by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
inally! I've come up with the answer to the post-war poser.
How are you going to keep them down on the farm?
ANSWER: With the strategic use of godsend medicines.
For more, see my bombshell essay entitled Huxley's Reservations about Mescaline, in which I finally pick up the gauntlet that Aldous Huxley tossed down 75 years ago!
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Here is a comment I posted today on the website for the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics1.
This shutting down of research was based on a bizarre and anti-scientific idea: namely, that...
if a drug can pose a danger for white young people when used at one dose for one reason, it must not be used by anyone at any dose for any reason.
Meanwhile, the FDA approves of Big Pharma drugs whose published side effects include death itself. Aspirin kills 3,000 a year in the UK alone. Liquor kills 178,000 a year in the US. Clearly the outlawing of psychedelics is completely irrational. And yet folks like Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman support drug prohibition. This is disingenuous in the extreme. They claim to be interested in safety -- but whose safety? Not the safety of the 60,000 who have been disappeared in Mexico over the last two decades thanks to the War on Drugs. Not the safety of the 67,000 minorities who have been killed by gun violence over the last ten years. Not the safety of the user who is ignorant about drug use thanks to the Drug Warrior's refusal to teach safe use. Not the safety of the folks who have to dangerously synthesize DMT because it is outlawed. Not the safety of inner city kids like 15-year-old Niomi Russell who was killed in drive-by shooting in 2024, thanks to the fact that drug prohibition had armed D.C. neighborhoods to the teeth. The FDA also approves of shock therapy, by the way. They would rather that we knowingly damage the brains of the depressed than to let them use the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions, as Soma inspired the rishi of the Punjab in 1500 BCE.
See also Comments about Drugs.
May 7, 2025
An essay describing my recent magic mushroom experience in Oaxaca, Mexico: Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms.
May 6, 2025
This has been Update Monday here at abolishthedea.com. First, I added some reflections to my 2022 essay entitled The Mother of all Western Biases. Then I updated one of the very first anti-Drug War articles that I ever wrote, a full six years ago now, entitled How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Drug War. (Ah, 2019! Those were the days, huh?) If that seems prehistoric, I went on to update an article that was even older than THAT: namely, In Praise of Thomas Szasz. (Ah, even earlier in 2019! Those were REALLY the days, huh? Even more so, I mean!) In that latter case, I explained why Drug Warriors (bless them) positively SHALL be hating on Thomas Szasz. And why? Spoiler alert: It is because Drug Warriors want to "arrest themselves out of problems" rather than to solve problems.
Here are a few other additional essays that I have also ventured to update with, shall we say, a few, ahem, "novel reflections" from my present-day self? (Sure, why not? "Novel reflections" it is!)
May 4, 2025
America has made its own dystopia with drug prohibition and refuses to see it. Instead of pointing out that drug prohibition has created extreme violence, Americans revel in movies like "Godfather" and "Scarface" -- and "Running with the Devil" and "Crisis." We are blind to the link between drug prohibition and violence, or just don't care. But then how will we recognize the links in movies when we have destroyed entire cities with drug prohibition and fail to see it? The only reason that there are no-go zones in America's inner cities is because of liquor prohibition and then drug prohibition, both of which brought guns and violence to the 'hood. But we ignore that fact as we sit back at home stuffing our face with popcorn as we watch movies in which the DEA runs riot over constitutional freedoms -- or in which the Mafia rules: that Mafia that was created out of whole cloth by prohibition. We Americans know that prohibition creates violence and we just don't care. It's the minorities who are suffering after all -- except for the increasingly common mass shootings, in which the pains of prohibition get spread out among the mainstream as well.
-- As my ideal thorough reader will know, I have had to lift heaven and earth to create a realistic withdrawal protocol for getting off of Effexor, since the pharmaceutical company refuses to make small doses of the drug with which I could stand a chance of actually accomplishing that seemingly unlikely feat (insofar as there is a 95% recidivism rate after three years for long-term users who attempt to get off the drug). I finally succeeded in finding a compounding pharmacy that would work with me, after first convincing my psychiatrist to allow me to do so, since he personally saw no problem with me remaining a patient for life. Unfortunately, I have been taking the extended-release version of the drug for decades now, and it turns out that Pfizer considers that formulation to be proprietary in nature and so they will not provide it for the purposes of helping folks get off their "miracle" drug. How convenient, right?
Nevertheless, I have succeeded in using a combination of 37.mg ER and compound 2.5mg pills to steadily reduce my daily Effexor intake over the last six months from 250 mg. to 37.5 mg. Having now, however, reached the lowest possible dosage for which mass-marketed pills are available, I am beginning the final phase of my protocol wherein a rely entirely on compounded (but fast-release) versions of Effexor. That is why I was disheartened, to put it mildly, by the difficulties that I have had in getting my mental health clinic to approve the compounded prescription refill request that I submitted Thursday morning. This is infuriating because it is so typical. This, in fact, is one of the main reasons why I want nothing to do with the mental healthcare field, because when it comes to drug refills, their nurses and doctors have always demonstrated a combination of incompetence and indifference to my time-sensitive requests as a patient.
In this case, the refill request was duly faxed to them on Thursday. On that same day, I contacted the clinic using their so-called "My Chart" website. After 24 hours, I contacted them again, at which point they claimed to be unaware of my refill request and asked me for the compounding schedule which I had forwarded them two months ago as part of getting that protocol approved. This was early Friday morning and they never got back to me again, although I double-checked with the compounding pharmacy and they insisted they had faxed the refill request on Thursday. They, however, faxed the request again, and I contacted the clinic again to see if they received it, but of course they did not respond. But then that make it super-clear on their phone recordings that there is no point in reminding them of anything because repeated calls and emails "will not expedite matters," as they put it.
This is yet another problem with drug law. Doctors have gotten complacent about their monopoly on doling out medicine, and now they are high and mighty. Their time on the golf course will NOT be interrupted by a patient who merely needs a medicine that will cause them grief to go without. The clinics need well over 48 hours to get refill matters processed and if that's a problem for the patient, screw them. They are the patient, and we are the doctors. My whole life viz. prescriptions has been a history of cavalier incompetence on the part of healthcare providers. I even experienced these issues when I was trying to get urgent medicines refilled for my elderly mothers. The medical clinics simply refused to be hurried and had no interest in the details of the problems that they were causing for their patient by refusing to act promptly. THEY are in charge of doling out the goods and they will do so when they see fit, thank us all very much.
May 2, 2025
I've got to stop reading emails just before going to bed. I spent a largely sleepless night last night thanks to having read the following subject line in an email from MAPS:
"Ketamine: Powerful Ally—or Risky Escape?"
That subject line is so loaded with unspoken assumptions that it called for an essay by itself -- though it also turned out that I had plenty to say about the Ketamine-related paper to which it referred. See How Ketamine Advocates Reckon without the Drug War.
May 2, 2025
Today I have made so bold to as to update the following essays:
Drug War: the Musical!
Why I Am Pro Drugs
...and to post a new essay entitled Whitehead and Witches.
May 1, 2025
I have yet to hear a drug debate in which the good guys went for the jugular. Here on some thoughts on that subject in my update to my essay entitled Why I Am Pro Drugs.
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Drug Warriors are murderers. They know full well that liquor prohibition brought machine-gun-fire to America's streets. And yet they champion prohibition to fight the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions. So they try to save the white kids that they refuse to educate by outsourcing prohibition dangers to minorities and foreigners. 60,000 Mexicans were disappeared over the last 20 years thanks to the War on Drugs. 67,000 Blacks were killed in America's biggest cities by gunfire over the last ten years -- and it was first liquor and then drug prohibition that armed Black neighborhoods to the teeth.
This is why it is not hyperbole to charge prohibitionists with murder -- and even with premeditated murder, insofar as they know that liquor prohibition created the Mafia as we know it today. In fact, the Drug Warriors are seeming totally unaware of two glaringly obvioius things: namely, the endless downsides of drug prohibition and the endless potential upsides of drug use -- as documented in the book "Pihkal" for instance and as made clear by the fact that drug use inspired the creation of the Hindu religion. The fact is, as Carl Hart reports, that many people use drugs wisely and for good reasons, in spite of the government's attempts to make drug use as dangerous as possible by refusing to teach safe use and refusing to regulate product.
For more, see update to my 2024 essay entitled Drug War Murderers.
April 30, 2025
Here is a review that is sure to be censored by philosophically challenged techies: My review of Fentanyl Inc..
April 29, 2025
This just in: Opiates have fantastic positive uses! Imagine that! For more, see my update to my 2023 essay entitled In Defense of Opium.
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I continue to unpack my takeaway insights from my latest reading of "The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James. Please see my latest updates to my essay entitled: A Philosophical Review of 'The Varieties of Religious Experience'.
April 27, 2025
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as an impediment to justice.
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If any reader understands with me the way that Drug War ideology has censored academia and non-fiction authors in general, then I urge them to send a copy of the following essay of mine to the psychology professor of their choice: Demonizing Human Transcendence. No academician has less excuse for ignoring the stultifying results of the Drug War than psychologists, for William James practically founded their field and he called for the active investigation of altered states.
I have also updated my 2023 essay entitled Why doctors should prescribe opium for depression. In a free world, psychiatrists should be able to prescribe opium in certain cases of depression -- based on actual circumstances. For this, they must abolish the one-size-fits-all mindset of the Drug War and modern psychiatry. (The Drug War actually has a "one-size-UNfits-all" ideology, incidentally.) Of course, in a truly free world, materialist psychiatrists would not be gatekeepers for godsend drug use in the first place. They would be replaced by (or in some cases morph into) pharmacologically savvy empaths. The name more or less says it all, but for more on this subject, see my 2020 essay entitled Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism.
April 27, 2025
Today I have a surprise drug test for you: Take this Drug Test. Halos on and in the full upright position.
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The outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of the religious impulse. For more on this topic, please see my latest updates to my essay entitled A Philosophical Review of 'The Varieties of Religious Experience'.
Speaking of which, William James' 20 Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion are not without their comic moments. In Lecture X on Conversion, James quotes "an excellent little illiterate English evangelist" named Billy Bray on the subject of how he communes with God.
"On one occasion," Bray said, "when at a prayer‐ meeting at Hicks Mill, I heard the Lord say to me, 'Worship me with clean lips.' So, when we got up from our knees, I took the quid out of my mouth and 'whipped 'en' [threw it] under the form."
Forgive the levity that I am about to invoke here, but I believe I can prove the idiocy of Bray's religious views as suggested above by the use of the argumentum ad absurdum -- while also saying something intelligent about the subject of drugs. Work with me here, folks.
Maybe it's just the scapegrace in me, but I cannot help thinking of the Lord following up his exhortation to Billy to "Worship me with clean lips" with the following indignant exclamation: "And get a haircut while you're at it! For God's sake, Billy, I mean, what was your last barber even THINKING?!"
Nor is this simply irreverence on my part. My philosophical point is this: If God is really interested in correcting our bad habits on such a retail basis, it begs the question, why does He come forth only with his disapproval about the habits which tend to be already on our own radar? If He views unclean lips as an implicit affront to majesty, so to speak, then surely He would be equally affronted by our wearing of a pair of dirty socks or of a carelessly cinched-up cravat. Such a God, were He consistent, would tut-tut our failure to button all the relevant buttons on our coat given the current climatic conditions.
In other words, such a God is of the Earth, Earthy, wherefore Billy Bray would be well advised to question the veracity of his religious visions.
This is what the Drug Warriors do when they consider drugs to be unholy. They improbably envision a God that cannot stand our use of the very substances that He himself created. It makes you wonder if God makes some hard-and-fast rule about gluten viz salvation. That seems unlikely to me. Ergo, the Drug Warrior had better join Billy in second-guessing their own religious presuppositions.
April 26, 2025
Good morning, starshine. (The Earth says hello, by the way.)
Today I will be doing a close read of "The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James in order to add more specifics to my philosophical review of the same. (See upcoming updates to A Philosophical Review of 'The Varieties of Religious Experience'.)
But first, some old business.
The attentive reader (should there be such) will have noticed that I have yet to fulfill my recent promise to philosophically evaluate the Erowid website.
This is because I have realized upon digging further into the site that I am not yet qualified to perform such a review. Some of the qualms that I originally thought I had about the resource are probably the result of my failure to investigate it thoroughly. So stay tuned.
See? I'm not such a bad guy. I try to be fair.
I am looking forward to reading the drug summary pages in particular.
What was my concern in the first place?
My concern was that the site might tend to place potential godsend meds in a harsh light by failing to put the downsides of use in context. If Erowid covered shark encounters, for instance, there would be plenty of reports about shark attacks. My question then would be: how successfully does the website put those attack reports in context, so that the casual site visitor does not come away with the idea that sharks are a clear and present danger for anyone who so much as dips a toe in the ocean?
Ideally, any horror story about a statistically super-safe drug should have a disclaimer reminding the reader that the gnarly outcomes being documented are extremely unlikely to occur. What's more, this disclaimer should appear on the same page as the horror story. The mere fact that the drug's relative safety might be documented elsewhere on Erowid is not enough. A casual site visitor who sees the horror story out of context is likely to come to a negative conclusion about the drug in question without bothering to perform any further research on Erowid. To the contrary, their next Google search could very well include the drug name plus the words "horror stories," since they are now associating the drug with negative outcomes only.
These are not yet criticisms of Erowid, just a foretaste of what I fear I might find upon a closer investigation. I will be delving further to see if Erowid is actually guilty as charged -- or as initially feared.
I also hope to find that the "main page" for each drug makes it clear, to the extent possible, how risky the use of the drug is compared to the use of other drugs -- and to the performance of other life activities. If I am more likely to win the lottery than to experience a given drug downside, then tell me. Give me at least some idea of what is foreground and what is background when it comes to potential dangers, do not just overwhelm me with acontextual data.
Again, I am not (yet) charging Erowid with any shortcomings, merely enumerating my existing qualms prior to truly investigating the site.
April 25, 2025
Check out our new radio ads at the Partnership for a Death Free America. They are part of our second anniversary celebration of making the world safe for suburban American young people.
Partnership for a Death Free America
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Today I have updated my letter to Dr. Dasgupta of of the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center: Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion. Dr. Dasgupta is, of course, generally speaking, on the right side of the issues when it comes to drug legalization. But the very fact that a materialist scientist is considered an expert on such matters is highly problematic, because materialists ignore all obvious benefits of drugs. They talk about methadone and buprenorphine... but drugs to treat misnamed "opioid disorder" are omnipresent: phenethylamines and laughing gas, for starters. And "opioid disorders" is misleading: the disorder is "prohibition disorder." Young people were not dying on the streets from opiates when opiates were legal in America. It took prohibition to accomplish that by refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate the drug supply, and refusing to re-legalize godsend alternatives that the government had no right to outlaw in the first place.
Materialists are gaslighting us when they tell us that the only drugs to treat such conditions are methadone and buprenorphine. Do they really think we are dumb enough to believe that drugs that have inspired entire religions have no positive uses for helping us change behaviors? Do they really believe that drugs that inspired the following user reports in "Pihkal" cannot help people change unwanted behaviors.
"I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world."
"I feel that it is one of the most profound and deep learning experiences I have had."
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."
April 24, 2025
Coming soon: some philosophical concerns/observations about the Erowid website.
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I received a bulk email from the DPA and Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta today with the subject line "I've Studied Overdose Deaths for 20 Years." I opened it with hesitation, knowing that I was about to see materialist biases, and sure enough the message contained a prominent link reading:
"What are medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD)? What are barriers to people getting them?"
I had to immediately write a letter to Nabarun to answer his questions for him:
QUESTION: What are medications for so-called opioid use disorder?
ANSWER: Almost all the drugs that we have outlawed.
QUESTION: What are barriers to people getting them?
ANSWER: Drug prohibition.
For more, see my new essay entitled Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion.
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I have also updated my letter to the elusive Nathan at DEA.org -- a site that creeps me out, since it treats the DEA as a legitimate organization rather than as the Gestapo that it is. For more, see Open Letter to Nathan at TheDEA.org.
April 23, 2025
William James saw the power of anesthetics like laughing gas to provide us with religious states, states in which we seemed to be somehow inspired with certainties about the nature of ultimate reality. Unfortunately, he failed to realize that substances like nitrous oxide were just one of many kinds of substances that can inspire such states. Had he noticed this crucial fact, perhaps it would have been harder for demagogue pols to convince us that psychoactive substances are somehow evil. For more, see my latest essay entitled A Philosophical Review of 'The Varieties of Religious Experience'.
Let us pray.
Dear God, we come before thee, asking forgiveness for our previous kneejerk support of a drugs policy that has destroyed democracy in America, destroyed the rule of law in Latin America, and rendered gunfire in inner cities so commonplace as to now be completely invisible to modern politicians, except insofar as they wish to make political hay out of the very violence that they themselves have brought about with their racist Drug War. Speak to the hearts of the bamboozled everywhere. Remind them that to utter words like "Fentanyl kills" is to support this racist Drug War. Remind them, moreover, that phrases like "Fentanyl kills" and "Fentanyl steals our loved ones" are philosophically identical to saying things like "Fire bad!" as did our prehistoric forebears in the benighted past. Remind us that all such statements are wrong for the same reason. They both imply a demonstrably false notion: namely, that a substance that can be misused by one demographic in one situation can have no benefits for anybody in any situation. Show them the absurdity of this viewpoint, God. Remind them that all substances have potential positive uses at some dose, for some person, for some reason -- nay, that even cyanide and Botox have positive uses in healthcare -- and that it is tyrannical and ultimately racist to outlaw substances for everybody in the world merely because they can cause problems for young white Americans whom we have refused to educate about safe use, for whom we have refused to regulate the drug supply, and for whom we have refused to legalize a wide variety of alternative choices for the safe and sustainable benefit of mind and mood.
Amen.
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You want to do something in your neighborhood to fight the War on Drugs? Start holding Drug Warriors Anonymous meetings, where freedom-loving people can chew the fat as part of a recognizable protest movement against the racist and anti-democratic status quo. Drug Warriors Anonymous. Of course, you could call your meeting anything you want, but by using the term "Drug Warriors Anonymous" you turn your very organizational name into a protest and thereby make it clear why you are getting together -- that is, not to merely talk about drugs like the hedonists that freedom-lovers are supposed to be these days, but to champion common sense and time-honored principles about the value of free speech, academic freedom, and the sanctity of human life that we are willfully destroying today thanks to policies inspired by fear rather than understanding.
April 22, 2025
Coming later today, why I write... How Drug Warriors Deny Me the Pursuit of Happiness.
April 20, 2025
I have a added a transcription to my dope comedy routine from 2023: A Dope Comedy Routine About Drugs.
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The Drug War outlaws philosophy -- and yet philosophers do not even notice. This is probably due to two major reasons: first, philosophers are scared to death of speaking up -- and second because most philosophers are materialists, and the Drug War privileges materialism by outlawing precisely those substances whose use conduces to a non-materialistic worldview. For more on this completely unnoticed topic, see my new essay entitled How the Drug War Outlaws Philosophy.
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Outlawing drugs is a crime against humanity. Drugs have obvious positive uses for Alzheimer's patients and the autistic, not to mention average so-called "normal" human beings. This is blazingly obvious in light of the fact that the Hindu religion owes its very existence to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. For more, see my 2025 update to my 2022 essay entitled Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!.
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See also the update of an update for 2025 for the essay entitled What Obama got wrong about drugs.
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Speaking of glorified drug use, streaming channels are full of Jim Beam commercials, purposefully targeted at young people.
April 19, 2025
Today, I have concluded my series called "After the Drug War": After the Drug War Part 4. Bon appétit.
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The Partnership for a Death Free America is now two years old! We are celebrating by launching a campaign to outlaw fire! Listen to our latest ads by checking out the 2025 update to Partnership for a Death Free America.
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Julian Buchanan once mentioned how tempting it was at times to fall asleep at the philosophical wheel and become a pod person who believes that the Drug War is right. It is a world view that is promulgated in so many blatant and subtle ways, after all. Why should one struggle against it? It is tempting to believe that one is mad oneself, rather than to believe that the entire world is wrong. And yet whenever I have those moments, I am instantly snapped back to reality by ads for Jim Beam Bourbon on TV -- ads directed at young people, no less: ads that glorify bourbon drinking.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. We outlaw the kinds of substances that have inspired religions -- substances that inspire and elate as did the Soma that inspired the Hindu religion. Why? Because such substances would be dangerous for young people. And yet a substance that kills 178,000 a year in America alone is promoted in regular ads on prime-time television, ads directed at young people.
So it is easy for me to keep myself from falling asleep and becoming a pod person. Even without the Jim Beam ads, I have only to consider the fact that the MDMA-hating FDA approves Big Pharma drugs whose side effects include death itself -- then I remember that it is NOT my imagination after all, that the entire world is completely brainwashed by the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
April 17, 2025
Phrases like "Fentanyl kills" are stupid for the same reason that the phrase "Fire bad!" is stupid. 
All such categorical statements are based on the following insane assumption: namely, that a substance that can cause problems when used by one person in one way for one purpose cannot be used safely by anyone in any way for any purpose! In other words, phrases like "Fentanyl kills" are superstitious utterances worthy of our Stone Age forebears.
This insight is crucial for Americans to grasp if they ever hope to free themselves of the firm grip of mind control that the Drug Warriors have exercised over them since grade school. Since childhood, we have all had our brains fried by the propaganda of half-truths, lies and censorship: censorship of any and all positive stories about the substances that we are meant to fear rather than to understand. That is why I added a short blurb on this subject to my site introduction. See my April 2025 update to Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com.
Two years ago, the newscasters (er, presenters) at Channel 5 UK staged a pep rally in favor of criminalizing nitrous oxide. They were supposed to be merely hosting a discussion between two experts on the substance called laughing gas, but the announcers could not hold back their righteous indignation. I know how they feel. I know an entire family that was killed by fire -- and I am always outraged by folks who talk about safe fire use. Do they not realize that NOBODY can use fire safely! See my update ton my 2023 essay entitled The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter.
Today we are told that there may be alien life forms out there. It looks like the DEA is going to have to start gearing up to take their war against self-transcendence into outer space!
New installment of After the Drug War Part 3.
April 16, 2025
Imagine if driver's ed classes were conducted like so-called drug education classes. 
I got a hoot out of doing just that in my new short essay entitled: Driver's Ed and Drugs.
Any drug that elates has obvious uses for the depressed and others -- uses limited only by the human imagination. The Drug War is all about gaslighting us into thinking otherwise. For more, see my update to my 2023 article entitled Why doctors should prescribe opium for depression.
April 15, 2025
The Drug Warriors want us to hate drug dealers. Indeed, they need us to. Otherwise, we would blame the real culprits for the violence and suffering caused by drug prohibition. We would blame the Drug Warriors themselves! Learn more by reading my latest essay entitled Drug Warriors are the Problem, not Drug Dealers.
April 13, 2025
Americans believe that it is a righteous thing to kill drug dealers.
Really? How about the guys who supplied Michael Pollan with HIS drugs to write his books? How about the guys who supplied the Vedic people with Soma? This view can only be based on the warped idea that there are substances that are really bad in and of themselves, that have no good uses whatsoever. But all drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time, for some person.
Learn more by reading my latest essay entitled Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do.
April 11, 2025
Historians completely ignore the War on Drugs, just as scientists do. We live in a make-believe world thanks to such Drug War censorship: a world in which the positive effects of drug use are ignored, as are the negative effects of drug prohibition. It is a world of self-satisfied (not to mention cowardly) make-believe! For the latest on this topic, see my 2025 update of my 2023 essay entitled: Even Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug War.
April 10, 2025
If you are not sufficiently outraged by drug prohibition, I have the cure for you. Just read my 2025 update to Drug Warriors and their Prey, in which I quote several infuriating excerpts from the book of that name by Richard Lawrence Miller.
For more on Miller's book -- including more infuriating outtakes -- see my essay entitled Why Drug Warriors are Nazis.
April 9, 2025
I have good news and bad news: The good news is that Andrew Weil's book "From Chocolate to Morphine2" is one of the most honest books that exist today on the subject of drugs. The bad news is that even the content of THIS book is informed by certain Drug War prejudices that were apparently instilled in the author by Drug War propaganda. To learn more, please see my 2025 update to my essay entitled: Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy.
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Being a Drug Warrior means never having to say you're sorry. To learn more, see the 2025 update to my essay entitled When you say 'Drugs'.
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Comic duo Adderall Zoloft and Paxil Buspar are back at the DEA Lounge and people are breaking down the doors to get in -- SWAT teams, by the look of it! Listen to their latest routine, which is anything but: Fried Brains Over Easy: another Drug War Comedy Routine.
April 8, 2025
In recent essays, I have been asking the following question:
What qualifies the drug-designing chemist to decide what emotional and mental states constitute a "cure" for my depression?
This question comes to mind when I find chemist Alexander Shulgin speculating that the depressed need something other than the godsend psychoactive medicines whose miraculous effects he describes in "Pihkal,3," as if the depressed are aliens from another planet, strange life forms that are not amenable to the psychological interventions that work for normal human beings. Folks like myself apparently cannot benefit from rapture and ecstasy. Who knew? Answer: Not anyone with common sense, for starters.
I have today noticed a line from Schopenhauer that nicely catches the concerns that I have about chemists who draw such bizarre but consequence-laden conclusions:
"The mere study of Chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher.4"
This statement, of course, had nothing to do with designing drug cures for the depressed, and yet it is more connected with my theme than one might think, for Schopenhauer intended the comment as a reproof of materialist pseudo-philosophers. And the creation of Big Pharma psychoactive drugs today is firmly in the hands of said materialist pseudo-philosophers, those who are dogmatically blind to common sense because they fail to see the inhumanity of the tenets by which they work: namely, those of the passion-free psychological theory of behaviorism. It is this behaviorism that turns our modern materialist scientists into collaborators in the Drug War, because it gives them a metaphysical pretext for signing off on the great Drug War lie: namely, that the glaringly obvious benefits of psychoactive medicines do not 'really' exist, that all benefits for the depressed must be discovered under a microscope.
In the minds of such materialists, rapture and ecstasy are all well and good for "normal" people, but folks whom we have classified as "depressed" according to the DSM cannot benefit from such things. Apparently, they have to shut up and take their meds instead -- and for a lifetime, at that.
Um, thanks but no thanks, Alex. I think I'll try the rapture and ecstasy instead. In my world, feeling good actually HELPS ME -- regardless of whether or not you can prove that to your own satisfaction with the help of quantifiable data.
So let's ask that question again:
What qualifies the drug-designing chemist to decide what emotional and mental states constitute a "cure" for my depression?
ANSWER: Nothing. I myself know what mental and emotional states constitute a cure for my depression, thank you very much. Drug-designing chemists do not have my interest in mind in any case: they have the interests of the pharmaceutical companies in mind when they pretend to create a one-size-fits-all drug for me -- wherefore the depressed actually have a duty to self-medicate: a duty to themselves!
Yes, self-medication is dangerous, but why is it so? It is dangerous because drug prohibition makes it so, by refusing to teach safe use and by refusing to regulate the drug supply as to quality and quantity -- and of course by seeking to arrest the depressed for attempting to treat their depression in a way that does not turn them into a Big Pharma patient for life.
Next question: could America's "mental health" policies be more inhumane?
ANSWER: No. And as with so many modern dystopias, we have the Drug War to thank for that.
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Ever wonder what newscasts would look like if the media covered ALL risky activities the way that they cover drug use? See my 2025 update to my 2023 essay entitled Time for News Outlets to stop promoting drug war lies.
