The thin line between honesty and fearmongering in the age of the War on Drugs

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The thin line between honesty and fearmongering in the age of the War on Drugs

a review of essay number 11 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 28, 2025

The following remarks are part of a series of responses to the essays contained in the 2001 book "Hallucinogens: A Reader," edited by Charles Grob ¹. The comments below are in response to essay number 11: "The Psychedelic Vision at the Turn of the Millennium: A Discussion with Andrew Weil, M.D."

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August 16, 2025

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I wrote this essay less than two months ago, and yet I already feel the need to clarify and stress a point that I made therein: namely, that human behavior is the result of a vast array of variables (of a biochemical, psychosocial, and genetic nature) -- and so we should resist the temptation to which Weil succumbs below, the temptation, that is, to consider drugs as all-powerful causes of specific human behavior. Weil muses that he may have pursued different interests in life had he used mescaline early in his life, implying that this change would have been objectively detrimental to his writing career. Maybe. Maybe not. But this sort of facile speculation about counter-factual outcomes is to be discouraged for at least two reasons: First because it is a favorite M.O. of the Drug Warriors to argue in this way. They love to abstract drug use from all other motivating forces in life and to ascribe all sorts of negative power to such use in and of itself, without reference to any context whatsoever. More importantly, however, our lives as human beings are determined by the complex interaction of a wide array of factors, and it is therefore presumptuous to suppose that one single input (like the one-time use of a given drug) would prove to be decisive in and of itself.

Besides, for all Weil knows, he would have lived a far richer life had he used mescaline early in his career. Such things are unknowable for the simple reason that life is complex. Outcomes result from the complex interaction of a wide variety of factors. In pursuit of their pretentious and hubristic claim to omniscience, the drug-bashing materialist leapfrogs this complexity by studying only quantifiable effects of drugs, thereby ignoring precisely everything that matters in life from the point of view of the users. Just so does Weil leapfrog this pesky complexity in order to implicitly level a completely speculative charge against the use of mescaline. Such metaphysical musings might not bother me were America at peace with drugs -- but Weil forgets that we are at war: or rather that our government is waging a war against drug users. Considered in this context, it is unhelpful for Weil to provide our enemies with ammunition by speculating about the existence of problematic outcomes that he can know nothing about, no, not even in theory. In a free world, such speculation might be harmless enough and even productive of philosophical discussion -- but in the age of the Drug War, such speculation can only give comfort to the enemy by confirming them in their childish practice of judging drug use outside of all context.

Let me add here that I myself experienced the effects of a powerful psychedelic in my youth, and that use was far from deleterious. That experience gave me an epiphany that has abided with me ever since: namely, the fact that the Drug Warrior is completely uninterested in my mental health. I suddenly saw via such drug use that the mind-numbing antidepressants ² upon which I had been placed as a teenager were a BAD JOKE. Those latter drugs clouded my mind and tranquilized me -- whereas the psychedelic that I had ingested embraced me, as it were, with a sort of beatific inspiration and vision! That teenage drug use taught me -- through feelings rather than words -- that the goal of modern depression treatment was to make me a regular customer of dependence-causing Big Pharma drugs, that it had nothing to do with helping me to thrive in life! I have spent the rest of that life trying to convince my brainwashed state-siders of that fact -- with very little apparent success, I might add, thanks no doubt to the full-court press of drug propaganda with which Americans are assailed since childhood, above all in the form of the ruthless censorship of all positive reports of drug use from modern media of every kind.

One final note: Weil reckons without the Drug War when he speculates about the past. He essentially tells us that:

"In a free world, I might have used mescaline prematurely."

He fails to realize that, in a free world, he would have also been able to use coca and opiates and phenethylamines -- and hundreds of other drugs -- on a wise basis. And so, if mescaline did indeed tend to impede his motivation to authorship (as Weil rather rashly speculates), then he would have had access to the use of other drugs that could have modified or even reversed that effect, should such modification or reversal have seemed expedient to this hypothetical version of Weil about which the doctor is speculating here.

BEGIN ORIGINAL ESSAY

During the chat session that constitutes this essay, Grob says:

"I wonder at what point might our profession start to open up to the potentials that psychedelics might have in terms of helping us understand health, understand illness and understand new methods to intervene."

