Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 18, 2025
ell, pull up a chair and sit down, pardna! Let me tell you what this here website is all about. But first, let me tell you a little about yours truly. I am the Drug War Philosopher and founder of abolishthedea.com, one Ballard Quass by name. I am not a board-certified philosopher, but I am a lover of wisdom and so I make so bold as to use the appellation. Last time I checked, it had not been trademarked. If it makes you feel any better, though, I was offered a job as a TA in the philosophy department of Virginia Commonwealth University back in 1989, but I turned it down. I did not realize at the time that by so doing, I was giving my ideological opponents of the future an excuse to pretend that I did not exist.
Truth be told, however, my lack of tenure actually makes me MORE of a philosopher than my board-certified counterparts. Why? Because I am able to speak truths that they could only speak on pain of losing their jobs!
Take the subject of laughing gas, for instance. The FDA recently decided that they were going to regulate that substance as a "drug."1 Now, as a philosopher, I knew that it was the use of laughing gas, nitrous oxide, that had inspired the ontology of William James. I knew, moreover, that James had conjured us as philosophers to study the effects of such substances in "The Varieties of Religious Experience."
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final," wrote James, "which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.2"
So I was appalled at the FDA's efforts to treat N2O as a drug and so make it even less available to the public than it already was.
But guess what happened when I tried to alert board-certified philosophers to this pending injustice? Not one of them responded. Not one. You would have thought that at least the Harvard philosophers would have been up in arms, since James founded the Harvard Psychology Department. But not a bit of it. So I tried my luck "across the pond" and wrote individual letters on this subject to every single philosopher at Oxford University -- every single one of them -- and not one of them responded3. Not one.
And so when the FDA called for public comment on their attempts to demonize laughing gas, I was the only philosopher in the entire world who wrote in to protest the proposed action in the name of academic liberty.
And so it seems to me that my outsider status is a plus, not a negative.
Why do I care? I'm so glad that you probably asked that question!
You see, I am a 66-year-old chronic depressive who realized five years ago that the Drug War had been depriving me of godsend medicine for a lifetime and that it had shunted me off instead onto dependence-causing Big Pharma drugs, drugs for which dependence, indeed, was a feature, not a bug4. So I determined to track down the premises upon which such an inhumane policy was based and to expose the false assumptions that seemed to justify it in the minds of the masses. In other words, I decided to approach the subject of the Drug War and substance prohibition from a philosophical point of view.
I soon realized that the injustices of the Drug War were hidden in plain sight everywhere, but that I had been brainwashed by drug-war ideology not to see them. Take laughing gas again, for instance. In a sane world, nitrous oxide would be made available to the suicidal in portable kits, in the same way that we give epi pens to those with severe allergies. In fact, I soon realized that any "pick-me-up" substance could be used as an antidepressant, or at least as one part of a mood-elevating protocol. And yet the DEA scheduling system tells me that such drugs have no positive uses whatsoever, this despite the fact that some of these substances had inspired entire religions in the past and were considered panaceas by all ancient physicians. Clearly, some false assumptions were at play here that no one was acknowledging, and that is where philosophers should come in. It is their job to identify false assumptions. Sadly, however, most board-certified philosophers are asleep on the job when it comes to the Drug War. It is clearly more than their jobs are worth to speak up on this subject. This explains why 100 of America's most well-known philosophers ghosted me when I sent them a 16-page thesis on these topics: not one of them even acknowledged receipt5.
I soon found that the problematic assumptions of the Drug War did not just come from "the great unwashed," however, but that the assumptions of materialists were giving a veneer of "science" to Drug War lies6. Take the lie, for instance, that most psychoactive drugs have no positive uses whatsoever. This is clearly just a prejudiced belief based on the unspoken Christian Science assumptions of the poorly educated, but the materialists find themselves agreeing with this absurd statement, albeit for their own unique reasons. They believe that the true causes of human behavior are to be found under a microscope, and so it is okay to ignore both anecdotes and history when it comes to drug use. They are dedicated to the inhumane philosophy of Behaviorism. And so the fact that a drug cheers you up and gives you something to look forward to means nothing to them. The fact that you laugh under the influence of laughing gas means nothing to them7. They are after the Holy Grail of a materialist "cure" for your depression. They do not want to simply make you laugh and feel good. They have a much higher metaphysical ambition in mind: they want to create a "REAL" cure for you.
And what is the result of this materialist hubris? One in four American women are dependent upon Big Pharma drugs for life - while we yet outlaw drugs that have inspired entire religions.