April 5, 2025
Obama wanted to study the brain. What we really need to study is the human being and the mind. For more, please see my April 2025 update to my 2020 essay entitled What Obama got wrong about drugs.
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I have added remarks to yet another 2020 essay of mine. (I feel tempted to make a joke here about 2020 hindsight, but don't worry, I shall refrain.) This second essay is entitled The Worst thing about the Drug War. As you might imagine, one is spoiled for choice when selecting for such a category.
Spoiler Alert: I originally decided in 2020 that the worst thing about the Drug War was that it was a worldwide phenomena and so I could not escape the injustice even by the most extreme form of repatriation, say to Bangladesh, for instance. Today I'm thinking that maybe the worst thing about the Drug War is that it outlaws the freedom of religion. In other words, my 2020 self said "potato" whilst my 2025 self says "po-tah-to."
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Prohibition is a crime against humanity. Pass it on.
April 5, 2025
Christian Science is a strange religion in light of the War on Drugs: at a superficial level, its very existence helps support drug prohibition by telling us that drug use is immoral and unnecessary (immoral BECAUSE unnecessary insofar as we should rely on the healing powers of Jesus Christ) -- and yet at a deeper level, Eddy's "beef" was not so much with drugs as it was with materialist medicine which denied the powers of the human mind. For more on this fraught and highly consequential topic, see my new essay on this topic entitled Christian Science and Drugs.
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Today I did a critical re-read of my July '24 comedy routine/essay entitled The Drug War Philosopher of the United States of America. I felt compelled after doing so to append a few clarifications. You know how it is: sometimes one revisits one's previous protest screeds and finds that they have retroactive scruples about the comments contained therein -- about their failure to make one's point as emphatically as one might wish.
By the way, if the reader is troubled by such things, there IS hope, for I understand that there are new treatments being devised for retroactive scruples every single day. I even hear that a vaccine might be forthcoming.
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I was told by one of my X followers that most psychiatrists would desire to have shock therapy if they were to become seriously depressed.
WHAAAAAAT!?
If this is true -- or even anywhere close to true -- it shows how thoroughly the Drug Warrior has succeeded in brainwashing us to believe that drugs can have no positive uses whatsoever.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
The drug user reports in Pihkal describe ecstatic states that would make life a blessing! The accounts of laughing gas in the work of William James describe literally heavenly states. The Hindu religion, for that matter, owes its existence to drug(s) that inspire and elate.
How tragic, if that tweet is true: that the Drug War has so warped the American mind as to make us complacently seek out brain damage when we are depressed.
I weep when I think of the childishness into which modern science has devolved thanks to America's cradle-to-grave brainwashing in the drug-hating ideology of substance demonization.
Learn more by reading the 2025 update to my essay entitled The Drug War Philosopher of the United States of America.
April 4, 2025
Materialists are sickos when it comes to treating mind and mood. They actually think that death and brain-damaging shock therapy are better than the use of "drugs." What a disgrace. For more, see my newly updated 2024 essay entitled: The FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive drugs.
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Here is the next in my essay series entitled "After the Drug War":
After the Drug War part 2.
April 3, 2025
Update today on my 2022 essay entitled Drug Use as Self-Medication.
I have also updated my essay entitled The Bill Clinton Fallacy. It now includes, for instance, the following important observation:
"The Hindu religion owes its very existence to a drug that elated and inspired, from which it clearly follows that the outlawing of psychoactive substances is a violation of religious liberty. Those who have ears, let them hear. Those who have ignorant white brothers, let them educate them rather than outlawing the religious impulse itself by outlawing the godsends of mother nature (and the many wonderful drugs that have been inspired thereby)."
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I need hardly add that America's troglodyte Congress passed the Halt Act. They still insist on treating health concerns as a criminal matter. See my latest update to my essay entitled: Another Cry in the Wilderness. This is all a completely bogus and fascist-oriented way of looking at the world. We need to educate, not arrest. We need to stop denying the power of medicines that inspire and elate. It is a violation of religious liberty to do so insofar as the Hindu religion was inspired by just such "drugs."
We need, in short, to develop a network of what I call "pharmacologically savvy empaths" to teach people to use drugs wisely and for good purposes. We need to finally recognize that drugs are not a problem; the only problems are a lack of education and direction in people's lives. We do not need the military to solve that sort of problem, we need living, breathing people who know the risks and benefits of all substance use (based on personal experience and historic research) and can inspire usage patterns that limit drug downsides to the bare minimum consistent with a free society.
We also need to acknowledge -- as if we were actually adults -- that we can never save everybody -- except by outsourcing the downsides of prohibition to minorities and foreigners, while meanwhile denying godsend medicines to all those who would use them wisely and for good reasons if given half a chance. For more on these topics, please read my essays entitled Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism and The Bill Clinton Fallacy.
April 3, 2025
Do you know how I am always griping about the failure of philosophers to discuss the subject of drugs with me? Well, there was one exception. I wrote Thomas Szasz a lengthy letter on the topic in the 1980s and he responded -- with a lengthy letter of his own. Only imagine! Learn more in my update to my 2019 essay entitled In Praise of Thomas Szasz.
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Resolved: that Capitalism as practiced today requires drug prohibition: Capitalism and the Drug War.
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I am always learning more reasons to hate the War on Drugs and the prohibition for which it stands. For that reason alone, I am nervous when reading my older essays. I fear that in so doing, I will find that I have been prolix in cases wherein a single sentence would have sufficed to blow the Drug War out of the water, so to speak.
That's why I was relieved today to find that I could still sign off on every line of my 2020 essay entitled America's Great Anti-Depressant Scam. In those COVID-era musings, I remind the reader how Big Pharma and the modern media lead Americans by the nose when it comes to our attitudes about drugs. A Big Pharma med can include death itself as a side effect and Americans are unfazed. But if a statistically safe drug such as Ecstasy could even theoretically cause issues for a white American suburbanite, we are told that we have to battle against such drug use by all means necessary, even by destroying the Bill of Rights -- starting with the renunciation of the protections of the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
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Morphine can give the educated user a deep appreciation of Mother Nature. But the Drug War teaches us how to fear such drugs rather than to use them wisely. What a waste of godsend resources. But then that is the whole point of the Drug War: to convince us that we can never use drugs wisely. It is the infantilization of Americans and the suppression of education and progress on behalf of the drug-hating ideology of Mary Baker-Eddy.
The Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. It follows, therefore, that prohibition is the outlawing of the religious impulse itself, for it outlaws precisely the kinds of drugs that inspired the Hindu religion. See more in my updated essay entitled: How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine.
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Remember that Corner on Coca game that I designed back in 2023? Please to check out 2025 update on same: Corner on Coca!. (Sorry, I've been watching too many of those slightly racist Charlie Chan movies!)
April 2, 2025
My latest essay is entitled The Invisible Drug War.
I have also updated my 2020 essay entitled How Logic-Challenged Journalists Support the Drug War.
April 1, 2025
Today 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 15-year-old's like Niomi Russell5.
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
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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,6" 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 DrugsHow the Internet Archive Censors Free Speech about DrugsTHE 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.
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Needless to say that the folks at the Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University7 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 Forum8 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 drug9. Laughing gas: the substance that inspired William James's view of reality10.
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 way11?
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 Applications12." 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 ignorance13.
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."
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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.)
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Ring the bells! I have updated my 2020 essay entitled Heroin versus Alcohol!
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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.
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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.14" 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 Hutton15, 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 Forum16. 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.
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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 Forum17. 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.18" Hutton only uses the word "drugs" once in the book, and then only in a derogatory sense. But he uses the word "her
Notes:1
UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics,
(up)2 Weil, Andrew,
From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs, Open Road Integrated Media, New York, 2004
(up)3 Shulgin, Alexander,
PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story , Transform Press, 1991
(up)4 Schopenhauer, Arthur,
On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason,
(up)5 Failla, Zak,
Niomi Russell Killed By Drive-By Shooters In Southeast DC, Daily Voice, 2024
(up)6 Blood, Benjamin,
The anaesthetic revelation and the gist of philosophy,
(up)7
Urban Health Collaborative, Drexel University,
(up)8
The Philosophy Forum,
(up)9 Quass, Brian,
Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas, 2023
(up)10 James, William,
The Varieties of Religious Experience, Philosophical Library, New York, 1902
(up)11 Quass, Brian,
How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James, 2025
(up)12 Quass, Brian,
Coca Wine, 2024
(up)13 Quass, Brian,
After the Drug War, 2025
(up)14 Ocker, J.W.,
Cult Following: The Extreme Sects That Capture Our Imagination,
(up)15 Hutton, Ronald,
The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, Yale Press, 2017
(up)16
The Philosophy Forum,
(up)17
The Philosophy Forum,
(up)18 Hutton, Ronald,
The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, Yale Press, 2017
(up)
More Essays Here
Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs
Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.
NOW is the time for entheogens -- not (as Strassman and Pollan seem to think) at some future date when materialists have finally wrapped their minds around the potential usefulness of drugs that experientially teach compassion.
Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.
As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.
We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.
There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.
Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.
There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."
M. Pollan says "not so fast" when it comes to drug re-legalization. I say FAST? I've gone a whole lifetime w/o access to Mother Nature's plants. How can a botanist approve of that? Answer: By ignoring all legalization stakeholders except for the kids whom we refuse to educate.
So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.
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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)
