are self-censoring themselves. And no one is going to "call them" on it because everyone in the intoxiphobic western world is censored in the same way.

    The latest example is the 2024 book by J.W. Ocker entitled "Cult Following.9" The Drug War is the most pernicious cult of all time, teaching us not only to fear psychoactive substances personally, but encouraging us as a people to go out in the world and stop all others from benefiting from the drugs that we have chosen to fear rather than to understand. And yet Ocker does not mention the Drug War in his book on cults. To the contrary, true to his brainwashing, he focuses exclusively on associating the word 'drugs' with sinister forces. He ignores the Drug War -- i.e., the Great American Cult of Substance Demonization -- and reports instead on "narcosatanists" in Mexico in the 1980s.

    Too Typical.

    Just another in an endless series of non-fiction books that keep the Drug War out of sight and out of the mind of the reader -- nay, which tend to justify the Drug War by concentrating lopsidedly on only negative stories about drug use. Just like "The Witch" by Ronald Hutton10, an academic work which uses the word "drugs" only once, and then in a pejorative context, whereas the author glibly uses the word "herbs" time and time again. The author fails to recognize that the herbs in question were the drugs of the time and were endowed with psychoactive properties -- hence their use in "spells" and service magic.

    Here is my letter to J.W. Ocker on this topic:



    Good morning, JW.

    I would suggest that the Drug War is the Great American Cult par excellence. It brainwashes us from childhood with the Christian Science belief that psychoactive drugs have no positive uses whatsoever, when in reality such substances inspired the Hindu religion and have been shown in modern times to have phenomenal beneficial powers. The Drug War cult teaches us not merely to hate such drugs ourselves, but to go out into the world as a people and actively ensure that no one else benefits from them anywhere, ever. Surely, that is a fanaticism worthy of the term "cult."

    Here is just one of the many lines in the Rig Veda which extol the powers of the psychoactive Soma:

    "They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture."

    Alexander Shulgin has documented the same sort of drug-inspired ecstasy and insight in "Pihkal," with user reports such as the following:

    "I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."

    And yet the Drug War cult would never permit the creation of a Hinduism 2.0, based on the use of the uplifting and insightful phenethylamines synthesized by chemist Alexander Shulgin. Indeed, there would be no Hinduism today had our DEA been active in the Punjab in 1500 BCE. If Drug Czar William Bennett had been in charge back then, the Soma peddlers would have been beheaded. How is that for fanaticism?

    In light of this backstory (and an endless list of similar inconvenient truths, such as the fact that Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin were both inspired by the use of opium), the Drug War is surely the Great Cult of Substance Demonization.

    Unfortunately, almost all non-fiction writers ignore such things entirely. In "The Witch" by Ronald Hutton, the author only mentions "drugs" once, and then in a derogatory fashion. He fails to realize that the witches' "herbs" that he references so frequently and so glibly throughout his book WERE drugs -- just as surely as "meds" are drugs, although Big Pharma would have us think otherwise.

    Just a few thoughts that I wanted to share! Thanks very much for your time.

    PS My guess is that, like most well-educated persons, you generally accept these facts already, and yet you fear (alas, probably rightly so) that to associate yourself with such Drug War heresy would be career suicide.










    March 25, 2025




    I have added some important updates to my 2021 essay entitled The Drug War Cure for Covid.

    Also, as mentioned yesterday, I have applied for membership in the Philosophy Forum11. No word back from the moderator. I am predicting, however, that I will be ghosted. I do not know the moderator, Jamal, from Adam; however, I have learned over the last six years of writing about drugs that philosophers hate to talk about the Drug War. They prefer to believe that substance prohibition has nothing to do with philosophy -- which is the whole reason why my site exists, by the way, for that belief is dead wrong in so many ways and at so many levels. That is why I am still spoiled for choice for philosophical essay topics to this very day, six years after I began parsing the Drug War for the absurd, inhumane, and anti-democratic premises upon which it is based.

    --

    The Rig Veda is full of references to the psychoactive Soma. The Vedic and Hindu religions were inspired by Soma.

    "The living drops of Soma juice pour,
    as they flow, the gladdening drink,
    Intelligent drops above the basin of the sea,
    exhilarating, finding light."


    This has enormous implications when considered in light of the inspirational medicines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, medicines whose user reports remind one of the experiences of the Soma user. In a sane world, we would be allowed to religiously use such phenethylamines in the same way and for the same reasons as Soma was used in the Punjab in 1500 B.C. But the Drug Warrior outlaws such religions.


    "The euphoria grows in intensity for several hours and remains for the rest of the day making this one of the most enjoyable experiences I have ever had."


    These, of course, are the sorts of substances that the DEA tells us have no known uses. The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for depriving humankind of such medicine.


    SPOILER ALERT. If you wish to see the new horror movie called Candlewood, then do not read the following drug-related musings.

    America's ignorance about so-called "drugs" shows up when you least expect it. Last night I watched the horror movie "Candlewood," in which a family of four leaves the Big Apple to live more peaceably in the countryside of Connecticut. It seemed a cookie-cutter plot. There was the teenage girl with dyed hair who was griping endlessly about being torn away from her friends and the stepmother who does not understand her, etc.

    A suspicious-looking groundskeeper informs the family of an urban legend connected with their property, according to which their site is haunted by an "Indian princess" and a murderous jilted lover. The story is discounted at once by the father as just a tasteless attempt to scare his kids. However, each family member begins to separately see visions that tend to corroborate the story. Finally, the family gets around to comparing notes and finds that they are all witnessing similar and related phenomenon.

    I will fast-forward through the blood and guts that ensue. Suffice it to say that the visions lead to such confusion that the parents end up killing their own two kids -- after which the parents kill each other for good measure. All of this was inspired by these crazy visions, right?

    Well, guess where these crazy visions came from. As the closing scene makes clear, the city-hating groundskeeper had a practice of collecting local mushrooms -- seemingly at random and without regard for species -- and pulverizing them prior to adding them to the local water supply.

    That's it. That's the total "explanation" for the murder and mayhem: a tainted water supply combined with a little fearmongering about an urban legend.

    That shows the intelligence level that the producers expect of their audience these days. For the idea that mushroom ingestion would lead to domestic massacres like this -- not once, but repeatedly, from generation to generation, as the flashbacks suggest -- is silly. Even had the mushrooms been chosen for maximum psychedelic potential, there is no reason to suspect that violence would have developed from their ingestion. To the contrary, most users of psychedelic mushrooms report a greater feeling of oneness with the world, a greater appreciation of colors, and so forth. They do not develop a mad desire to make fast and free with kitchen knives and the loaded shotgun that the last tenant of the house had given pride of place on the wall above the living room fireplace.

    This movie is all of a piece with Crack Raccoon and Cocaine Bear: movies that depend for their effect on America's childish ignorance about drugs.





    March 24, 2025





    The Drug War is the Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time -- not least because philosophers are afraid to address it! Here's my essay on the topic -- which is actually in the form of an application to join the Philosophy Forum12. It will be very interesting to see if I am approved -- given the amount of blocking and banning that I have encountered in my efforts to combat ignorant drug-war orthodoxy.

    Why the Drug War is the Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time





    March 24, 2025




    I'm something of an old film junkie. That is to say I am both old and I enjoy old films. This is partly due to the fact that I enjoy taking a break from modern movies, insofar as they tend to reek of the confused mores of our times, particularly with regard to their portrayal of substance use. Among my guilty cinematic pleasures are the movies in which Sidney Toler stars as Charlie Chan, the faux-Chinese detective created by American novelist Earl Derr Biggers (faux insofar as Sidney Toler was born in Missouri). There is one Charlie Chan movie, however, which I refuse to watch because it concerns Charlie's attempts to break up an opium smuggling ring, a criminal enterprise that was brought into existence scarcely two decades before the heyday of the Chan franchise thanks to the idiotic substance demonization of racist American politicians.




    I was surprised, however, to see a little drug hypocrisy pop up in the 1941 movie "Charlie Chan in Rio." The plot concerned the Chinese detective's attempts to solve the murder of an attractive actress. In his efforts to do so, Chan is aided by a mentalist named Alfredo Cardozo, who has a trick whereby he elicits the truth from subjects by hypnotizing them. He does not hypnotize them, however, by swinging a watch back and forth in front of their eyes and advising them in an impressive voice that they are getting sleepy: instead, he gives them a jolt of caffeine via a small serving of coffee and then asks them to smoke a cigarette containing a special "herb." After a few puffs on the doctored cigarette, the subject falls into a trance during which they apparently cannot help but tell the truth. Cardozo assures Chan that the mystery "herb" is perfectly safe and the detective readily takes his word for it, subsequently using the cigarette to determine guilt and innocence among the well-heeled suspects.

    It's amazing what a simple word can do. By referring to said substance as an "herb" instead of a "drug," the detective is ready to make practical use of the psychoactive effects to solve his case -- even though he has recently been to Hong Kong to arrest people for trafficking in substances that create similar trancelike effects in the user. This hypocritical perspective reminds me of the book by Ronald Hutton entitled "The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present.13" Hutton only uses the word "drugs" once in the book, and then only in a derogatory sense. But he uses the word "herb" repeatedly. What he fails to realize, of course, is that those herbs he keeps citing WERE drugs. They were drugs just as "meds" are drugs. Terms like "herbs," "meds" and "drugs" do not denote separate kinds of substances -- they simply connote the way that society feels about those substances. And so herbs are considered harmless, meds are considered scientifically justified, and drugs are considered pointless and evil.

