There's nothing complicated about it -- legalize Mother Nature's plants now!

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There's nothing complicated about it -- legalize Mother Nature's plants now!

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 22, 2019

I belong to a Google group called Metaphysical Speculation, hosted by author Bernardo Kastrup. This morning, one member started a thread concerning Michael Pollan's fears that it's too dangerous to legalize psychedelic plants - and the posting member (Robert) agreed, concluding that the whole subject of drug legalization is "complicated."

2025 Update

I begged to differ vehemently, and I did so in the following response to Robert, Michael Pollan, and all the other Chicken Littles out there who fear that the sky will fall in if we legalize the plants and fungi of Mother Nature.

The "it's complicated" argument has Richard Nixon smiling in his grave. He outlawed drugs in order to get his political opponents off of the voting rolls. Now Nixon finds, half a century later, that even his political opponents have convinced themselves that it's too dangerous to restore the liberties that he took from us. Meanwhile, it's quite all right for American presidents to engage in the Stalinist practice of asking children to report their parents for using the plants of Mother Nature. Those turncoat kids even get a photo op with Nancy Reagan. Nixon's ghost must be ecstatic. His anti-minority Drug War tapped into a deep vein of Big Brotherism and paranoia in the mind of the American public, both on the left and on the right.

It's complicated to get our freedoms back? No it's not.

If the government had taken away the freedom of the press and then launched a 50-year campaign to point out the dangers of unbridled speech, we might now be terrified of restoring the freedom of the press. But that does not change the fact that the freedom of the press must be restored - and ASAP. Nor does it mean that the defenders of this freedom are under an obligation to explain how this restoration can be accomplished without causing unrest or even violence. If the restoration of those freedoms brings its own set of problems, so be it. If anyone is responsible for that violence, it is the fascists who outlawed those freedoms in the first place.

Folks like Robert are worried about potential victims of decriminalization - meanwhile they ignore the actual fate of the millions of depressed and anxious that they walk by every day, law-abiding citizens who have been forced to use inadequate - AND ADDICTIVE - medicines because America is so focused on keeping NON-ADDICTIVE substances like psychedelics out of the hands of the minority who might (somehow) abuse them (even though psychedelics are hardly the "go-to" drugs for young people seeking a quick and guaranteed high).

With respect, the government DOES define our rights - in the U.S. Constitution - and among those rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

How can the U.S. government grant us the pursuit of happiness and then deny us the means to attain that happiness - by denying us the naturally growing medications that can increase our mental acumen and appreciation for life?

I'm sure Robert would be angry if the government tried to tell him what to think - how much angrier he should be if the government told him HOW and HOW MUCH he can think, but that's what government does when it denies us the mind-improving therapeutic power of plants and fungi.

Robert frets about those who became addicted to opium . However the morally charged term "addiction" was created by the Drug Warrior to bring shame on opium users (especially the minorities with whom Caucasian prohibitionists associated opium use in the early 20th century). While opium was legal in the U.S., the term used was "habituation," and many doctors didn't even consider it to be a problem - until the Drug War interrupted supply. Benjamin Franklin was a regular opium user, and there were no Nancy Reagans calling him out as a "wretch" in need of imprisonment and therapy. Moreover, although daily users could become habituated, the occasional use of opium did not cause habituation, nor did the user require ever greater doses to achieve comparable effects.

I'd much rather see opium legal than see the DEA stomp onto Thomas Jefferson's Monticello ¹ and confiscate all his poppy plants, as they did in 1987. Why is this outrage not patently obvious to freedom-loving people??? The DEA stomps onto Jefferson's estate to confiscate PLANTS??? PLANTS!!! Sounds like a Ray Bradbury sci-fi about a future tyrannous government, not a story from our present-day America, at least as I'd like to think of it.

Folks like Robert and Michael Pollan are purblind: they vividly imagine addicts in the street the second that government (in its generosity) decides that we can use the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet. But they are blind to the millions of addicts that pass them on the street every day THANKS to America's Drug War. At least one in 10 Americans are currently addicted to antidepressant SSRIs, which became the go-to legal treatment for depression after psychedelics were outlawed. The APA ignores this VAST addiction, of course, or insists pedantically that we call it a "chemical dependency," but from a user's point of view, there is very little difference between chemical dependence and addiction. They are both demoralizing and expensive.

I have been STUCK on Effexor ² for 25 years. Six months ago, I got sick of being an eternal patient and told my psychiatrist that I wanted to get off of Effexor. He told me that there was no point in trying. He said there had been a recent NIH study that showed that 95% of those who attempted to get off of Effexor were back on it within three years. In other words, Effexor is far, far worse than opium ³ and cocaine ⁴ ⁵ in causing addiction - yet Chicken Littles like Michael Pollan have absolutely no criticism for this state of affairs - probably because this American addiction is oiling the wheels of capitalism ⁶ by giving pharmaceutical companies enormous riches and paying huge dividends for fat cats in the 1%, meanwhile giving psychiatrists overpaid jobs as glorified pill pushers, who disdain to have psychological discussions with their biochemically interchangeable patients. Also, Americans seem to have this Puritan streak in them: that's the only way I can explain their preference for Effexor over Opium. "At least," they reason, "the folks using Effexor aren't doing so to enjoy the opera, like Thomas De Quincey - or to have inspiring dreams, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, thank God!"

Regarding the following question:

Why not just expect that use of psychedelics in a desacralized setting will be disruptive and should be?