The more important question is: when is his profession going to open up to the potentials that ALL psychoactive drugs have for helping humanity?

If one were pessimistic, the question might even be: Will the profession EVER open up to the potentials that ALL psychoactive drugs have for helping humanity?

I know at least three close relations who are on the brink of suicide at this moment because of severe depression -- and yet the medical profession would never think of using drugs that inspire and elate in order to cheer them up, this despite the fact that entire religions have been founded based on the effects of such drugs. This is the real problem with American healthcare: not just the outlawing of psychedelics, but the outlawing of drugs in general.

This total lack of real treatment of depression has all been brought about by fearmongering about drugs. This is why I am very wary of statements by Weil that seem to give comfort to the prohibitionist enemy. He speculates that he might have prematurely dropped out of the medical profession had he used mescaline earlier in his life, and he blames this on the mescaline itself, implying that there is a one-size-fits-all thing known as the "mescaline experience." But how can this be when mescaline gave Sartre ³ visions of hell while it gave Huxley visions of heaven? Moreover, there are endless details that inspire action or inaction in life -- and as powerful as mescaline might be, it works in conjunction with other givens in the user's life, not in spite of them.

I get it, though: these substances can have profound psychological effects and one must be prepared for that. But in the age of the drug-demonizing Drug War, we should never make such admissions without explicitly specifying that education is the answer, not prohibition -- education and the promulgation of best use practices for users based on their circumstances in life. We should also explicitly acknowledge that all risky activities will have victims. If we want mental freedom, we have to accept the occasional drug-using "waster" as a fact of life -- just as we do the occasional alcoholic and the occasional pathological gambler. Only when we talk about drug use do we adopt the absurd notion that it's "one strike, you're out" when it comes to downsides. These implicit prejudices must be "outed" and rebutted, not naively ignored in the false belief that the drug debate is rational in nature. It is rather all about power politics designed to brand certain substances as evil for the purposes of disempowering one's political enemies.

Meanwhile, Weil is not the only pundit who can imagine use scenarios. I can see the informed and strategic use of mescaline preventing suicide, I can see it helping to get a life on course. In fact, I could guarantee Weil right now that I could successfully get off the Effexor ⁴ that I am trying to kick with the help of such drugs. There is no doubt about it. This is psychological common sense and does not need to be verified by a behaviorist looking at my biochemistry under a microscope.

When presented without such qualifications, Weil's fearful musings give comfort and support to drug prohibitionists, who need only find one merely potential downside to drug use (such as the highly fraught and speculative one with which Weil provides them) in order to justify (in their own eyes, at least) the demonstrably deadly policy of drug prohibition.

CONCLUSION

Grob and Weil should be fretting about the unnecessary depression and suicides brought about by drug prohibition in general. The crack down on psychedelics is just one result of that flawed approach to mind and mood medicine and cannot be meaningfully addressed outside of that broader context.

MENTAL AND PHYSICAL HEALING

On a positive note, Weil makes the completely overlooked point that the use of psychedelics can help change things in the real world, it can help us unlearn physical illness. (Psychoactive drugs in general can accomplish this, by the way, and for a wide variety of psychological reasons that modern behaviorists are loath to acknowledge --as the smoking of opium ⁵ , for instance, can "cure" the common cold -- but this is a topic for another essay.) Weil claims to have overcome his allergy to cats with the help of psychedelics and tells us that such use eventually rectified his body's inability to tan. These stories are quite credible. As Paul Stamets reports in "Fantastic Fungi," his consumption of psilocybin mushrooms as a teenager put an end to his problem stuttering as a child. Even materialist science is learning the value of psilocybin use in fighting diabetes. The outcome of Stamets' drug use is especially significant here. Imagine if we had outlawed psychedelics based on Weil's own fears. Stamets would be stuttering to this day -- and probably also be using a daily antidepressant under the psychiatrist's purely metaphysical claim that he was thereby treating "the real problem."