    The producers had a dilemma: they wanted to use the obvious beneficial effects of a drug in a plot twist, and yet drugs were obviously bad. What to do?

    Answer: It's easy. Just refer to the drug as an herb.

    --

    A few installments ago (scroll down), I lamented the use of algorithms to flag and delete free speech about drugs. I highlighted the fact that sites that use such algorithms mistakenly take such algorithmic decisions as unimpeachable, since they are essentially performed by a computer. The problem with this viewpoint is obvious. It is the fact that these algorithms were originally created by human beings. You are therefore not being fair simply because you are leaving your censorship decisions up to an algorithm. The algorithm itself has biases, insofar as it was written by a human being.

    I noticed that this blind faith in algorithms is widespread. It is alive and well, for instance, on the Project Gutenberg website. Here is a case in point.

    I recently enjoyed reading a Gutenberg asset entitled "Mr. Punch's Pocket Ibsen" by comic author F. Antsey. It contained satires of a number of Ibsen's plays, featuring lines like the following from the blackmailer Krogstad in "A Doll's House":

    "Bad thing for the complexion, suicide--and silly, too, because it wouldn't mend matters in the least."


    Yet I noticed after reading that the AI-generated summary had failed to notice that Antsey's versions of Ibsen's plays were satires. Instead, the algorithm's summary informs us that "the compilation aims to present these theatrical masterpieces in a more accessible format for earnest students and enthusiasts of Ibsen's work."

    That was the funny part of this story. But the hilarious part arrived when I attempted to inform Project Gutenberg of this clueless summary. I was told that that the algorithm was essentially correct and that no changes were going to be made to the AI summary.

    What? Do the folks at PG even know what satire is? Satire is NOT an attempt to present a theatrical masterpiece in a more accessible format for earnest students: satire is a SEND-UP of theatrical masterpieces and the like!

    It's funny, though, I knew in my heart that it was a bad idea to send them my suggested corrections about the AI summary, even though the Project actually solicits such. I knew in my heart that the proper understanding of my criticism would require a knowledge of literary basics and that this was perhaps asking too much in the digital age, an age wherein folks feel they can stop reading literary masterpieces and just "look up" the relevant bits whenever they're challenged for details.

    It's great praise for Antsey, in any case, that his mockery of the original works was subtle enough that his satires are accepted as serious renderings of Ibsen's plays. It makes me wonder what Antsey would have had to have written in order to make his satirical intention clear to the Project Gutenberg staff members and/or their genre-challenged algorithms.

    Apparently, Antsey would have had to have included slapstick lines like the following:

    KROGSTAD pompously enters stage left and emits a loud and long BUUUURP!












    March 22, 2025




    Latest essay: Confessions of an Effexor Junkie.




    March 21, 2025




    Here is a quotation from the Rig Veda:

    "They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda


    Commentary: There would be no Hindu religion today had the Drug War been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.

    --

    According to the current behaviorist approach, our chemists -- not you as a depressed person -- get to decide how a depressed person should think and feel in life in order to be considered to be "cured." The obvious question is: where did chemists get their expertise for deciding what constitutes a 'cure' for depression? Why cannot depressed persons themselves decide what constitutes a cure for themselves based on their own unique hopes and dreams in life? If chemists are really to be in charge of such things, you would think they would all be required to have dual degrees in both chemistry and philosophy -- nay, in religion and psychology, too, for that matter.

    No two philosophers have entirely agreed on what constitutes "the good life" since Plato: why are we so casually letting chemists, of all people, decide what constitutes the good life for the depressed in terms of their ideal mood and mentation? This paternal status quo becomes particularly outrageous when we consider that these chemists are dogmatically ignorant of the unique biographies of the lives that they will be so fundamentally affecting by their dilettante guesses on such topics.

    For my latest reflections on the ideal way to deal with drugs and mental health. Please click the "update" link on the following essay: How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs.

    --

    I have yet to hear back from the Urban Health Collective. (See March 18th blog entry.) Let us hope that they are still formulating a response. I would hate to think that their failure to mention the Drug War in their reports to the media about inner-city violence is a result of their fear to rock the boat. That attitude is all too prevalent these days in public service organizations: it is almost always "see no evil, hear no evil" when it comes to the Drug War. You can link inner-city gun violence to lack of education, lack of job opportunities, and even to Covid and global warming, but almost no one dares to link violence to the real cause: i.e., drug prohibition, which armed the 'hood "to the teeth" in the first place -- and for the same exact reasons that liquor prohibition brought machine-gun fire to American streets. That was not caused by Covid or global warming -- that problem, like today's, was caused by the outlawing of desired substances. Everyone knows that: prohibition incentivizes violence. But that is an inconvenient truth for it suggests that the Drug War is idiotic and dead wrong -- and so it is a truth that is almost totally ignored by almost every public service organization of our time. Let's continue to hope for now, however, that the Urban Health Collective will prove to be an exception to this rule.

    --

    And some more thoughts on drugs and Armageddon.

    --

    More on replacing psychiatrists with pharmacologically savvy empaths.




    March 19, 2025



    "If the present generation or any other are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free. Wrongs cannot have a legal descent."
    -- Thomas Paine



    March 18, 2025




    My latest essay: Condescending Drug Warriors.

    --

    I sent an email today to the Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University14. I was responding to a data brief15 concerning gun-related deaths in inner cities. The presentation gave some plausible reasons for an upswing in violence since 2020, but they completely ignored the reason why the hood is loaded with guns in the first place.

    But soft, you shall read!


    Hello, team!

    I respect the work that you do, however, I have one suggestion for your organization.

    On the first page of your June 2023 data brief entitled "Gun Deaths in Big Cities," you make the following observation:

    "The proliferation of guns has been particularly lethal for densely-populated urban communities that have been subject to years of structural inequities, and underinvestment, and a lack of opportunities for young people."

    While this is certainly true, you neglect to mention why there was a proliferation of guns in cities in the first place: it was surely due to the War on Drugs and drug prohibition, which incentivized drug dealing, which led to competition, which led to violence. This is not surprising as liquor prohibition created the Mafia as we know it today. It brought us Al Capone and the debut of machine-gun fire in American streets.

    As Ann Heather Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014:

    "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."

    For these reasons, I would suggest that you begin citing drug prohibition and the Drug War as a major cause of inner-city violence. The Drug War will never end if we refuse to hold it responsible for the evil that it causes.







    March 17, 2025




    As Whitehead tells us, all English sentences are elliptical: they rely for their meaning on implicit propositions that are to be supplied by the auditor or reader in order to make a sentence fully intelligible and meaningful in the sense that it was uttered or written. To use a couple examples from Whitehead himself, an 'expositor' might say that 'This college building is commodious,' by which he or she is actually advancing at least two unique propositions: 1) that this is a college building, and 2) that this building is commodious, or more precisely, that this building is commodious as a college building. Likewise, if the expositor says, 'That criminal is your friend,' he or she is clearly making at least two claims: first, that the individual in question is a criminal and that this person is a friend of yours. As Whitehead said, one might respond to that assumption-filled sentence by retorting as follows: 'He is my friend and you are insulting.'

    This is why fallacious Drug Warrior arguments are difficult for many drug-law reformers to answer, because they both conceal and rely on a host of multiple false but implicit propositions in order to establish their plausibility. And so when such arguments are advanced, the freedom lovers are disoriented. It's like they have been hit by a cluster bomb of illogical and misleading propositions. 'Where do I begin to refute such a hydra-headed misunderstanding?' they say to themselves. To respond effectively, they cannot simply identify and refute the tacit propositions of the Drug Warrior individually: they have to identify and refute the unspoken syllogism as a part of which those propositions were falsely assumed to support the Drug Warrior's explicit argument in the first place.

    That's why the best response is often a comic one -- one which fights fire with fire by rendering your own implicit comeback syllogism implicitly.

    Let's take an example of one very popular Drug Warrior 'argument,' namely, the sentence that:

    'You would not say that if you had a child who had died of a drug overdose.'


    If ever a statement was loaded with stealth propositions, this is the one. It really takes a ready wit to fire back effectively against such a stealth argument.

    Here is one possible comeback salvo, however:

    'And you would not say THAT if you had a child who had been disappeared in Mexico thanks to the War on Drugs.'


    Or I might ask them if they were in favor of horseback riding remaining legal. If they answered in the affirmative, I would respond as follows: 'You would not say that if you had a child who had been killed by falling off a horse.'

    Then I'd ask them if they were in favor of cars remaining legal... Well, you get the idea. I would show them that I could get on a moral high horse over prohibitions just as quickly and as plausibly as they can.

    I might also ask them if they had friends who had committed suicide because Drug Warriors had outlawed everything that could have cheered them up.

    --

    I've added some thoughts here on cocaine and the common sense use of drugs.





    March 16, 2025



    Opium is a wonderful drug -- the closest thing to a panacea. And yet Americans only know how to fear it. Its strategic and wise use has endless potential for helping us think creatively. It can help us view our life problems metaphorically, with the kind of analytic detachment that we westerners assume is only available to the mystic on a mountaintop who has spent an entire lifetime to acquire it. Learn more in this update to my 2020 essay entitled Using Opium to Fight Depression.

