How the drug war has turned modern philosophy into pseudoscience
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 16, 2024
Author's Follow-up:
February 07, 2026
Philosophers should be "all over" the Claire Brosseau story published December 2025 in the New York Times1. Yet I am the only philosopher to point out that the subject of assisted suicide for the depressed cannot be discussed intelligently without discussing the policy of drug prohibition without which such assisted suicide would not even be necessary. In my view, doctors have a moral duty to protest drug prohibition -- on the grounds that it prevents Claire from treating her own health -- so much so that it seems to render her very death necessary. The ongoing silence of doctors and pundits on this topic makes me ask myself: how bad do the effects of drug prohibition have to become before the medical establishment will actually ACKNOWLEDGE them? And what is their motivation for continued silence? Could it have something to do with the fact that, in their heart of hearts, they know that drug prohibition is paying the bills and keeping the lights on in their clinics and labs?
Not only do drugs exist that could help Claire to die peaceably at home without permission of her government or doctors, but there are also drugs that could make her want to live -- although she has been brainwashed since childhood by Drug War censorship into believing as a matter of faith that such drugs do not exist. Consider, for just one example, these user reports of the phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the early 1990s2:
I felt that the experience continued for many days, and I feel that it is one of the most profound and deep learning experiences I have had.
Excellent feelings, tremendous opening of insight and understanding, a real awakening
I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing.
It is bizarre and cruel even to give Claire the right to assisted suicide while not simultaneously at least protesting the drug prohibition which made that suicide seemingly necessary in the first place!
And then there's laughing gas, the substance that William James urged philosophers to use in order to investigate the nature of reality itself. One common "side effect" of that drug is that it makes the user feel like they are in heaven itself. But if the Claire Brosseau's of the world doubt its efficacy, they should bear in mind that the use of nitrous oxide changed James's entire philosophy when it comes to the nature of reality, convincing him that there are multiple kinds of consciousness and that they all have relevance to our daily lives:
"One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. " --William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature3
But then James's use of laughing gas is not even mentioned in his online biography at his alma mater, Harvard University, which is just another of the many reasons why I say that we are living in a new dark ages when it comes to scholarship and learning.
The Essay proper
I have already explained in many essays how today's psychology reckons without the Drug War4. It ignores the insights that would be gained by taking drug effects seriously and so ends up disastrously shunting the depressed and anxious off onto dependence-causing Big Pharma 56 meds while dogmatically ignoring the obvious powers of a long list of drugs to elate and inspire. This mindset also helps justify the use of shock therapy for the severely depressed when such victims could have otherwise been cheered up in real-time with drugs like MDMA 7 , coca, and even opium - the nightly smoking of which is surely preferable to having one's brain fried8! Yet drug researchers like Robert Glatter profess to be uncertain whether even laughing gas could actually help the depressed9.
Could laughing gas help me, Robert? You're kidding me, right?
Such obfuscating materialists do not even dare to ask if the daily chewing of the coca leaf could help chronic depressives like myself10. It is more than their jobs are worth for them to ask such questions. For academics today are under the thumb of the Drug Warrior and know better than to promote treatments that use demonized substances, which the Drug Warrior insists can have no positive uses for anybody, anywhere, ever. To insist otherwise is to kiss your research funding goodbye.
To repeat, then, modern psychology reckons without the Drug War and this has had disastrous results. I know this all too well, as this oversight has helped to justify draconian drug laws that have deprived me for a lifetime now of the godsend mood medicine that grows at my very feet.
And yet philosophy does the exact same thing. Modern philosophy also reckons without the Drug War. It too ignores the insights that would be gained by taking drug effects seriously.
