by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
heck 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 Morphine1" 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,2," 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.3"
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 Russell4.
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,5" 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 University6 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 Forum7 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 drug8. Laughing gas: the substance that inspired William James's view of reality9.
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 way10?
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 Applications11." 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 ignorance12.
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.13" 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 Hutton14, 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 Forum15. 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 Forum16. 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.17" 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And some more thoughts on drugs and Armageddon.
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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.
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I sent an email today to the Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University18. I was responding to a data brief19 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.
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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.
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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.'20
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
Notes:1 Weil, Andrew,
From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs, Open Road Integrated Media, New York, 2004
(up)2 Shulgin, Alexander,
PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story , Transform Press, 1991
(up)3 Schopenhauer, Arthur,
On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason,
(up)4 Failla, Zak,
Niomi Russell Killed By Drive-By Shooters In Southeast DC, Daily Voice, 2024
(up)5 Blood, Benjamin,
The anaesthetic revelation and the gist of philosophy,
(up)6
Urban Health Collaborative, Drexel University,
(up)7
The Philosophy Forum,
(up)8 Quass, Brian,
Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas, 2023
(up)9 James, William,
The Varieties of Religious Experience, Philosophical Library, New York, 1902
(up)10 Quass, Brian,
How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James, 2025
(up)11 Quass, Brian,
Coca Wine, 2024
(up)12 Quass, Brian,
After the Drug War, 2025
(up)13 Ocker, J.W.,
Cult Following: The Extreme Sects That Capture Our Imagination,
(up)14 Hutton, Ronald,
The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, Yale Press, 2017
(up)15
The Philosophy Forum,
(up)16
The Philosophy Forum,
(up)17 Hutton, Ronald,
The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, Yale Press, 2017
(up)18
Urban Health Collaborative, Drexel University,
(up)19
Gun Deaths in Big Cities, Big Cities Health,
(up)20 Shulgin, Alexander,
PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story , Transform Press, 1991
(up)
More Essays Here
Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs
I hated the show "The Apprentice," because it taught a cynical and hate-filled lesson about the proper way to "get ahead" in the world. I saw Trump as a menace back then, long before he started declaring that American elections were corrupt before the very first vote was cast!
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
The so-called "herbs" that witches used were drugs, in the same way that "meds" are drugs. If academics made that connection, the study of witchcraft would shed a lot of light on the fearmongering of modern prohibitionists.
Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks: J'excuse! People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took prohibition to bring that about.
Prohibitionists have the same M O they've had for the last 100+ years: blame drugs for everything. Being a drug warrior is never having the decency to say you're sorry -- not to Mexicans, not to inner-city crime victims, not to patients who go without adequate pain relief...
First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.
3:51 PM · Jul 15, 2024
Drug warriors are full of hate for "users." Many of them make it clear that they want users to die (like Gates and Bennett...). The drug war has weaponized humanity's worst instincts.
Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?
Mad in America solicits personal stories about people trying to get off of antidepressants, but they will not publish your story if you want to use entheogenic medicines to help you. They're afraid their readers can't handle the truth.
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The latest hits from Drug War Records, featuring Freddie and the Fearmongers!
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)