    --

    Feeling a trifle down today. I was thinking to spread my ideas on Reddit, but I am just so tired of being barred by algorithms and immoderate moderators. I was thinking of posting my essay on our insane approach to mental health on the mental health Reddit -- but that Reddit reeks of pop-science materialist beliefs in pill mill psychology and the disease-mongering of the DSM. My thoughts there would be basically unintelligible. Belief in the 'scientific' nature of mental health is a religion there, and not one to be slighted with impunity. There is a self-congratulatory air to such Reddit groups, as who should say: 'We've found the path, folks, we have found the way -- now we just have to see which long-term 'med' is right for YOU.'

    This is why I sometimes wish to change the goal line: rather than asking for America to change its materialist and puritanical ways of thinking about the world, I sometimes think we should focus on a more realistic goal, like getting America to have at least enough modesty and self-doubt to allow other countries to approach drug use in an entirely different way. Maybe we could just say:

    'Okay, America, you go on believing in your one-size-fits-all pills and the idea that science should be in charge of mind and mood medicine. You go on believing that unsanctioned drug use is wrong. But at least -- at least, Dear America -- consider maybe allowing another country to go a different way on this subject.'


    Someone should form such a country for that very reason: a country in which mother nature is free to all and in which mind and mood are not a matter for government control via drug laws.

    I used to scorn the idea that America practiced colonialism and imperialism, but I find us guilty as charged after contemplating the Drug War from a philosophical point of view. Sadly, it does not take too much strong-arming to get world leaders to go along with a superstition that allows them to better control their people and to crack down on indigenous dissent. We have a nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over our heads and yet our actions show that we would prefer annihilation to the use of 'drugs.' And so I empathize with the drug tester quoted in Pihkal who wrote of his inspiring experience as follows:

    'I saw how we created the nuclear fiasco to threaten the existence of the planet, as if it would be only through the threat of complete annihilation that people might wake up and begin to become concerned about each other.'16


    I keep trying to remind myself that I write for futurity, but that's easier said than done. And why is that so? Because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help me make my peace with that understanding. The Drug Warrior might tell me to read Marcus Aurelius -- but guess what? Marcus wrote his oh-so-reasonable effusions under the influence of opium -- whereas you, dear Drug Warrior, have deprived me of every substance on earth that could inspire me with sangfroid similar to that of the second-century Roman emperor.

    Censorship

    Here is another thing that I have learned after six years of studying drugs and drug use from a philosophical point of view: I have learned that censorship is alive and well -- and occurring in mainstream places, not just in fringe journals and the like. The worst part is that much of this censorship is performed by algorithms, so that one can never learn exactly why they are being censored or by whom. I find that creepy and frustrating in the extreme. To paraphrase Poe, these modern censors have 'out-Kafka'ed Kafka.'

    Take the Internet Archive, for instance. I attempted to post a review of a technical study of MDMA by the NIH in which I denied that the NIH had any standing on such matters, insofar as they were blind to all glaringly obvious benefits of drug use. An algorithm told me that my comments were 'spam' and so would not be published. I emailed the Archive asking why my review was being flagged as spam. It was only after threatening a lawsuit that an Archive employee deigned to respond to my email.

    She hazarded a guess that the algorithm blocked my review because my comments did not concern the specifics of the report that I was critiquing -- but I pointed out to her that I was not critiquing the report as such but rather the fact that the NIH was biased from the start in performing all such studies insofar as they ignored on principle all obvious benefits of the drugs in question. My point was that the NIH has no standing on such topics. Besides, I am not a scientist. I am not qualified to discuss benzene rings and drug homologues, let alone to critique a discussion about them by the NIH. But I am a thinking human being. I can point out that the focus on such biochemical topics is a shell game designed to keep America's eyes off the prize when it comes to their right to mental and emotional freedom. Or at least I can try to point that out. But according to the Internet Archive, you can only critique the science, not the rationale which made the science relevant in the first place.

    More here: How the Internet Archive Censors Free Speech about Drugs.

    That woman, by the way, said that the Archive never interferes with the algorithms. She actually thought that was a good thing. She thought that it meant that the Archive employees could not exercise any personal prejudices in censoring reviews. I pointed out that their algorithms were created by SOMEBODY and that THEIR points of view matter. It is for that reason that the Archive should be paying close attention to how such algorithms actually work. It is madness to just say, 'Oh, it's an algorithm, and it is working consistently and without bias.' That is totally false -- or at least unknowable without constant monitoring. Yet the IA employee prides her organization on letting the algorithm act as it will -- thereby placing our right to free speech in the hands of some anonymous geek, one doubtless a third my own age and who may not know Aristotle from a Philly cheese steak.

    My ideas were also censored by Mad in America. They solicit the biographies of antidepressant users -- but if those bios contain factual stories about potentially positive drug use, they claim that one is recommending treatments, and they tell us that that is wrong. Why? Because doctors know best. And who are those doctors but the very guys who got me hooked on antidepressants in the first place. Why? Because of their belief in behaviorism, according to which common sense psychology does not matter, only the quantifiable effects of biochemistry. But Mad in America is just one of endless examples of organizations that do not achieve their goals because they do not understand the connection between blind materialism, the War on Drugs and modern topics of all kinds.

    MIA is just like those organizations that fight against suicide and shock therapy. Both of these fights should be a fight against the War on Drugs, since there are endless medicines that could render suicides improbable and shock therapy unnecessary. But Americans have been taught to think of drug-war protest as a niche topic, like basket weaving or pastry cooking -- which, of course, is the whole problem. Americans thought they could have democracy and the Drug War, but the Drug War got rid of the 1st and 4th amendments and helped elect a fascist by throwing millions of minorities in jail. But the propaganda of censorship has kept Americans -- and its seemingly progressive organizations -- from connecting the dots.

    More here: Mad at Mad in America.

    Those who have ears, let them hear. Better yet, let them spread these ideas online, where they struggle to get even the smallest foothold thanks to the systemic prejudice of self-satisfied censors.


    Alexander Shulgin

    I have updated my essay on the insanity of mental health treatment in America. For all his open-mindedness, Alexander Shulgin wrote as if the depressed were from another planet. He seems to understand as a human being that the drugs he is reviewing have wonderful benefits for all people -- and yet as a chemist who works with Big Pharma, he also speaks as if a different kind of medicine needs to be devised for the depressed (as opposed to 'normal' people like Alex himself), a one-size-fits-all medicine that will work behind the scenes and not in the glorious and obvious ways that are described of drugs in Pikhal. He apparently is clearly thinking less about what would help the depressed and more about what kind of drugs would be acceptable to Big Pharma, which are two hugely different things. Why won't he trust folks with the blues to respond positively to rapture and insight? Why does he not see the vast array of common-sense approaches that suggest themselves for the strategic use of a wide variety of drugs based on the user's specific needs -- whether they are depressed, searching for god, or just wishing to have a little relaxation in life?

    Answer: Because as a chemist after the almighty dollar, he knows he must think of the human being as a widget, and not as his friend or loved one. If he were designing drugs to help a friend or loved one, he would obviously use drugs with glaringly obvious results: and not insist rather that they become wards of the healthcare state by using a one-size-fits-all drug designed to produce the maximum possible income for Big Pharma companies and the chemists who work for them.

    More here: Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane



    March 15, 2025



    In Pihkal, Alexander and Ann Shulgin prove that drug users are the experts when it comes to psychoactive drug use, not materialist scientists. The reason? The latter are dogmatically obliged to ignore all obvious benefits of psychoactive medicines thanks to their belief in the inhumane tenets of behaviorism. For more on this subject, please see my latest essay entitled Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane.



    March 14, 2025




    It's amazing! Americans actually prefer suicide to drug use. That is just how fanatical we have become thanks to our cradle-to-grave indoctrination in the substance demonizing ideology of drug prohibition. This issue has taken on a greater urgency for me lately after a relative of mine visited the E.R. for severe depression. That's why I wrote the following sort of 'protest essay' today entitled: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use.

    --
    In Pihkal17, Alexander Shulgin gave qualitative feedback on his experiences under the influence of a wide variety of phenethylamines. Below, I cite some of his observations and comment on what his experiences suggest in the way of beneficial uses for drugs in a future age -- one in which the world has moved beyond the substance-demonizing ideology of the Drug War, a world in which the prohibitionists have been routed after having been definitively revealed for the violence-causing and murder-facilitating demagogues which they so demonstrably are.

    'I felt my voice integrated and dropped in a way it never had before, and that remained for several days.'


    This suggests obvious uses in voice therapy and training.

    ----------

    'I am experiencing more deeply than ever before the importance of acknowledging and deeply honoring each human being.'


    A drug for therapeutic use with hotheads -- those who might otherwise shoot up grade schools.

    ----------

    'It really showed me where I was unfinished, but with self-loving and tolerance. Tremendous processing and letting go. Seeing things very clearly and also able to laugh at my trips. Lots of singing.'


    Imagine using such drugs in combination with therapy facilitated by someone whom is trusted and respected by the drug user. The whole problem with most therapy is that it presupposes an honesty and insight on the 'patient's' part that is not realistic. In looking back on my own psychotherapy, I realize that I was seldom being forthcoming -- even though I actually felt that I was. Drugs like this could open the floodgates of therapeutic chat in a lively and life-affirming way.

    ----------

    'Became totally absorbed by the music.'


    Someday, music education will involve the use of drugs. This will require the recognition that materialists are NOT the experts when it comes to matters of mind and mood.






    March 13, 2025



    I've made so bold as to update my site introduction:. I tried to imagine what prohibitionists must be thinking by supporting a policy that kills so many more than it saves. Besides, even if drug prohibition saved net lives, it would not follow that the Drug War made sense. We do not outlaw horseback riding, even though to do so would mean far less death and injury in the world. Horseback riding is, in fact, the number-one cause of traumatic brain injury in the States, yet I have never heard of anyone calling for the outlawing of equestrian sports. I won't mention the fact that liquor kills 178,000 every year in the States because Kevin Sabet says he's tired of hearing that fact. Kevin seems to believe that it's some kind of logical error to state any fact that so clearly points out the hypocrisy of the War on Drugs. I guess he would call it 'the strong suit fallacy,' according to which a philosopher can only play their 'strong suit' argument, at most, once per a debate or essay? Who knows?

    Kevin, by the way, is the poster child for the logical fallacy pointed out by HG Wells. That is, he fails to understand that health is a balance of factors and is not created by any one thing, be that genetics, personality or drug use. And if, as Kevin believes, we can state in general that too many folks are using marijuana, he has only himself to blame, for his hateful anti-scientific drug prohibition policy has outlawed almost every single alternative for such use. Look in the mirror, Kevin, if you want to know what's wrong with America's drug policy. How many people have to die before you recognize that prohibition itself is the problem, prohibition and the ignorance about safe use that is mandated by Drug Warriors themselves? Prohibition created the Mafia, for God's sake. It continues today to create cartels and drug gangs. It destroyed the 1st and 4th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It led to the election and re-election of an insurrectionist president thanks to the imprisoning of millions of minorities. But I'll tell you what: If you want my respect for your logical consistency, then start demonizing horseback riding. How much longer are horse dealers going to get away with peddling that junk? Surely, according to prohibitionist logic, we should have former horseback riders making the circuit of the elementary schools, warning kids away from the horrible practice of horseback riding.

    I can hear them now talking to wide-eyed youngsters in class:

    'You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!'




    March 12, 2025




    I was paused at a stoplight on Route 33 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia last weekend, when I saw a car brightly painted with the business name of 'Brew-Haha!' And I thought to myself: 'Hmm? And they say we can't 'glorify' drug use? What is that business name doing but glorifying alcohol use???'

    --

    I'm always trying to imagine how I will be misunderstood. Here is an answer to a conceivable objection to my essay about the myth of mental illness.

    ---

    Now there is finally hope for those who have been brainwashed by Drug War propaganda. Join Drug Warriors Anonymous today. To learn more, click the link below:

    Drug Warriors Anonymous

    --

    It has been five years since I wrote to Gabrielle Glaser about her article in the Atlantic about Alcoholics Anonymous. Gabrielle has not yet seen fit to answer me -- but then she is in good company. No pundit or academic has ever responded to my insights about the Drug War -- because to do so would have branded them as Drug War heretics. Worse yet, it would have branded them as scientific heretics, since I maintain that it was always a category error to put materialists in charge of the study of mind and mood medicine. To learn more, see my update to the letter that I wrote to Gabrielle five years ago. It will be found as an appendix to my 2020 essay entitled: Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser. To go directly to the update, click here.

    --

    William James gave me a job as a philosopher. He charged the lover of wisdom with the task of figuring out what 'anesthetic revelations' have to tell us about the nature of reality. He was set on this course by a paper written by Benjamin Paul Blood18, an American philosopher of his time who had highlighted a rarely mentioned fact: namely, that the outcome of anesthesia on medical and dental patients (using the then-prevalent expedient of laughing gas) gave the inebriate a new way of seeing the world, one in which the self disappears and a sense of unity and oneness prevails. This outcome suggested to Blood that our views of life are the result of just one inadequate way of looking at the world, through our fallible senses. The 'anesthetic revelation' gave us another reason to mistrust our ability to understand ultimate things, besides the Kantian critique of our inherent insufficiency for such work. James summed up his view of this 'anesthetic revelation' as follows:

    'One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.'

    And it is this aspect of James' philosophy that is censored by the Drug Warrior ideology of substance demonization. That is why we look for a reference to laughing gas in vain in his online biography at Harvard University, where he founded the very psychology department.




    March 11, 2025



    William James urged philosophers to use laughing gas and similar substances to learn about the nature of reality. And yet his alma mater, Harvard University, does not even mention laughing gas in their online bio of the man. No wonder the university did not send anyone to Washington to protest the FDA's plan to treat laughing gas as a 'drug'. Harvard is embarrassed by James's use of laughing gas and has rewritten his biography to hush it up. This is especially painful for me to notice on this particular week, when a relative of mine visited an E.R. for severe depression -- an emergency room which, of course, withheld all substances like laughing gas from her that could cheer her up at once and inspire her. Why? Because America believes that suicide is better than 'drug use.'

    And so Harvard's censorship of William James' biography is bad for two reasons: 1) it is a cowardly nod to government censorship of academia, and 2) it is an action that helps normalize substance prohibition and the bizarre and cruel attitude that death itself is preferable to 'using drugs.'

    I protested said censorship in a letter to Matthew K. Nock, the Chair of the Harvard Psychology Department, the department which was founded by William James himself. You can read that letter in my new essay entitled: How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James.

    --

    American drug policy is insane. We would prefer that the depressed commit suicide rather than to use drugs that elate and inspire. We would prefer to damage the brains of the depressed with ECT rather than to let them use drugs that elate and inspire.

    But do you know what the craziest part of all is?

    The craziest part is the fact that I am the only philosopher in the world who is pointing this out. I am the only philosopher who has drawn the obvious link between materialism, behaviorism, and American drug policy. This is no doubt because of today's technological triumphalism, thanks to which it is assumed that 'science can handle anything it puts its mind to.' I am the only philosopher who draws the connection between suicide and drug laws19. I am the only philosopher who draws the connection between ECT and drug laws20. I am the only philosopher who stood up for William James by urging the FDA not to start treating laughing gas as a 'drug,' since James himself told us to use the substance to learn about the worlds of perception and reality21. I am the only philosopher who has pointed out that reports of positive drug use are the ultimate 'damned' facts in the Fortean sense of that word. One can champion almost any niche cause in the world today in academia, but if you point out that opium has positive uses, not only will the fact be damned but so will you yourself for pointing it out -- damned by the intolerant society of the Drug Warrior22 23.

    The rest of the philosophers are busy using specialized vocabulary to decide whether or not they are actually brains in a vat.

    My guess is that they ARE brains in a vat: maybe that explains why we have such an inhumane drug policy. But whatever else American philosophers are, they are definitely asleep at the wheel. The Drug War is based on a raft of false assumptions and lies -- and it is the philosopher's job to expose such choplogic. But our modern thinkers are either bamboozled themselves by the drug-war propaganda of substance demonization to which they have been subjected since grade school, or else they are scared to speak up lest they run afoul both of racist Drug Warriors and of the behaviorist scientists who collaborate with them. How do they collaborate? By pretending that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine. That's an obvious category error, as would have been clear to the South American natives whom the west has suppressed and forced to renounce 'drugs' in favor of alcohol, those indigenous peoples whom even William James referred to as savages, apparently never thinking for a moment that there was anything we might learn from the people whom we conquer in the name of utilitarian materialism.

    Whitehead told us that we can tell that a philosophy is wrong or at least misapplied when it leads to 'absurdum.' And what has the philosophy of the Drug War led to? It has led to a world wherein we prefer suicide to drug use, wherein we prefer brain-damaging ECT to drug use -- all because of materialism and behaviorism, which say we can safely ignore anecdote, history, and even psychological common sense about incentives and anticipation. Scientists are the slow kids in the class when it comes to obvious psychological common sense. They have yet to figure out if laughing gas can help the depressed -- never mind the obvious fact that the substance could give the suicidal a break from depressive thoughts24. But so dogmatic has American science become that we would rather the depressed kill themselves then to use evil rotten terrible 'drugs.' This attitude is at once childish and evil.

    Americans are sickos when it comes to drugs -- and so far in denial that they travel the globe to burn plants and arrest foreigners who fail to adopt their own unprecedented hatred of psychoactive substances. For it never yet occurred to any country on earth to outlaw all psychoactive plant medicine until we handed teetotalers the mother of all consolation prizes after their failure to definitively outlaw alcohol: the right to outlaw virtually every other substance that altered mind and mood.

    This is why we need more than the tweaking of a few drug laws: America needs a whole new philosophy of life: otherwise all drug law reforms will become scapegoats for problems caused by our drug-war mentality of substance demonization.

    We can start by replacing materialist psychiatrists and drug researchers with pharmacologically savvy empaths (see below).

    --

    Charles Fort didn't know from damned. Accounts of positive drug use are such 'damned' facts that even most Forteans will ghost you if you tell them such things. I recently wrote a letter to a bigtime Fortean, Mitch Horowitz, author of Uncertain Places, to remind him that reports of positive drug use are the most damned facts of all times. I did this because the author was rambling on about 'damned' facts in his recent book but never mentioned the most obvious damned facts of all: those facts about positive drug use. And yet Mitch ghosted me. Do you see the irony hear, folks? The facts of positive drug use are so damned that even Forteans refuse to talk about them! (If you're not positively drowning in irony right now, you apparently have not yet read 'The Book of the Damned' by Charles Fort25 26. For more, see my essay: Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation.)

    Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths






    In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.

    This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.

    This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.

    How do I know this?

    Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.

    More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?

    This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."

  • Addicted to Addiction
  • Addicted to Ignorance
  • Addiction
  • After the Drug War
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Case Studies in Wise Drug Use
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Declaration of Independence from the War on Drugs
  • Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy
  • Ego Transcendence Made Easy
  • Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
  • Heroin versus Alcohol
  • How Cocaine could have helped me
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War is a War on Creativity
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
  • How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb
  • How the Drug War Punishes the Elderly
  • How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs
  • Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism
  • In Praise of Doctor Feelgood
  • In Praise of Drug Dealers
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy
  • Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism
  • Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the war on drugs
  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG
  • The Drug War and Armageddon
  • The Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
  • The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs
  • Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane
  • Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs




    • Here is why the Drug War reminds me of 'Lord of the Flies' by William Golding.

    Here's more on how the Drug War promotes drug abuse. In fact, the DEA's survival requires that there always be drug abuse. If it cannot be found, then it must be created. It need not even really exist -- but it is crucial that it always be thought to exist -- even if the abuse in question were caused by the Drug War itself and its failure to regulate product and its refusal to teach safe use and its incentivization of criminals, etc. etc. etc.



    March 9, 2025



    I've got a bone to pick with you. Yes, YOU! My records show that you have not yet deigned to read my essay entitled HG Wells and Drugs. So go ahead: deign! Deign!


    Word has it that you have also scorned a related essay of mine from three years back. You know, the one I called Moonfall? That's the essay in which I take sci-fi authors to task for ignoring common sense psychology and thereby becoming dupes for the muddled metaphysics of the Drug War. Speaking of which, I am not even sure that you have read my recent adumbrations in THAT quarter. But not to worry. It just so happens that I have a link handy. Wait a minute, it's here somewhere... Oh, yes, here it is: The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War.

    Did I mention that I have also updated my 2020 open letter to Erowid?

    Open Letter to Erowid

    Trump is sometimes right, though always for the wrong reasons. America is full of fake science, for the simple reason that almost all writers and thinkers and scientists take the Drug War for granted. They consider it a natural baseline. They therefore are blind to how prohibition biases us against entire ways of being in the world.

    Here are a list of some topics that cannot be discussed intelligently without reference to drugs, but which are discussed in this way in any case thanks to the brainwashing -- and/or the frightened self-interest -- of those who opine on such topics.



    This is just a sampling of a long list of topics that are cast in a very simplified and censored light by our refusal to consider what drug use and drug freedom implies about such topics. Take the latter item: the nature of reality. The drug law outlaws all the substances that show us the wide range of realities in which William James believed. The Drug War outlaws substances whose use conduces to a non-materialistic way of seeing the world. Therefore philosophers are engaging in make-believe when they discuss the nature of reality without reference to the effects of mother nature's medicines. This is why the make-believe continues, by the way, because materialists recognize that this game is biased in their ideological favor.










    March 7, 2025




    Here is an essay on four things that come to mind on the subject of: HG Wells and Drugs.

    March 6, 2025




    The Drug War disincentivizes safety. See how in my latest essay entitled Thank God for Soul Quest.


    March 4, 2025



    The more I study the philosophy of the Drug War, the more I realize that Americans are living in a make-believe world. It is a world in which the downsides of prohibition and the upsides of drug use are seamlessly censored out of daily life -- and out of any and all media. U.S. historians routinely pretend that substance prohibition does not exist -- even though it was an unprecedented step in human history when our country outlawed mother nature wholesale in the 20th century: unprecedented in the history of the world!

    Even books about drug-law reform do not come close to describing the full downsides of outlawing drugs -- and I have yet to find any books which recognize the full potential benefits of drugs. This is because the great potential of psychoactive drugs is merely a matter of psychological common sense, and Americans have been taught to ignore common sense thanks to their adherence to materialist and behaviorist principles, both of which tell them that scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine. Our job is to wait for science to create reductionist cures -- to wait and wait and wait -- and who knows? The FDA may someday approve a few of them, at least for one or two specific illnesses in that disease-mongering insurance manual they call the DSM.

    Meanwhile, everyone knows that laughing gas can cheer up the depressed, that MDMA can make us compassionate, and that opium is the closest thing there is to a pharmacological panacea. We all pretend otherwise in this make-believe world of ours. Worse yet, we are so deeply in denial about the pathological nature of our purblind outlook about drugs that we require the entire world to adopt our jaundiced point of view with respect to mother nature's medicines on pain of economic blackmail and military invasion. We believe in the enormous lie that drug use is riskier than any other activity on the planet. Meanwhile, we ensure the truth of that proposition by our very prohibition, which ensures that users will be uneducated about drugs and subject to receiving corrupt product. If Ecstasy is dangerous, it is only because it is an unregulated form of MDMA, and hence liable to contamination with god-knows-what other products -- and this is all the fault of drug prohibition, NOT drugs.

    I have added some more reflections on this topic to my latest studiously ignored essay:

    Every Day and in every way, you are getting more and more bamboozled by drug war propaganda

    March 4, 2025



    Occult author Mitch Horowitz favorably referred to Emile Coué in his 2022 book 'Uncertain Places.' This gave me pause... in spades. But soft, you shall read...

    Every Day and in every way, you are getting more and more bamboozled by drug war propaganda

    March 3, 2025



    I am halfway through reading the delightful 'Uncertain Places' by Mitch Horowitz. Unfortunately, Mitch is like almost all non-fiction authors in that he ignores the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room: the fact that the Drug War has outlawed precisely those medicines that conduce to the world view that he advocates. In the absence of that admission, some of Mitch's statements just are not true. He claims, for instance, that we are all free when it comes to the world of imagination. But this is not true at all in the age of the Drug War. We have no freedom to experiment with the kinds of states that William James himself said we should study. We have no freedom to use the kinds of substances that inspired stories like 'The Crawling Chaos' by HP Lovecraft. We have no freedom to use the kinds of substances that inspired the 'Kubla Khan' of Coleridge. We have no freedom to use the kinds of substances that inspired the Hindu religion.



    Imagination most certainly is NOT free in the age of the War on Drugs. Unless we admit this sad truth, we will fail to hold the Drug War responsible for its downsides, and so the criminally counterproductive policy of drug prohibition will continue forever.

    And what about those aliens flying those UFOs? Imagine if we did communicate with such. We would ultimately have to demand from them the right to destroy any psychoactive medicines that they have on their planet! For the Drug War is a jealous god, it can tolerate no rival views -- neither indigenous nor extraterrestrial.


    February 28, 2025



    I have taken the liberty of updating my admittedly delightful essay entitled 'The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War.' I have shown (ahem, rather conclusively, I flatter myself) how the psychological theory of behaviorism has blinded modern science to the glaringly obvious benefits of drug use. I have demonstrated how a theory which was designed to render psychology objective and certain has instead mired the field in the deterministic prejudices of the past, meanwhile serving to 'justify' inhumane drug policy on the grounds of it being, ahem, 'scientific,' which, I don't THINK so.

    Those who have ears, let them hear. Those who have eyes, let them see. Those who have dogs, let them lie in the corner and take a long-overdue nap while their master (i.e., you) clocks the verities herein contained:

    The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War

    ---

    Just getting ready to read Uncertain Places: Essays on Occult and Outsider Experiences by Mitch Horowitz. I fear that the author is going to ignore drugs and the Drug War... but we shall see. The Drug War, is of course, hugely relevant to such topics and any reasonable expositor will make that clear. Most authors today, however, pretend that the Drug War is a natural baseline and so can be safely ignored when discussing societal issues -- and nothing could be further from the truth.



    February 26, 2025



    Looks like I'm going to have to start paying more attention to drug-war censorship. I'm still waiting for the Internet Archive to explain why my view of NIDA and its articles is being blocked by them by algorithms that claim that my comments are spam, of all things. It looks like 'spam' has come to mean anything that site publishers do not like.



    Here are my latest reflections on this particular instance of drug-war censorship: How the Internet Archive Censors Free Speech about Drugs.


    February 26, 2025



    New York Attorney General Letitia James was just on Bluesky, thumping her chest about how many dealers she had put behind bars. I wonder how much she is getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out to her that the Drug War in which she is complicit has caused the disappearance of 60,000 Mexicans in the last 20 years, turned inner cities into shooting galleries, destroyed the 4th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and put bureaucrats in charge of deciding whether new religions were 'sincere' or not.

    I also called the Internet Archive and left a message, asking for a clarification on whether they are still allowing free speech about drugs. Their algorithms barred my review of a NIDA article yesterday, apparently because it dared to question the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.

    February 25, 2025



    I just got a cold slap in the face. After writing a review of a NIDA article on the Archive.org website, I clicked 'submit'... only to be told that my comments were flagged as spam and would not be published. I don't ever think I'll get used to this Kafkaesque form of censorship practiced so shamelessly today on the web. Free speech is dead on the subject of drugs. Drug warriors have decided that they are right and there's nothing more to say.

    Please see my new essay on the topic entitled How the Archive.org Website Censors Free Speech About Drugs.



    February 24, 2025



    Imagine a healthcare system in which healers were allowed to use ANY SUBSTANCE ON EARTH that would help a person achieve desired mental states, a world in which healers actually used psychological common sense to facilitate change.

    Learn more from the new protocol that I have put forth in my latest essay: The New Common Sense Way to Improve Mind and Mood.




    February 22, 2025



    Why are scientists so dumb when it comes to drugs? Why do they ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense in evaluating psychoactive substances? I think I've figured it out...



    Dogmatic Dullards


    February 22, 2025



    My heart is still going out to those Connecticuters who cannot decide whether or not to kill people for selling plant medicine. What a poser, my friends! What a poser!


    Fortunately, I received a letter from a reader that took my mind off of that highly fraught subject. My response is another attempt to cut to the jugular on the subject of what is wrong with the War on Drugs. I call it Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs.

    February 21, 2025



    Oh, those poor Connecticuters27!They are in a positive tizzy. Should they kill people for selling mother nature's plant medicines? Or should they not? What a dilemma, right? I can see them now, plucking daisy petals in the brainwashed chambers of their mind: 'We kill them, we kill them not. We kill them, we kill them not...'

    Connecticut Drug Warriors want to charge drug dealers with murder



    If safety was their goal, they'd be promoting the instant decapitation of everyone peddling alcohol, which is the ultimate 'junk' if we assume that government is in charge of our health.

    GK Chesterton28 understood this in his time when prohibitionists were raising a stink about alcohol: once we put the government in charge of our health, we can outlaw anything whatsoever with plausibility. Why? Because the prohibitionist fails to realize that health is a balance of forces and unhealthiness does not reside in any one thing, except in a lethal dose, perhaps, in which case anything at all can be plausibly demonized, since one can overdose on a sufficient quantity of any substance whatsoever.

    I can empathize with the Connecticut Drug Warriors, however. I almost died ten years ago from anaphylactic shock after eating too many chili flakes, and I am STILL trying to track down the scumbags who sold me that junk! Check out my inspiring story using the link below. (I'm on the grade-school circuit, for a mere $1,000 per inspiring lecture!)

    Your local food store is peddling junk right in front of your very eyes!






    February 20, 2025



    Irony of ironies, that the indignant 19th-century hatred of liquor should ultimately result in the outlawing of virtually every mind-affecting substance on the planet EXCEPT for liquor. Learn more in this update to my 2020 essay entitled: A Connecticut Drug Warrior in King Arthur's Court.

    And now a word about Schopenhauer and his infamous pessimism:

    It's so typical of curmudgeons to try to make a universal law out of their own psychological issues. Schopenhauer does not seem to understand that attitude matters. As Hamlet said, 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.' It is neither the shortness of life nor the inhumanity of our fellows that ruins life for most people -- but rather their attitude TOWARD such circumstances. Every manic-depressive knows that a blue sky and party cake does not make a person happy, nor living amid postcard scenery. One can commit suicide in Disneyland just as well as Skid Row. It is attitude, attitude, attitude that matters -- from which it follows that it is a sin to outlaw substances that can help us adopt a positive attitude toward life. That's why it's so frustrating that philosophers like Schopenhauer pretend that life can be judged by circumstances alone. Only once we acknowledge that attitude matters can we clearly see the importance of the many mind-improving medicines of which Mother Nature is full, the meds that we slander today by classing them under the pejorative label of 'drugs.'




    ---------


    In a way, we should not have needed Kant to 'prove' our inability to opine advisedly on metaphysical truths. The very fact that we are required to put forward such speculations in a fallible and inherently ambiguous communication medium that we ourselves created -- namely that of human language -- should give us reason to moderate our philosophical ambitions. It almost sounds like self-dealing for language-makers to prove ultimate things via a language that they themselves have created. It sounds like a rigged process. Besides, both saint and psychonaut tell us that truth is proven experientially, not with words. As Meister Eckhart says, 'God is nothing that we can express.'

    To use words for such ultimate purposes seems to presuppose that our language contains the necessary words to speak of such things, which is something that we cannot possibly know. To assume that it does contain such words is to presuppose our understanding of the ultimate things that we are trying to describe in words. That is what philosophers call the fallacy of petitio principii.

    Before the word 'gaslighting' was added to our vocabulary in the 21st century, English speakers found it quite hard to figure out what was going on when people were trying to mess with their head. They lacked the vocabulary necessary to identify such psychological manipulation. We can only assume that there are many words still missing from our vocabulary that would be needed to help us make sense of and describe what's going on with ultimate reality. The idea that human language could ever be comprehensive enough for such purposes seems unlikely. Moreover, to parse ultimate realities via words would be superficial at best. It would be like the description of an emotional state, rather than the experience of that state.

    So, we need to doubt two things, really: first, that we can speak accurately of ultimate things in words, and second, that doing so would have any purpose. Its only point would seem to be to give metaphysicians free rein to create a whole dictionary worth of nuanced terms in an attempt to establish some agreed-upon wall of words as a sort of lifeless shadow of the world of ultimate experience.

    But then philosophers seem to like nothing so much as creating specialist vocabularies. Such lexicons certainly have their place in philosophy, but I fear they are sometimes used for the purpose of disguising shallow thinking -- or worse yet, for camouflaging social protest. One has to be especially leery of this penchant for neologizing in the age of the Drug War. If ever a social policy called for the clear-cut disdain of the logician, it is the War on Drugs, and yet much of the rare pushback that one finds in academia is couched in academese. Between the circumlocution and the irrelevant and verbose qualifications, the reader gets the impression that the author is trying to distance him or herself from any firm conclusions, this at a time when the Drug War is cruising for a philosophical bruising, based as it is on contradictions, hypocrisy, racism, xenophobia, and a host of faulty but unacknowledged religious and metaphysical presuppositions -- as well as a total inability to properly distinguish cause from effect.

    Drug warriors are so full of mindless bluster, they're just asking for it. And what does the philosopher do? Gives 'em a love tap!

    February 19, 2025



    Ever wonder why you see no discussion of positive drug use on websites? It's because publishers are in charge of squashing free speech via censorship, in the same way that businesses are in charge of denying our rights under the 4th amendment via drug testing. The whole Drug War is a scheme to get rid of democratic norms, which is no surprise, since the mass incarceration of minorities hands election victories to the racist and imperialist Drug Warriors.

    Learn more in my latest essay entitled Doctors do NOT know best when it comes to psychoactive drugs.


    February 17, 2025




    Today, I point out why Drug Re-legalization is Not Enough: America needs a new philosophy of life: Drug re-legalization is not enough.

    February 15, 2025



    Anyone familiar with the philosophies of both Immanuel Kant and William James should understand that philosophers have a duty to investigate what we westerners call 'altered states' and hence have a duty to disdainfully deride and denounce the outlawing of psychoactive substances. Kant's basic message, as inspired by Hume, is that we cannot understand ultimate realities in words, but as James insists in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience,' it is our duty as philosophers to try to understand such realities EXPERIENTIALLY, i.e., with the help of psychoactive substances such as nitrous oxide.

    'No account of the universe in its totality,' wrote James, 'can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.'


    This is why it is a shame that I am the only philosopher in the world who contacted the FDA to protest their recent plans to begin treating nitrous oxide as a 'drug' and so further discourage its use in metaphysical research. Alas, such goal-driven substance use is already considered unthinkable by most academics thanks to their brainwashed fealty to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. Thus I was the only philosopher in the world who spoke up on behalf of the legacy of William James and on behalf of academic freedom, for that matter, by pleading with the FDA to refrain from further marginalizing an already vastly underused substance. (In a sane world, the suicidal would be given laughing gas kits in the same way that we provide epi pens for those with severe allergies.)

    But then this is the point of my entire website and the hundreds of essays that it contains: to demonstrate to the world that the Drug War and prohibition are a cancer on the body politic and not just a matter of a few laws set up to discourage hedonists. For the idea that we should hate psychoactive substances is itself a metaphysical notion peculiar to the western mindset and not some logical truth that any unbiased mind must accept. Unfortunately, scientists seem to know, as it were subconsciously, that the Drug War is a good thing, for it is clearly biased in the name of the materialism which they themselves profess. In the wake of the technological revolution, science is feeling omniscient, and so it naturally wants to avoid dealing with drug effects and the variability of human emotions. They cannot be quantified, as behaviorist materialism requires. So philosophers and scientists alike see a benefit in drug laws that outlaw substances that facilitate mystical feelings and ontological intimations: 'Good riddance to such namby-pamby data,' says the materialist in their 'heart of hearts.'

    And so the Drug War outlaws precisely those substances whose use conduces to a non-materialist view of the world, one in which we have intimations about the supposedly 'unknowable' world of the noumena. And why is the noumena unknowable to us? First, thanks to the merely pragmatic nature of our perceptions as explained by Kant. But also thanks to the inherent limitations of that incomplete and fallible communication system that we call human language, whose inevitable shortcomings and vagaries seem to bar us from definitively saying anything that could not, at least in theory, be plausibly gainsaid in that same inherently malleable language.

    These limitations of human language contrast tellingly, however, with the vivid existential convictions about reality that are communicated by substance use according to the trip reports of the psychonauts of all ages. We can debate the ontological significance of such experiences, of course, but let us remember that it was precisely such 'use' that opened James' mind to a world of potential realities of whose existence he had previously been blissfully unaware. Why? Because of his previous self-satisfied acceptance of materialist principles.

    Unfortunately, modern philosophers have ceded their job of metaphysical investigation to psychonauts like James Fadiman, Alex Gibbons and Jim Hogshire. Not that there is anything wrong with the research of these latter truth seekers, but it is a shame that philosophers are not working with them to promote human progress and philosophical understanding. And so if metaphysics is dead in the 21st century, it is because today's philosophers have abandoned the pursuit of truth in the name of supporting America's hateful and superstitious war on psychoactive substances.

    According to Kant, we can know nothing about the noumenal world, or ultimate reality, but this claim is not true*. In claiming otherwise, Kant was unaware of the metaphysical insights provided by psychoactive drug use. There is such a thing as 'experiential proof' inspired by such use -- an absolute conviction that is felt 'in every fiber of one's being,' as opposed to having been 'proven' for one syllogistically in the fallible and eternally insufficient communication method that we call human language.

    This is Kant's Holy Grail, had he only realized it, a way to move forward with metaphysical research: by looking for experiential proof of ultimate realities rather than merely logical ones.

    *Kant's claim could be salvaged, perhaps, by specifying the type of 'knowledge' that we're talking about here. My point is simply that Kant seemed unaware of the power of psychoactive drugs to inspire states that provide us with convictions with respect to the noumenal world. Whether the source of those convictions is 'knowledge' properly so-called is an interesting question, but one well beyond the scope of these comments and unnecessary for their rational evaluation.


    February 14, 2025



    Insights about drugs are hidden in plain sight. But Americans are too brainwashed to notice them. That's because they got to us early: in grade school, to teach us the drug-hating principles of Mary Baker-Eddy, founder of the religion of Christian Science.

    I found one insight last night while watching the first episode of Rod Serling's 'Night Gallery.' To learn more, please read my new essay on the subject entitled: The Dead Man.

    February 12, 2025



    Here's an update to my latest essay about Schopenhauer and Drugs: namely, Ego Transcendence Made Easy.

    February 11, 2025



    Want to transcend self and see objectively! Schopenhauer's advice? Take a cold bath! Learn more in my latest essay about his 'World as Will and Idea.'

    February 10, 2025



    New essay: 'Psilocybin Breakthrough: Praise the Lord, I saw the light!'

    I have also taken the liberty of updating that 404 page you receive when you click on an invalid link. Watch out, though. A 404 gives cops reasonable cause to search you for drugs. Click here to learn more!

    February 6, 2025



    Here's an essay inspired by an ice storm:

    You Can't Handle the Truth! (why Drug Warriors ignore the obvious)

    I've also taken the liberty of updating my essay entitled What's Drugs Got to Do With It. Spoiler alert: I consider how Schopenhauer's unchangeable will can be squared with Acquired Savant Syndrome. (I know, I know: it's another obvious attempt on my part to acquire readers at any cost, right?! Go for the jugular, that's my motto!)


    February 5, 2025




    Here's another essay of mine with a title that is sure to break the Internet:

    'What's Drugs Got to Do With It? (The importance of psychoactive substances in modern philosophy).

    Well, go ahead, start breaking.


    February 4, 2025




    I wrote to the CBS TV station in Charlottesville a couple of years ago, when my elderly mother was in hospice in that city, suffering unnecessarily thanks to the wholesale outlawing of psychoactive substances. It irked me that the television station was publicizing an upcoming 'anti-drug' rally -- sponsored by... wait for it, folks... Budweiser: a company whose products kill 178,000 a year in America alone -- that's according to America's CDC.

    Of course, I do not hold liquor responsible -- but if Drug Warriors were consistent and logical, they would certainly do so.

    The problem is that the Drug War outlaws all alternatives to liquor -- which is why it's outrageous hypocrisy when Big Liquor sponsors a 'just say no' rally.

    For my latest thoughts on the topic, plus a short comedy sketch, should_stop_supporting_the_drug_war.php#update'>click here.




    February 3, 2025



    I try to respond to at least one bone-headed Bluesky post per day. It's interesting that most threads that I respond to are not really discussions, but rather echo chambers. Everybody believes drugs are the problem and they're just taking turns to demonize substances. Today, the topic was those evil Mexicans sending us fentanyl.

    I reminded the thread participants that they need only look in the mirror to see the people responsible for fentanyl entering the country. Substance prohibition created the cartels just as surely as liquor prohibition created the American Mafia. So if they want a Drug War, then they need to stop whining -- they asked for it. As prohibitionists, they are the ones who are incentivizing the violence. They are the ones demanding that young people be ignorant about safe use. They are the ones demanding that supply be unregulated. They are the ones who decided that education is a dirty word when it comes to psychoactive substances.

    Instead of getting together on Bluesky for orgies of drug-bashing, they need to look in the mirror and behold the cause of the problem: their ignorant fearmongering and the anti-democratic laws that it has spawned, which have destroyed American freedom and handed otherwise close elections to tyrants. How? By incarcerating more citizens than any other country on earth -- most of whom are minorities -- and thus removing them from the voting rolls.

    The sad truth is that America is a failed democracy because of the Drug War, and the strategic political fearmongering for which it stands.

    --- ---

    Here's an update on my two-year-old essay entitled What Terence McKenna Got Wrong about Drugs. In this update, I remind the reader that McKenna is not alone: that Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman have some very conservative views about drug policy -- ones that are demonstrably hypocritical and productive of great harm.


    Here is an update to my 2020 essay entitled 'Ten Idiots Who Helped Spread Drug War Propaganda on Listverse.


    February 2, 2025



    I have updated my 2019 essay entitled How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War (part 2).

    I've also seen fit to update the essay entitled 'What Can the Chemical Hold?'

    But wait, there's more.

    Here is an update of my 2019 essay entitled 'Puritanical Assumptions about Drug Use in the Entertainment Field.

    Amazingly, I seem to be the only philosopher in the world who has connected drug use not simply with self-medication, but with an obvious vocational need in certain people to jettison pernicious self-doubt -- to jettison self-doubt or else suffer dire consequences, namely the loss of their very calling in life. And yet these are the same people whom we seek to arrest and punish with long jail sentences. The hatred of this prohibitionist tendency is beyond words. It is the fanatical enforcement of Christian Science precepts against individuals whose only crime was attempting to succeed in life, was attempting to feed their families, was attempting to live their one-and-only life's dream. And yet we punish these people with jail sentences. But then I've always said that the Drug War represents a complete inversion of values, it is an exercise in finding uses for the police and the military -- and for what purpose? For the purpose of cracking down on poor minorities and the psychologically and/or financially disempowered.





    January 31, 2025



    I have yet to find one thinker on the topic of drugs who has not fallen for at least one or two Drug War lies. A list of the partially bamboozled includes Rick Doblin29, Carl Hart30, DJ Nutt31, Terence McKenna32, Rick Strassman33, Michael Pollan34 and Andrew Weil35. This is to be expected because we Americans live and breathe Drug War propaganda these days, thanks to censorship. We are not allowed to hear, read or see anything which suggests the positive use of outlawed substances; meanwhile, no one connects the dots between gun violence and the War on Drugs. And no one points out the fact that young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal, that it took prohibition to create that dystopia.

    Perhaps the main reason that the list of bamboozled 'experts' is so long, however, is the fact that materialist science is the new American god, and so many on the list basically accept the lie that Big Pharma 'meds' are not 'drugs' in the pejorative sense of that word. They actually believe that Big Pharma has 'sorted' depression, as the Brits would say, and that anyone who hasn't been thus 'cured' is merely treatment-resistant, in the same way that others are lactose intolerant with respect to milk. What they fail to realize, however, is that there are no such things as drugs at all -- i.e., no such thing as substances which can be declared to have no positive uses a priori. They fail to realize moreover that it is a category error to place materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood. They fail to realize that any psychoactive drug can be used as an antidepressant as part of an imaginative protocol that makes common psychological sense.

    But materialist scientists do not believe in common sense. They do not believe in anecdote. They do not believe in history. And so they tell us with a straight face that obvious godsends like MDMA and laughing gas have no potential uses for the depressed. They are thereby supporting a hateful behaviorism that ignores the patient entirely and dictates 'cures' based on theory, and then blames the patient if they are not cured by the same.

    Andrew Weil is one of the most clear-minded thinkers that you'll find on the subject of drugs in America, but even he has been brainwashed by certain elements of Drug War ideology. To learn how, read my update of my review of his 1998 book entitled 'From Chocolate to Morphine.'



    January 30, 2025



    I have taken the liberty of updating my essay entitled american_philosophers_what_they_thought_about_the_drug_war.php#update2'>'I Asked 100 American Philosophers What They Thought about the Drug War.'

    I have written to numerous philosophers on drug-related topics over the last five years and have always been ghosted -- except for one case, in which I was gaslit by a philosopher who told me that all was well, that philosophers were not censoring themselves about drugs. Talk about a big lie. Why then was I the only philosopher in the world who protested to the FDA about their attempts to outlaw laughing gas, the substance whose effects inspired the ontology of William James? Despite writing over 100 individual letters to philosophers at Harvard and Oxford on this topic, pointing out how the new law was a further attack on academic freedom, no one even responded, let alone protested. I would have thought that I'd gain some traction at Harvard, where James founded the Psychology Department, but no such luck. It is apparently more than a philosopher's job is worth these days to complain about the War on Drugs -- which, of course, is yet another reason why drug prohibition is anathema in a purportedly free country.

    For more on the ghosting and gaslighting to which I have been subjected over the last five years, here's an essay that I wrote back in November 2023 on what I call 'the Semmelweis Effect.'


    January 29, 2025



    I've just made so bold as to update my essay entitled How the Drug War Turned Me into an Eternal Patient. Spoiler alert: I begin tapering Effexor tomorrow -- absent, of course, the many drugs that could help me succeed.

    Speaking of hateful prohibition, I used to think that America was on the way to becoming the shining light that it always boasted of being. Now it seems that the best hope we can cherish is that its founding principles will someday be the inspiration for a sociopolitical reboot, one in which the populace is more educated, less subject to the proselytization of an absurdly rich oligarchy, and aware at long last that prohibition causes all of the problems that it purports to solve and then some -- that prohibition is, in fact, the ultimate case of fearmongering, that it inevitably results in censorship, mass incarceration of minorities, the militarization of local police forces, and the overthrow of American principles, hence the election of you-know-whom.