Prohibitionists tell themselves that their laws are keeping vulnerable white young people off of potentially dangerous substances. This is a dubious claim, however, since the outlawing of drugs does not prevent use but rather makes that use far more problematic than it need otherwise have been, especially when we refuse "on principle" to teach safe use. Even if Drug Warriors do prevent a white American young person from using mescaline in response to the fearful speculations of Andrew Weil, the Drug Warrior has done far more than that with drug prohibition. They have brought about suicide and the unnecessary use of brain-damaging shock therapy for the depressed. This is what happens when we outlaw all substances that inspire and elate -- even though the prohibitionist never takes credit for the downsides of prohibition -- least of all for the fact that drug prohibition has ended American democracy by throwing hundreds of thousands of minorities in jail and so handing otherwise close elections to fascists.

CONCLUSION

Weil does not sufficiently realize that there is a war underway in the western world to brand words like "drugs" and "psychedelics" as evil. In the midst of such a war," we must be more circumspect and precise in the way that we criticize drug use -- lest we yield ground to our adversaries thanks to our inability to imagine a wide range of positive drug uses that would be obvious to others. Weil can clearly envision a young person making a supposedly wrong decision after mescaline use -- but he is blind to the needs of the depressed individuals who are on the brink of suicide because fearmongering about drugs like mescaline has deprived them of everything that would actually lift their mood.

Drug prohibition is the root problem here. It is based on branding drugs a priori as good or bad -- which is a blatantly anti-scientific temptation that should be resisted in the name of human progress.

And so if Weil is going to fret about his future Mini Me's who might prematurely use mescaline, he should be an equal opportunity worrywart: he should also worry about those who will commit suicide ⁶ or undergo brain-damaging shock therapy because of drug prohibition, or who, at very least, will be made a ward of the healthcare state by being placed on dependence-causing Big Pharma ⁷ ⁸ drugs for a lifetime. These are the invisible stakeholders in the drug prohibition debate to which Weil pays short shrift, or rather pays no shrift at all. I could also mention those stakeholders who wish to use drugs like mescaline for religious inspiration, mental rejuvenation, relaxation, and philosophical study a la William James. But the liberty to do so will follow naturally once we accept the notion that the suicidally depressed have rights too!

Finally, it might be instructive for me to answer the following question in closing:

Q. Why do I see these matters in a different light from Weil and Grob?

A. Because I have skin in the game. I know close relatives who could be lifted AT THIS VERY INSTANT from profound gloom with the help of outlawed medicine -- and so I cannot bring myself to diplomatically play along with the go-slow, lukewarm approach to drug re-legalization ⁹ implicit in the musing of otherwise sensible people like Weil.

AFTERWORD

What's more, in a free world -- one which viewed drugs as tools for human progress -- human beings would have a degree of pharmacological choice that we cannot imagine right now in the age of substance prohibition. If a mescaline user feared they were being inordinately influenced by the effects of one single drug, they could use other mind-clarifying and mind-influencing drugs to correct for that perceived imbalance. This is a common sense caveat which should go without saying, but it is worth stating explicitly here because it is one of the many benefits of drug-related freedom that Drug Warriors cannot bring themselves to imagine -- one which unfortunately is invisible to most Drug War critics as well.

Hallucinogens: a Reader, edited by Charles Grob

Notes:

1: Hallucinogens: a reader Grob, M.D., editor, Charles, Penguin Putnam, 2002 (up)
2: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
3: Sartre and Speed: a review of essay number 4 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob DWP (up)
4: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
5: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
6: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
7: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
8: 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)
9: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)

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If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.

Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.

Drugs are not the enemy, ignorance is -- the ignorance that the Drug War encourages by teaching us to fear drugs rather than to understand them.

Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.

When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.

The U.S. Congress considered the following to be a scientific fact back in 1924: "A person taking narcotics regularly impedes evolutionary progress and tends to degenerate backwards toward the brute." -- Richmond Hobson

Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).

There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.

Drug prohibition is a caustic lye that destroys every democratic freedom that it comes in contact with.

In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.

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The thin line between honesty and fearmongering in the age of the War on Drugs

a review of essay number 11 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob

Author's Follow-up:

August 16, 2025

Hallucinogens: a Reader, edited by Charles Grob

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend