The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War

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The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 2, 2021

If an American has a negative response to an anti-depressant, we sigh and say, "Oh, dear, they had a bad reaction." We ascribe no blame to the Big Pharma anti-depressant. The bad reaction is the fault of the user: their system simply fails to respond appropriately to the drug in question.

Update: May 17, 2025

If an American has a negative response to a psychoactive plant medicine, we snarl and say, "Oh, dear, that is an evil drug!"

It's this kind of muddled thinking about substances that makes the Drug War the great philosophical problem of our time, because the Drug War is propped up and supported on a framework of bogus hypocritical assumptions like this.

Take the old canard of the "crutch," the idea that we should not use Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines because they are crutches.

Was coca a crutch when it helped HG Wells and Jules Verne write great stories? Was opium ¹ a crutch when it increased Benjamin Franklin's creativity and friendliness? Were psychedelics a crutch when they provided Plato with metaphysical insights at the Eleusinian mysteries ²? Was the natural substance called Soma a crutch when it single-handedly (or single-plantedly) inspired the Vedic religion?

If any substances are "crutches," they are the tranquilizing meds of Big Pharma , which, since the introduction of lithium, have been designed, not to help folks achieve self-actualization in life, but to render them more docile and accepting of the status quo. (When Antonio Moniz won the Nobel Prize for lobotomy, it was the nurses who were cheering, not the patients.) In this way, Big Pharma ³ ⁴ meds are crutches designed to make the patient forget about the need to walk on their own two feet.

Author's Follow-up:

May 17, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

The Drug War is the great philosophical problem of our time. And yet most philosophers are in denial. I am the only philosopher on the planet who formally protested to the FDA about its plans to treat laughing gas ⁵ as a "drug."⁶ The use of nitrous oxide inspired the ontology of William James. He conjured philosophers to use the substance to investigate the nature of reality. And yet our government has outlawed such research by making the gas in question harder to use than ever. Laughing gas was already shamefully unavailable to the depressed as a practical matter. In a sane and compassionate world, we would provide laughing-gas kits to the severely depressed just as we provide epi pens to those with severe allergies -- but Americans actually prefer that the depressed kill themselves rather than use substances that have been outlawed by racist politicians.

And what is the "justification" for outlawing such substances? The fact that white American young people have found ways to use the substances dangerously. These are the same white American young people whom the prohibitionists refuse to teach about safe drug use! And now they are going to tell all demographics in the world that they cannot use these substances because said substances might harm the local white kids whom America refuses to educate.

Americans are so outrageously presumptuous -- and so blind to all the stakeholders in their drug debates. They have no interest in the needs of those suffering silently behind closed doors. They have no interest in academic freedom. They have no interest in the drive-by shootings that drug prohibition has brought to inner city neighborhoods. They have no interest in the fact that drug prohibition has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America. They just want to crack down on the drug-related incidents that are highlighted in our financially suborned media -- the problems that they themselves have caused by refusing to educate our children about the fact that they live in a world full of psychoactive substances, not thanks to drug dealers, but rather thanks to God himself, or to Mother Nature, or to evolution, etc. That's a fact of life. It behooves us as free and supposedly scientific individuals to learn about these substances and to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity rather than to demonize and fear them. Meanwhile, we must understand that shouting phrases like "Fentanyl ⁷ kills" is exactly like shouting "Fire bad!" -- all such statements promote the idea that we should fear potentially dangerous substances rather than learning how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.

Fentanyl

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
2: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
3: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
4: 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)
5: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
6: Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas DWP (up)
7: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)

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The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.

Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal": "More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place." Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).

MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. These are the people who think Electro Shock Therapy is not used often enough! What sick priorities.

This is why I call the drug war 'fanatical Christian Science.' People would rather have grandpa die than to let him use laughing gas or coca or opium or MDMA, etc. etc.

Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.

Videos about science and psilocybin are funny. They show nerds trying to catch up with common sense.

There would be almost no relapses for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.

I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.

The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.

Even if the FDA approved MDMA today, it would only be available for folks specifically pronounced to have PTSD by materialist doctors, as if all other emotional issues are different problems and have to be studied separately. That's just ideological foot-dragging.

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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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