    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,36' 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 reality37. 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 Eckhart38, 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 such39.

    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 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 Idea40' are interesting to contemplate in light of the research of folks like James Fadiman41 and Stanislav Grof42. 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 Whitaker43 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 Ecstasy44.' 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 America45.'

    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: There are endless ways that drugs can be used wisely -- none of which will ever be publicized by modern media conglomerates.. 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: There are endless ways that drugs can be used wisely -- none of which will ever be publicized by modern media conglomerates..

    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: Addiction is a problem BECAUSE of the drug war. We have outlawed all substances that could help us get off a hated substance and stay off. This is psychological common sense. Unfortunately, both drug warriors and behaviorists ignore common sense.. 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: Modern doctors have no problem with turning patients into eternal drug users. They do not mind drug dependency, they just want their patients to be dependent on the 'right' drugs, i.e., the ones for which the doctor's prescription is required.. 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 religion46. 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 Indians47.

    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 soul48.

    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, Paracelsus49 50.

    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 speaking51.

    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 opiates52. 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 car53. 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, respectively54.

    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 evil55. 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 mood56. 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 microscope57.

    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 Hart58) 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 bliss59. 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 things60 61.



    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.62'

    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 basis63. 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 Hutton64 65, 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 stop66. 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 Present67.'

    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 Witch68' 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 interest69.

    What goes up must come down70? 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' life71. 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 speaking72.

    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 year73.

    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.74'


    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 Eddy75.



    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.'76


    To men, mind77, 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: Brain-damaging shock therapy takes on sinister totalitarian overtones in an age where we are not free to reach down and use the antidepressants that grow at our very feet.
    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 dying78. 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 Shulgin79.

    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 drug80, 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 James81.

    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.



    Notes:

    1 Blood, Benjamin, The anaesthetic revelation and the gist of philosophy, (up)
    2 Urban Health Collaborative, Drexel University, (up)
    3 The Philosophy Forum, (up)
    4 Quass, Brian, Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas, 2023 (up)
    5 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Philosophical Library, New York, 1902 (up)
    6 Quass, Brian, How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James, 2025 (up)
    7 Quass, Brian, Coca Wine, 2024 (up)
    8 Quass, Brian, After the Drug War, 2025 (up)
    9 Ocker, J.W., Cult Following: The Extreme Sects That Capture Our Imagination, (up)
    10 Hutton, Ronald, The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, Yale Press, 2017 (up)
    11 The Philosophy Forum, (up)
    12 The Philosophy Forum, (up)
    13 Hutton, Ronald, The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, Yale Press, 2017 (up)
    14 Urban Health Collaborative, Drexel University, (up)
    15 Gun Deaths in Big Cities, Big Cities Health, (up)
    16 Shulgin, Alexander, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story , Transform Press, 1991 (up)
    17 Shulgin, Alexander, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story , Transform Press, 1991 (up)
    18 Blood, Benjamin, The anaesthetic revelation and the gist of philosophy, (up)
    19 Quass, Brian, Suicide and the Drug War, 2022 (up)
    20 Quass, Brian, Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War, 2020 (up)
    21 Quass, Brian, Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas, 2023 (up)
    22 Quass, Brian, Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation, 2025 (up)
    23 Fort, Charles, The Book of the Damned, (up)
    24 Quass, Brian, Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide, 2022 (up)
    25 Fort, Charles, The Book of the Damned, (up)
    26 Quass, Brian, The Book of the Damned, 2024 (up)
    27 Quass, Brian, Connecticut Drug Warriors want to charge drug dealers with murder, 2022 (up)
    28 Chesterton, GK, Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument against the Scientifically Organized State, 1822 (up)
    29 Quass, Brian, Three Problems With Rick Doblin's MAPS, 2023 (up)
    30 Quass, Brian, What Carl Hart Missed, 2023 (up)
    31 Nutt, DJ, Drug Science, (up)
    32 Quass, Brian, What Terence McKenna Got Wrong About Drugs, 2023 (up)
    33 Quass, Brian, Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman, 2024 (up)
    34 Quass, Brian, The Michael Pollan Fallacy, 2022 (up)
    35 Quass, Brian, What Andrew Weil Got Wrong, 2022 (up)
    36 Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Idea , (up)
    37 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Philosophical Library, New York, 1902 (up)
    38 Meister Eckhart, The Internet Archive, (up)
    39 He considers that we essentially are our "will," and that this will is determined once and for all. Our behavior is causally determined and is a result of our will employing the motives available to it as necessary to "have its way." One can apparently transcend determinism by denying will (that is, by transcending the ego). (up)
    40 Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Idea , (up)
    41 Fadiman, James, The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys , Park Street Press, New York, 2011 (up)
    42 Grof, Stanislav, The transpersonal vision: the healing potential of nonordinary states of consciousness, Sounds True, Boulder, Co., 1998 (up)
    43 Whitaker, Robert, Mad in America, Perseus Publishing, 2002 (up)
    44 Wininger, Charles, Listening to Ecstasy, 2021 (up)
    45 Hansen, Helena, Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America, 2023 (up)
    46 Soma: The Nectar of the Gods, (up)
    47 Maria, Ana, Main Sacred Plants in South America, mamacoca.org, 2004 (up)
    48 Leafie, Exploring ancient psychedelics – Ergot, a history, (up)
    49 Quass, Brian, The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton, 2023 (up)
    50 Quass, Brian, Opium for the Masses by Jim Hogshire, 2023 (up)
    51 How the DEA Scrubbed Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Poppy Garden from Public Memory, alternet.org, 2010 (up)
    52 Quass, Brian, Regulate and Educate, 2024 (up)
    53 Horses Kill, The Partnership for a Death Free America, (up)
    54 Beheading of Convicted Drug Dealers Discussed by Bennett, LA Times - Reuters, 1989 (up)
    55 Quass, Brian, Self-Censorship in the Age of the Drug War, 2020 (up)
    56 Quass, Brian, Behaviorism and the War on Drugs, 2024 (up)
    57 Quass, Brian, Materialism and the Drug War Part II, 2023 (up)
    58 Hart, Carl, Drug Use for Grown-Ups, Penguin Random House, New York, 2022 (up)
    59 Shulgin, Alexander, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story , Transform Press, 1991 (up)
    60 Quass, Brian, GK Chesterton on Prohibition, 2024 (up)
    61 Chesterton, GK, Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument against the Scientifically Organized State, 1822 (up)
    62 Quass, Brian, Behaviorism and the War on Drugs, 2024 (up)
    63 Daily Aspirin Linked To More Than 3,000 Deaths Per Year, Scientists Warn, Huffington Post, (up)
    64 Hutton, Ronald, The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, Yale Press, 2017 (up)
    65 Quass, Brian, Drug Dealers as Modern Witches, 2024 (up)
    66 Crowley, Aleister, Essays On Intoxication, Everand, (up)
    67 Hutton, Ronald, The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, Yale Press, 2017 (up)
    68 Hutton, Ronald, The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, Yale Press, 2017 (up)
    69 Quass, Brian, What Goes Up Must Come Down?, 2024 (up)
    70 Quass, Brian, What Goes Up Must Come Down?, 2024 (up)
    71 Lutkajtis, Anna, Ministry of the Mushroom: Psilocybin Churches, Psychedelic Experience and Sacred Sensemaking, Academia.edu, 2021 (up)
    72 Quass, Brian, How the Drug War killed Leah Betts, 2020 (up)
    73 Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use in the United States, CDC, 2022 (up)
    74 Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use in the United States, CDC, 2022 (up)
    75 Quass, Brian, Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition, 2022 (up)
    76 Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government, Project Gutenberg, 1689 (up)
    77 i.e, to human beings (up)
    78 Assisted dying set to be legalised after historic vote, The Telegraph, 2024 (up)
    79 Shulgin, Alexander, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story , Transform Press, 1991 (up)
    80 Quass, Brian, Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas, 2023 (up)
    81 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Philosophical Library, New York, 1902 (up)



    computer screen with words DRUG WAR BLOG


    Next essay: The word 'drugs' is a political term
    Previous essay: Psst! You have been bamboozled by America's Drug War

    More Essays Here




    Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

    This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.
    Drug use is judged by different standards than any other risky activity in the western world. One death can lead to outrage, even though that death might be statistically insignificant.
    Psychiatrists never acknowledge the biggest downside to modern antidepressants: the fact that they turn you into a patient for life. That's demoralizing, especially since the best drugs for depression are outlawed by the government.
    "I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
    The Drug War treats doctors like potential criminals and it treats the rest of us like children. Prohibition does not end drug risks: it just outsources them to minorities and other vulnerable populations.
    The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
    I have nothing against science, BTW (altho' I might feel differently after a nuclear war!) I just want scientists to "stay in their lane" and stop pretending to be experts on my own personal mood and consciousness.
    I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.
    The sad fact is that America regularly arrests people whose only crime is that they are keeping performance anxiety at bay... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
    We live in a make-believe world in the US. We created it by outlawing all potentially helpful psychological meds, after which the number-one cause of arrest soon became "drugs." We then made movies to enjoy our crackdown on TV... after a tough day of being drug tested at work.
    More Tweets



    The latest hits from Drug War Records, featuring Freddie and the Fearmongers!


    1. Requiem for the Fourth Amendment



    2. There's No Place Like Home (until the DEA gets through with it)



    3. O Say Can You See (what the Drug War's done to you and me)






    front cover of Drug War Comic Book

    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)