In "The Concept of Nature," Alfred North Whitehead tells us that:
"The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us."8
The absurd consequences just noted clearly show us then that it was a category error to have placed materialists in charge of American drug policy and research in the first place. The true experts in these fields are what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, those shaman-like individuals who have used the drugs in question and who know something about human motivation and aspirations in the vocational, psychological, and spiritual realms. Materialist scientists may tell us of physical dangers associated with specific dosages of specific substances, but they have no expertise whatsoever in deciding if drug use passes a risk/benefit test for a given person. Such judgment calls must be made by the potential users themselves in light of their goals in life, their philosophy of life, and their risk tolerance given their own particular circumstances.
And so we see that materialists and Drug Warriors conspire to keep us from any obvious treatments for our depression and anxiety. As a lifelong victim of this absurd mindset, I can only say, "Thanks for nothing, guys!!!"
Nor is it just the anxious and depressed who suffer. Many of the drugs that we have outlawed can inspire spiritual states, as William James well knew. So the fact that we have outlawed drugs means we are outlawing religions - and not just a specific religion, either, but the religious impulse itself. Drug prohibition is thus unconscionably evil. It not only controls what we can think, but how and how much we can think. It is the greatest and most intimate degree of totalitarianism imaginable. The outlawing of opium, in particular, was an enormous power grab by government. It put government in charge of doling out pain relief.
As Jim Hogshire wrote in "Opium for the Masses":
"The poppy's central and indispensable position in our civilization makes access to it important, and thus forbidding public access to the poppy is staggeringly cruel."9
And then there's the racial angle of substance prohibition. Racist politicians have passed bills to remove minorities from subsidized housing if they fail to pass drug tests. This is racist in the extreme. To see this clearly, do a little thought experiment. Imagine that Congress had passed a law to give drug-tests to middle-class white women and planned to deny them Social Security payments if they tested positive for oxy or valium. One cannot imagine such a thing. Congress would never pass such a law because the Drug War is all about punishing minorities, not "respectable" white women. If that latter population misuses a drug, they are thought to demand our compassion and help - whereas we kick minority "substance abusers" out of their houses. This is horrific racism, and yet Americans are blinded to the injustice thanks to the immensely hypocritical fearmongering and substance demonization of the War on Drugs. It could not be clearer, however, that substance prohibition is ultimately just an excuse to disempower minorities, in a world in which more overt forms of racism are still considered more or less unacceptable10.
This should not come as a surprise, however. Drug prohibition has always been about cracking down on minorities. Opium was outlawed thanks to fearmongering about Chinese influence in America, cocaine thanks to fearmongering about Blacks, and marijuana thanks to fearmongering about Hispanics. Harry Anslinger helped bring about the death of Billie Holiday by harassing her over her use of heroin, not because Harry was interested in her well-being but because he wanted her to stop singing songs that made white America uncomfortable.
I hope you are starting to get a sense of why I am devoting my "twilight years" to attacking the War on Drugs. It is a hydra-headed injustice that causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some. It is the reason why America is now a dictatorship of the ignorant - because the Drug War has thrown millions of liberal minorities into jail, thus removing them from the voting rolls and ensuring the election of card-carrying Drug Warriors.
Let's think about movies, for a minute. Think of all the most violent films and scenes of torture. Most of them involve drug dealing. Sadly, these movies only reflect reality, and yet no one realizes that it is substance prohibition which brought this vicious dystopia to life! Prohibition incentivizes hugely profitable illicit drug dealing, and this empowers the amoral to be as evil as they want to be11. 60,000 have been "disappeared" in Mexico since 2006, and yet that astounding fact is never blamed on the War on Drugs, which created all that violence and death out of whole cloth! No one is willing to connect the dots12.
The Drug War and prohibition will never end, however, as long as we fail to hold it responsible for the deaths and heartache that it causes, like the drive-by shootings in America's inner cities. Today's clueless reporters attribute such violence to things like global warming and lack of jobs - to anything, in fact, but to drug prohibition, which armed the hood to the teeth in the first place.
As Anne 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."
And yet Lisa Ling produced an hour-long special on violence in Chicago, without even MENTIONING the War on Drugs13.
Do you see now why I created this website? Someone's got to say this stuff.
In a sane world, there would be Drug War programs at major universities where the assumptions and injustices of the prohibitionists would be held up to educated scorn14. One class would discuss the outlawing of religion implicit in drug criminalization, another would trace the psychiatric pill mill to the monopoly that Big Pharma received from substance prohibition, still another would show how reductive materialism lends a veneer of "science" to Drug War injustice, yet another would concentrate on the violence and hard feeling that substance prohibition has needlessly introduced into the world. There would also be courses covering the heretofore ignored fate of the millions who suffer in silence thanks to the under-prescription and/or outlawing of godsends and who are never considered as stakeholders in the drug-related debates sponsored by demagogue politicians. But for now, that's just a dream. The tide of willful ignorance has not yet turned. And so in the meantime, all I can do is set a principled example for a more educated and less brainwashed posterity.
This leads us to another unrecognized problem of the Drug War: it has censored both science and academia in general15. The scientific censorship can be seen in magazines like "Scientific American" and "Psychology Today," where they write supposedly definitive articles about emotions and consciousness while ignoring the insights that drug use provides us on such subjects. "Science News" magazine recently promoted a new kind of shock therapy for depression, which they told us was a difficult condition to treat16. But depression is difficult to treat only if we assume that psychoactive drugs do not exist. There are hundreds of drugs that could end depression for a user in a heartbeat - most notably, perhaps, the many phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin17, but also opium18 and coca19. And none of these drugs force us to risk damaging the brain to attain our ends.
I have frequently written to magazines that dogmatically ignore references to "drugs," asking them to end their censored articles with a disclaimer, such as: "The author has written in fealty to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization and has thus ignored the insights that drug use might provide on this topic." The author's conclusions are often just wrong unless one assumes such a disclaimer. But, as with most of my drug-related correspondence, I never receive a response. I guess that the editors assume that their readers are just as brainwashed by Drug War ideology as are their writers, and so no one is likely to hold the magazine responsible for their self-censorship when it comes to drugs.
And it's not just scientists who censor themselves in the age of the Drug War. Almost every non-fiction book either ignores drugs or speaks of them disparagingly - as if it makes sense to subsume a vast array of completely unique substances under the dismissive classification of "drugs."
Take the book by historian Ronald Hutton entitled "The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present.20" Like most academics, Ronald has nothing good to say about drugs. He only mentions them once in his book, when he likens them to the fatal brews created by so-called service magicians on behalf of murderers. What he does not realize, however, is that the "herbs" that he's forever referencing in his book are drugs! The word may sound gentler and more homey than "drugs," but clearly the "herbs" he mentioned were use as psychoactive agents. To claim that herbs are different than drugs, at least in this context, is like claiming that "meds" are different than "drugs." The only substantive difference, however, is that the former are promoted as good by the Drug Warrior and the latter are demonized as evil. The distinction is an irrational one based on fearmongering.
Hutton's failure to see this is unfortunate, because his whole book is about strategic fearmongering by the powers-that-be, and the Drug War is the most notorious example of strategic fearmongering in the history of the world21.
But you see what I'm up against, right? The whole world has gone mad with the prohibitionist mindset - with the possible exception of a few indigenous tribes that we westerners have not yet dispossessed and killed for failing to embrace a drug-free Christianity.
And believe me, I have only begun to list the downsides of the War on Drugs and substance prohibition. I have written hundreds of essays on drug-related topics over the last five years and I am still spoiled for choice when it comes to new angles to pursue in demonstrating the inhumanity and imbecility of the prohibitionist mindset.
The Drug Warrior has taught us to fear drug use in a way that we fear no other potentially dangerous activity on earth: not mountain climbing, not SCUBA diving, not tightrope walking, not drag-racing - not even car driving or beer drinking22. This is strategic fearmongering, however. Its goal is to deprive Americans of democratic freedoms by erecting the boogieman of "drugs," one which is nevertheless far less threatening in actuality than the many dangerous activities that we allow freely and even promote. We have the Drug War to thank for the destruction of our rights under the 4th amendment, for suppressing our freedom of religion, and for all but outlawing free and honest speech about drugs - something that is unconscionably suppressed these days by media of all kinds. We have, in fact, the Drug War to thank for Donald Trump and the end of American democracy.
And yet Americans slumber on.
It is easy to become depressed. The finish line keeps getting kicked further into the future, until one suspects that it will take a dose of Armageddon for the world to re-evaluate drugs from the indigenous point of view, to realize that they are our friends and that we should learn how to use them wisely for the benefit of individuals and communities, rather than superstitiously demonizing them a priori.
Strategic fearmongering is the enemy, and until that fact is realized, the Drug Warriors will continue destroying what's left of democracy around the world, leading to all sorts of unnecessary violence and suffering as they do so.
And Americans in particular should know better. Liquor prohibition created the Mafia, after all.
Meanwhile, any social policy that relies on ignorance rather than education should be abhorrent to freedom-loving people around the world. These are just a few of the reasons why I say that the Drug War is not just bad policy, but that it represents a wrong way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve and then some.
Conclusion
The list of problems with the Drug War mindset goes on and on and so I have to end this introduction somewhat arbitrarily. To simplify matters for the reader, however, let me close with an apothegm that says it all:
The Drug War is based on two enormous lies: 1) that there are no upsides to drug use, and 2) that there are no downsides to prohibition.
Author's Follow-up: January 28, 2025
There is an additional reason that I am devoting my twilight years to ending the hateful War on Drugs, and that is because my job in so doing is AI-proof. Artificial intelligence can never deal with the world's drug biases -- except perhaps tyrannically, by imposing its own supposedly logical "viewpoint" on the world. For the "viewpoint" of any AI app with respect to a philosophically fraught subject is a product of the algorithm that created it and the assumptions upon which that algorithm was coded. You can be sure, moreover, that coders will be under ongoing pressure to ensure that their AI algorithms are productive of politically correct output when it comes to the Drug War.
Philosophy, in general, is one field that AI can never conquer, except via ideological fiat. Such a technological triumph would always be guilty of the logical fallacy of petitio principii: it would presuppose the correctness of many of the highly debatable principles upon which such preeminence would be both justified and based.
Selected Essays by Topic
Addiction
Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the drug war censors honest talk about drug use.
In short, until we end the drug war, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.
Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both drug war ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.
Most authors today reckon without the drug war -- unless they are writing specifically about "drugs" -- and even then they tend to approach the subject in a way that clearly demonstrates that they have been brainwashed by drug war orthodoxy, even if they do not realize it themselves. That's why I write my philosophical book reviews, to point out this hypocrisy that no other philosopher in the world is pointing out. (Hey, if I thought I would ever be recognized in this lifetime, I would be humble and patient -- but it's clear to me that I'm to be largely ignored here-below until such time as I bite some serious dust, so you'll just have to put up with my horn-blowing, fair enough?)
Cocaine can be used wisely, believe it or not. You have been taught otherwise by a lifetime of censorship -- and by an FDA which dogmatically ignores all positive aspects of drug use, including increased communicative skill and endurance.
The drug war is laughable -- or it would be if the drug warriors hadn't deprived us of laughing gas, the substance that William James himself used to study alternate realities. (Gee, thanks, folks, for censoring academia. Don't worry, though, I'm not going to call you prohibitionists 'fascist bastards' on THAT account. Mom just didn't raise me like that.)_
In the age of the Drug War, psychiatrists, psychologists and doctors lack all common sense. They are dogmatically blind to the power of drugs that elate and inspire, based on their adherence to reductive materialism, which tells them that such things are not "real" cures. The human being is a biochemical machine, after all, and the scientist's job is to fix the biochemistry, not to make people merely feel good. There are hundreds of millions of victims of this mindset, but the doctors never notice them because these victims are silent: they are the ones who waste their days holed up behind locked doors, contemplating suicide.
Such a materialist mindset completely ignores the power of virtuous circles that a wide variety of pick-me-up drugs could create when properly chosen and scheduled -- on a calendar, I mean, and not by the DEA. Such a mindset completely ignores the power of anticipation. Such a mindset completely ignores the motivating power provided to these individuals of just plain being able to get things done in their lives.
The doctors have no scruples in this regard because, like all Americans, they have been taught since grade-school that drugs must be a dead end, that the creativity of humankind will never find a way to use them wisely.
The cruelty of this modern reductive paradigm is seen in the way that psychiatrists "adjust meds." They insist that the severely depressed patient get off one drug entirely before starting another. Imagine if a drug dealer insisted on the same thing. You would think that he was crazy. But the doctor knows best. He or she needs to be in total control of the variables, if only for insurance and regulatory purposes, and so it is for his or her convenience that the patient must go without anything during drug changes, thereby rendering them absolutely miserable.
Doctors praise antidepressants because they do not cause cravings, but for whom is that a benefit? For the prescribing doctor, of course, because the people whom they force to go without medicine merely suffer in a silent hell and do not pester the doctor to help them out.
