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The New Dark Ages

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

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




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?


Ancient Greek holding lantern in front of benighted university. 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

man straightening bowtie for his tuxedo



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 5 6 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.


Medieval castle in stormy weather: text in foreground: 21st-century AmericaTo 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

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


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

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


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."












Notes for essay entitled The New Dark Ages: How the drug war has turned modern philosophy into pseudoscience:

1: Nolen, Stephanie, and Chloë Ellingson. 2025. “Claire Brosseau Wants to Die. Will Canada Let Her?” The New York Times, December 29, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/health/assisted-death-mental-illness-canada.html. (up)
2: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
3: “The Varieties of Religious Experience : William James : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2021. Internet Archive. 2021. https://archive.org/details/the-varieties-of-religious-experience_202109. (up)
4: The Naive Psychology of the Drug War DWP (up)
5: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
6: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
7: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
8: Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War DWP (up)
9: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
10: Coca and its Therapeutic Application, Third Edition Mariani, Angelo, Gutenberg.org, 1896 (up)
11: The Critique of Pure Reason Kant, Immanuel, Project Gutenberg, 1781 (up)
12: In other words, there are not just noumena and phenomena -- there are perhaps an innumerable number of worlds in between. You might say that the very idea that we can presuppose one shared noumenal world common to us all as rational agents presupposes a western viewpoint of psychoactive substances -- according to which we can either be drunk or we can be seeing the world soberly -- whereas the indigenous metaphysic would claim that we can see reality more clearly in certain carefully cultivated intermediate states that lie between what the western world would simplistically categorize as either "high" or "sober." (up)
13: James, William. 2016. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820.The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience. (up)
14: What drug use could tell us about the rationalist triumphalism of Immanuel Kant DWP (up)
15: William James Harvard University, Boston, 2024 (up)
16: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
17: I asked 100 American philosophers what they thought about the Drug War DWP (up)
18: William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Scientists cannot tell us if using drugs is worth the risk any more than they can tell us if free climbing is worth the risk, or horseback riding or parkour.

Cocaine use is a blessing for some, just a little fun for most, and a curse for a few. Just like any other risky activity. We need to educate people about drugs rather than endlessly arresting them for attempting to improve their mental power!

I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.

Today's Washington Post reports that "opioid pills shipped" DROPPED 45% between 2011 and 2019..... while fatal overdoses ROSE TO RECORD LEVELS! Prohibition is PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.

If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.

Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.

Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.

America won't be grown up until we start blaming drug misuse on people and/or policies rather than on drugs.

The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.

Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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