Consider the conclusion of Immanuel Kant , that we can know nothing about the noumenal world, about "what is really out there," and that we have but one shared experience of the sensible world as mediated through the categories of thought11. Well, guess what? William James himself begged to differ. Under the influence of nitrous oxide, he came to the conclusion that our everyday "sober" consciousness which Kant is presupposing here "is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.12" James concluded, moreover, that "No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.13"
Yet disregard them we must, thanks to Drug War prohibition. We must hand the laurels in this philosophical contest to Immanuel Kant 14 because William James has been disqualified from even running in this race. Kant is right because the government says so. And are our philosophers pushing back against this prima facie censorship, especially now that the FDA has nitrous oxide in its sights as a drug to be demonized, the substance that inspired James's visions in the first place? Are they up in arms, petitioning the FDA on behalf of the freedom of inquiry and human progress in general?
To the contrary, most philosophers today seem to think that drug use can have nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy. In fact, the Harvard website does not even mention laughing gas in their biography of William James, the founder of their school of psychology and the first man in America to teach a course on that subject15. They have expunged James's "drug use" from history, just as most books about Benjamin Franklin refrain from telling the reader about his penchant for opium 16 . In the age of the Drug War, even our facts about the past must conform to Drug War orthodoxy, namely, the idea that psychoactive drug use can have no benefits for anybody, anywhere, ever.
This oversight is becoming increasingly inexcusable, however, as researchers involved in the psychedelic renaissance continue to remove the many layers of stigma that the racist Drug Warrior has strategically attached to psychoactive drug use over the last 100-plus years of substance demonization. But neither psychologist nor philosopher have yet to awaken from their "dogmatic slumbers." In fact, I have written on this subject to hundreds of American philosophers (real snail mail) over the last five years and never heard back from one of them17. Not one of them. I wrote to all the philosophers at Oxford about the UK's attempts to outlaw laughing gas, urging them to oppose the measure as an attack on academic inquiry, and no one responded18. Not one of them.
This is why I have concluded that the world is going through a new self-imposed Dark Ages, one in which science has willingly devolved into pseudoscience in order to conform to the requirements of racist Drug Warriors, who insist that drug use must always be thought of as a meaningless dead end.
Author's Follow-up: December 11, 2024
A note about the Inca use of the coca plant. It is true that coca candies and teas (etc.) are readily available for tourists in Peru; however, that does not mean you will actually have the Inca experience when consuming the same. The Inca -- and their descendants to this very day -- chew the leaf in large bunches and continuously, thereby extracting the invigorating alkaloids from the leaf, an effect that can at best be suggested or hinted at by candy chewing and the like.
Author's Follow-up: December 20, 2024
There are very few Americans who recognize that they have been brainwashed from childhood when it comes to "drugs." They have been taught to feel a certain way about them and to not ask any pesky questions. To paraphrase William Shirer in his book about Hitler:
"No one who has not lived for years in a DRUG WAR SOCIETY can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."
If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.
Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.
People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.
If we cared about the elderly in 'homes', we would be bringing in shamanic empaths and curanderos from Latin America to help cheer them up and expand their mental abilities. We would also immediately decriminalize the many drugs that could help safely when used wisely.
The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.
Before anyone receives shock therapy -- or the right to assisted suicide -- they should have the option to start using opium or cocaine daily -- in fact, any drug that makes them feel that life is worth living again.
"Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?
The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.
There are no recreational drugs. Even laughing gas has rational uses because it gives us a break from morbid introspection. There are recreational USES of drugs, but the term "recreational" is often used to express our disdain for users who go outside the healthcare system.
Most substance withdrawal would be EASY if drugs were re-legalized and we could use any substance we wanted to mitigate negative psychological effects.
Not only do drugs exist that could help Claire to die peaceably at home without permission of her government or doctors, but there are also drugs that could make her want to live -- although she has been brainwashed since childhood by Drug War censorship into believing as a matter of faith that such drugs do not exist. Consider, for just one example, these user reports of the phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the early 1990s2:
To repeat, then, modern psychology reckons without the Drug War and this has had disastrous results. I know this all too well, as this oversight has helped to justify draconian drug laws that have deprived me for a lifetime now of the godsend mood medicine that grows at my very feet.
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