This is the mindset that teaches doctors to damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than to give them the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions, as soma inspired the Vedic. This is the mindset that causes whole nations to vote in favor of letting people use drugs to die but will not let those same people use drugs that could make them want to live.
It is a complete perversion of values, all wrought by the anti-scientific, superstitious substance demonization of politically scheming politicians, populist pols who come to power by fearmongering.
This is one of the many reasons why the re-election of Trump is an existential disaster, and not just for drug policy but for democracy itself: Trump is the ultimate fearmonger.
Drug Testing is an anti-American attack on freedom. It destroyed the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. Its existence means that enemies of the drug war are not allowed to work in the United States of America. That is cruel and unusual punishment, especially when you consider that it's handed down, not by a court, but by a faceless process that has been outsourced by the government to American business.
Sure, it is acceptable to test for actual impairment in certain well-defined situations, but that is not what drug testing is about these days. Drug testing is all about rooting out good workers who happen to use substances about which colonialist politicians disapprove. It is so manifestly evil from a freedom-loving point of view that one scarcely knows how to begin arguing against it. But it's apparently what the drug warriors want: they want to leverage our fear of drugs to destroy American freedoms. They've destroyed the 4th Amendment with drug testing. Meanwhile our religious rights are being trampled by DC bureaucrats who absurdly claim to know whether our religions are "sincere" or not. And Oregon pols launched a plan in early 2024 to outlaw free speech about drugs.
WAKE UP! Drug testing and the drug war in general is all about destroying American democracy -- and democracy around the world, while we're at it. It is Christian Science Uber Alles -- even if the vast majority of drug warriors have never even heard of the drug-hating religion of Mary Baker Eddy.
Hollywood supports the war on drugs by refusing to show wise use while always depicting drug use in the worst possible light. Like all media, they refuse to show beneficial use -- and if they're not depicting drugs as dangerous dead-ends, they're at least showing use to be frivolous and dangerous. The producers kowtow to drug warrior sensibilities.
The Drug War Ghouls get busy any time a well-known figure dies prematurely, especially when the figure in question is a rock star or actor. You can just hear them whispering childishly: "Aww! Were they on any drugs? Were they on any drugs?" The presumption behind such tittering is that drugs are evil and can only lead to death and destruction. Of course, those who hold this viewpoint always forget that the drug war does everything it can to make such outcomes of drug use a self-fulfilling prophecy by discouraging education about safe use and by ensuring corrupt and uncertain drug supply with their eternal kneejerk prohibition. This is all completely inexcusable. The drug warriors cause death. They are the villains. They are the criminals. Take the so-called opiate crisis. Young people were not dying en masse from opioids when such drugs were legal in the United States. It took prohibition to bring that about.
Euthanasia and Shock Therapy in the age of the Drug War
It is bizarre that we should have "the right to die" in a world that outlaws drugs. That means, in effect, that we have a right to die, but we do not have the right to use drugs that might make us want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world -- and yet which remain unaccountably invisible to almost everyone, including almost all proponents of the aforesaid euthanasia.
I have written dozens of essays about antidepressants and the Drug War, but it is important to read this one first, for it contains the most up-to-date info on my battle to get off such drugs. This reading order is important because I declared premature victory against the SNRI called Effexor in recent essays, only to discover that the drug is far more insidious than I gave it credit for. It turns out withdrawing, at least for me, eventually led to deep feelings of abject despair, far greater than the depression for which I started taking the "med" in the first place.
The frustrating thing is, these feelings could be combatted by a host of drugs that we have outlawed in the name of our anti-scientific and anti-patient war on drugs. That much is just psychological common sense. But we have been taught to believe that there are no positive uses for opium, nor for cocaine, nor for coca, nor for MDMA, nor for laughing gas, nor for peyote, nor for the hundreds of inspiring phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, etc. etc. etc.
The truth is, rather, that Drug Warriors (and the millions whom they have brainwashed) do not WANT there to be positive uses for such drugs. No, they want me to "keep taking my meds" instead and so to enrich their investment portfolios in the pharmaceutical sector. Meanwhile, those without a vested financial interest have been taught that antidepressants are "scientific" and so they cannot understand my desire to get off them. They cannot understand the hell of being turned into a patient for life and having to make regular expensive and humiliating pilgrimages to psychiatrists (who are half one's own age) to bare one's soul for the purpose of obtaining an expensive prescription for a drug that numbs one's brain rather than inspiring it - and a drug which seems to counteract, dampen and/or repress most of the positive effects that I might have otherwise obtained by the few semi-legal alternatives to antidepressants, such as psilocybin and ayahuasca.
But it is just psychological common sense that I could withdraw successfully from Effexor with the advised use of a comprehensive pharmacy, including but not limited to the demonized substances listed above. But materialist science is not interested in common sense. And so they tell me that such drug use has not been proven to "work." But materialist doctors are not experts in what motivates me as a living, breathing, unique individual. The heart has its own reasons that reductionist science cannot understand. If I could look forward, at this moment, to relaxing with an opium pipe tonight, my mood would improve NOW, not just tonight. I would have something to look forward to. I would not feel the need to reach for that bottle full of Effexor pills that I was hoping to foreswear. Likewise, if I could use a drug to laugh and "touch the hand of God" (as with laughing gas and phenethylamines respectively), I could laugh at the pangs of despair that Effexor tries to throw my way.
Science's eternal response to such ideas is: "There is no proof that such things work!"
No, nor will there ever be in the age of the Drug War, in which such common sense use is punished by long jail terms and would never be favorably publicized, even if successful, since America's prime imperative in the age of the Drug War is to demonize psychoactive medicines, under the absurd assumption-laden idea that to talk honestly about drugs is to encourage their use.
Well, we SHOULD be encouraging their use in cases where they actually work, in cases, for instance, when they prevent guys like myself from killing themselves thanks to the knowledge that they are a bounden slave to the combined forces of the Drug War and Big Pharma's pill mill.
Besides, there is no proof that hugging works, but we do not need Dr. Spock of Star Trek to launch a study into that issue: we all know that hugging works by bringing two souls together both physically and spiritually. We do not need a map of brain chemistry to figure this out: the proof is extant, the proof is in the pudding.
But I haven't given up yet despite the setback in my most recent plan. I'm going to search the world for a place where I can get off antidepressants in a way that makes some psychological common sense.
Right now, all I see in terms of resources are a bunch of companies who, for large fees, will help me go cold turkey on antidepressants., or companies that claim to have found the right combination of legal herbal formulas that should make withdrawal easier. But to me, these are all what Percy Shelley would call "frail spells," concocted under the watchful eye of the Drug Warrior to make sure that nothing potent and obviously effective will get added to the mix. In fact, if a space alien came to earth and asked what sort of psychoactive drugs were outlawed, one could honestly answer: "Anything that obviously works."
Meanwhile, drug laws make it impossible for me to visit psychiatrists remotely online, requiring me instead to physically visit my doctors, thereby limiting rural residents like myself to accessing hayseed psychiatrists whose one area of expertise seems to be the writing of prescriptions for antidepressants. Talk to them about anything else, and their eyes glaze over. "That's all unproven," they'll say, "Or, no, we have yet to fully study such things." As if we have to study in order to realize that feeling good helps and can have positive psychological effects.
I'm sure that part of the problem with my withdrawal scheme is that I tried to get off the drug too quickly. But I only tried that because I can find no doctor who will compound the drug for me in a way that makes psychological common sense, namely, with daily miniscule reductions in dosage. My current psychiatrist told me that such compounding was unheard of and that I should drop doses by 37.5 mg at a time, since that is the lowest dose that the pharmaceutical companies create. He said I could start "counting pill beads" once I am down to a 37.5 mg daily dose if I wanted to taper still further.
Count pill beads? Surely that's why compounding pharmacists exist: to count pill beads. (UPDATE: I was wrong about this. See my article on "Tapering for Jesus.")
I did find a compounding company that said it could compound Effexor in the way that I desire. But there's a big catch: they have to receive a prescription for that purpose. And I can find no doctor in the world who is willing to write me one. Even those who sympathize with my plight want me to become their full-time patient before they will even consider writing such a prescription.
So those who warned me against trying to get off Effexor were right in a way: it is extraordinarily difficult. But they feel to realize WHY this is so. It is not just because Effexor is a toxic drug, but also because the drug war has outlawed everything that could help me get off it.
This is why those pundits who sign off on the psychiatric pill mill are clueless about the huge problem with the war on drugs: the way it humiliates and disempowers millions. For it turns out that the phrase "No hope in dope" is true after all, but only when the dope in question is modern antidepressants.
OCTOBER 2024
Here are some of the many articles I have written about the philosophy of getting off drugs. Bear in mind that I am in the process of getting off Effexor myself and am exploring the power of "drugs to fight drugs" in so doing. And this is not a straightforward path given the sweeping limits that are imposed by drug law. So the question of exactly what might work (and how and when, etc.) is still wide open and I am advocating nothing, except the common sense notion that we can benefit from euphoria and mood boosts, yes, and that "drugs can be used to fight drugs," and in a safe way too -- a way that will prove far safer than prohibition, which continues to bring about daily deaths from drive-by shootings and unregulated product while causing civil wars overseas.
I guess what I am saying here is, this site is not purporting to offer medical advice. I avoid using such wording, however, because so many authors refuse to talk honestly about drugs, especially about positive drug use, for fear of being seen as giving medical advice, and this, of course, is just how drug warriors want matters to remain. It lets them shut down free speech about drugs.
Besides, I reject the idea that materialist doctors are the experts when it comes to how we think and feel about life. The best they can do as materialist is to tell us the potential physical risks of using holistically-operating drugs, but individuals are the experts on what motivates them in life, on their own particular hopes and dreams and on what risks they deem necessary to obtain them, to pursue happiness, that is, which objective our legislators outlawed when they outlawed all substances that can help facilitate happiness in the properly motivated and educated individual.
The real answer is not for authors to give groveling apologies for being honest, however: the real answer is for kids to be educated about the basics of wise substance use -- and for America to come to grips with the fact that we will always be surrounded by "drugs" -- and that the goal should be to ensure safe use, not to keep endlessly arresting minorities and removing them from the voting rolls on behalf of the clinically insane idea that we should outlaw mother nature to protect our kids -- and this in a purportedly Christian country whose very deity told us that his creation was good.
Laughing gas is the substance that inspired William James' philosophy about human perception and the nature of ultimate reality. "No account of the universe in its totality," wrote James, "can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." And yet disregard them we must because the drug war has outlawed all substances that help create such states. This is a veto on human progress. It is also psychological common sense that laughing gas could be used to prevent suicides and treat depression -- but materialist science ignores common sense. This is why they need to butt out when it comes to psychoactive medicine. They are no experts on emotional states, except in their own dogmatic materialist minds. It is a category error to place materialists in charge of our thoughts and feelings. We actually know what works for ourselves. And if there are any experts in the field, they are not materialists, they are pharmacologically savvy empaths, what the indigenous world calls shaman.
The media have done all they can to support the drug war by holding the use of outlawed substances to safety standards that are never applied to any other risky activity on earth, meanwhile ignoring the fact that prohibition encourages ignorance and leads to contaminated drug supply. Thousands of American young people die each month because of unregulated supply and ignorance, not from drugs themselves.
They also support the drug war by ignoring it. Just read any article on inner-city shootings or on the extraordinary violence that is forever breaking out in South America. It's all related to the fact that America, in its arrogance, taught the world to blame plant medicines for social problems. And there was no excuse. Liquor prohibition had already created the American Mafia: and yet the media sees no connection between the drug war and the violence judging by their news coverage.
They also have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's fentanyl... Movies are now personifying these drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs that it's sad -- and the media can take much of the blame.
Materialist scientists collaborate with the drug war by refusing to see glaringly obvious drug benefits. They acknowledge only those benefits that they believe are visible under a microscope. The Hindu religion would not exist today had materialist scientists held soma to such a standard. But that's the absurd pass to which prohibition eventually brings us in a society wherein materialist science is the new god: scientists are put in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to imagine new religions or not.
This materialist bias is inspired in turn by behaviorism, the anti-indigenous doctrine of JB Watson that makes the following inhumane claim:
"Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic."
According to this view, the hopes and the dreams of a "patient" are to be ignored. Instead, we are to chart their physiology and brain chemistry.
JB Watson's Behaviorism is a sort of Dr. Spock with a vengeance. It is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it would seem to justify all their inability to deal with human emotions. Unfortunately, the attitude has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive usage reports or historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide how they are doing. It is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with drug war ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants.
That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a bar chart.
The FDA approves of brain-damaging shock therapy but will not approve MDMA for soldiers with PTSD. This is the same FDA that signs off on the psychiatric pill mill upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life. This is the same FDA that approves Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself! (Can somebody say "follow the money"?)
In 1987, the jackbooted DEA stomped onto Thomas Jefferson's estate of Monticello and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything that he stood for politically speaking. And yet the Thomas Jefferson Foundation pretends to this day that the raid never took place. They give no explanation to their visitors as to why the Foundation sold out the man whom they were meant to be honoring. And so all their visitors get a sanitized version of history, designed to let Americans feel that everything's fine, that there is no drug war, and life goes on. What an absolute disgrace, this so-called Thomas Jefferson Foundation. They should remove all the signs in Albemarle County that read "Hallowed Ground" -- because those grounds have been dishonored by the Foundation itself. THEY SOLD OUT THOMAS JEFFERSON -- and are now so pusillanimous and cowardly that they will not even admit that the raid ever took place -- a raid to confiscate flowers, for god's sake.
I wrote a letter to the head of Guest Services at Monticello and he responded: "I'm sorry you do not think that we are doing enough to explain the DEA raid." I responded in turn: "But you are doing NOTHING to explain the raid! You are pretending it never happened!" I then asked the director of guest services to correct me if I was wrong -- and he had nothing further to say. What absolute schmucks! Jefferson is spinning right now in his thoroughly dishonored grave.
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal in the United States. It took drug laws to accomplish that. By outlawing opium and refusing to teach safe use, the drug warrior has subjected users to contaminated product of uncertain dosage, thereby causing thousands of unnecessary overdoses.
Currently, I myself am chemically dependent on a Big Pharma drug for depression, that I have to take every day of my life. There is no rational reason why I should not be able to smoke opium daily instead. It is only drug-war fearmongering that has demonized that choice -- for obvious racist, economic and political reasons.
You have been lied to your entire life about opium. In fact, the drug war has done its best to excise the very word from the English vocabulary. That's why the Thomas Jefferson Foundation refuses to talk about the 1987 raid on Monticello in which Reagan's DEA confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking.
It's hard to learn the truth about opium because the few books on the subject demonize it rather than discuss it dispassionately. Take the book by John Halpern: "Opium: How an ancient flower shaped and poisoned our world." It's a typical Drug Warrior title. A flower did not poison our world, John: our world was poisoned by bad laws: laws that were inspired first and foremost by racism, followed closely by commercial interests, politics, misinformation and lies.
To learn something approaching to "the truth about Opium," read the book of that name by William Brereton, written to defend the time-honored panacea from the uninformed and libelous attacks of Christian missionaries.
The Drug War violates religious freedom by putting bureaucrats in charge of deciding if a religion is 'sincere' or not. That is so absurd that one does not know whether to laugh or cry. No one in government is capable of determining whether the inner states that I achieve with psychoactive medicine are religious or not. This is why Milton Friedman was so wrong when he said in 1972 that there are good people on both sides of the drug war debate. WRONG! There are those who are more than ready to take away my religious liberty and those who are not. If the former wish to be called 'good,' they will first need a refresher course in American democracy and religious freedom. They need to renounce their Christian Science theocracy and let folks like myself worship using the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions in the past. Until they do that, do not expect me to praise the very people who have launched an inquisition against my form of experiencing the divine.
The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
I knew all along that Measure 110 in Oregon was going to be blamed for the problems that the drug war causes. Drug warriors never take responsibility, despite all the blood that they have on their hands.
Democratic societies need to outlaw prohibition for many reasons, the first being the fact that prohibition removes millions of minorities from the voting rolls, thereby handing elections to fascists and insurrectionists.
The drug war follows me wherever I go. I was just researching "fun facts" about dogs, and http://petpedia.co told me that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as... searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?
First America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own pain by rendering opium illegal. Then the psychiatric field treats the resultant epidemic of depression by damaging the patient's brain, i.e., by treating depressed patients with shock therapy.
Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!
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It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
Alcohol is a drug in liquid form. If drug warriors want to punish people who use drugs, they should start punishing themselves.
This is the mentality for today's materialist researcher when it comes to "laughing gas." He does not care that it merely cheers folks up. He wants to see what is REALLY going on with the substance, using electrodes and brain scans.
Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.
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, Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com published on January 18, 2025 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)
ell, pull up a chair and sit down, pardna! Let me tell you what this here website is all about. But first, let me tell you a little about yours truly. I am the Drug War Philosopher and founder of abolishthedea.com, one Ballard Quass by name. I am not a board-certified philosopher, but I am a lover of wisdom and so I make so bold as to use the appellation. Last time I checked, it had not been trademarked. If it makes you feel any better, though, I was offered a job as a TA in the philosophy department of Virginia Commonwealth University back in 1989, but I turned it down. I did not realize at the time that by so doing, I was giving my ideological opponents of the future an excuse to pretend that I did not exist.
You have been reading an article entitled, Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com published on January 18, 2025 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)