That question is beside the point because it's an attempt to reassure Drug Warriors that drug legalization will work. But as I've tried to show above, the freedom fighter is under no obligation to prove that the restoration of freedom can come without causing any problems.

That said, if we want the use of psychedelics to be sacred, then the best way forward is through legalization ⁷ , which would undoubtedly result in the creation of churches (even some Christian churches) that use entheogens as a sacrament. If we take the wimpy path of legalizing psychedelics but keeping them in the hands of "professional clinicians," then we can be sure that every vestige of the "sacred" will be removed from the psychedelic experience. After all, clinicians are materialists (or at least work in an emphatically materialist environment) and so they will naturally want to turn the use of psychedelics into another pill-popping routine, sterilized and routinized to the point that healthcare companies and Big Pharma ⁸ ⁹ can establish predictable price points upon which to base psychedelic services.

To sum up, the Drug War will never disappear as long as its opponents claim that ending it is "complicated."

It is not complicated to demand the restoration of a right.

As Thomas Paine wrote:

"If the present generation or any other are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free. Wrongs cannot have a legal descent."

Those who fear such change just do not adequately realize how much damage the Drug War has done and is doing even as we speak.

Richard Nixon's Drug War has created so much violence that it has generated a whole new movie genre, in which good Americans (who generally disdain the niceties of the U.S. Constitution) beat-up on evil drug dealers who are simply filling the needs of the black market that we ourselves created for them. We might call this new movie category the "scumbag genre," featuring classics like American Gangster, Asian Connection, Bobby Z, Clockers, Cocaine Cowboys, Empire, L.A. Wars, Marked for Death, Scarface, Rush - all of which owe their existence to the fact that Richard Nixon (with help from Francis Burton Harrison back in 1914) outlawed the plants and fungi of Mother Nature.

Ending the Drug War is not complicated. It's an imperative for a freedom-loving people.

If Michael Pollan wants to worry about something, let him worry about the hospital patients who, even as we speak, are undergoing unnecessary ECT procedures, potentially injuring the brain - all because our Drug War has denied them non-addictive psychedelic medicines that show such promise in brightening their minds - all WITHOUT DAMAGING THE BRAIN.

Let him worry about the minorities that are being arrested every single day for the possession of naturally occurring substances, after which they are thrown into inhumanly overcrowded prisons.

Let him worry about the millions of Americans who are currently addicted for life to psychiatric drugs thanks to the outlawing of natural non-addictive plants and fungi.

Let him worry about the violence in the inner cities caused by gunfire among drug gangs - gangs that would not exist were the plants of Mother Nature merely as legal as they were 100 years ago.

Let him worry about the fact that drug testing ¹⁰ is an extrajudicial way to punish a misdemeanor with starvation.

(Amazing. Minimum-wage employees have their urine tested to make sure they are being good Christian Scientists when it comes to mental health - then they go out to see a movie in which good Americans kill people who are violating that Christian Science sensibility about the use of natural medications - meanwhile their corporate CEO is in the Bahamas doing LSD and marijuana with rock stars on his multi-million-dollar yacht.)

{^I don't know which is worse, law-and-order conservatives who want to prevent people from improving their minds with psychoactive substances, or "compassionate" leftists who want to protect Americans from themselves. Do these liberals really believe that the drug-related body count would be anything close to what it is today if America hadn't started down the road of criminalizing Mother Nature's plants with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914? The Drug War itself is the problem, folks!}{

Let him worry about the fact that millions of elderly Americans are moldering away in group homes, shorn of hope, when we know through recent research that guided use of entheogens could expand their lives, help them cope with mortality, put an end to their constant profitless fretting, and even grow more neurons for them thereby increasing their mental resilience - and all of these benefits are kept from the elderly by our anti-patient Drug War.

Let him worry about... I could literally go on and on mentioning the many downsides of the Drug War that seem to be invisible to the modern Chicken Littles of the world.

In short, let Pollan stop worrying about merely potential victims of freedom and start worrying about the real victims of this fascist state of affairs where, though we're not told what to think, we're told HOW and HOW MUCH to think.

Finally, if the "it's complicated" argument were extended to driving, Americans would have never hit the road. The first car accident would have resulted in hand-wringing and condemnation of the automobile as evil incarnate. But even Michael Pollan recognizes driving as a right - and no doubt drives by plenty of car accidents, like the rest of us, without feeling any moral imperative to go home and write a new book about the need to outlaw driving in America.

How sad it is that Americans who insist on the right to drive a car do not insist on the right to improve their own minds with the naturally occurring plants and fungi of Mother Nature.

I can see God now:

GOD: Blimey, I put those plants there to give them inspiration and to help them sense the unity of all life! Now they've bloody outlawed the things. Can you imagine, Gabriel, the hubristic idiots have outlawed my PLANTS!!!

GABRIEL: Well, sir, they do say it's "complicated."

GOD: Complicated? It's a plant! I've said it before and I'll say it again, Gabriel: Human beings really do seem to have the power to muck up anything, absolutely anything at all!

Author's Follow-up: March 24, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

I always fear reading an old post of mine about drugs. This is because I find new reasons to hate the Drug War every day, and so I fear that an old essay of mine will have the effect of supporting the Drug War with faint or inadequate condemnation. Nevertheless, I think upon re-reading the above that I have hit many of the requisite boxes.

I can add now in retrospect that the Drug War has ended American democracy because it has handed otherwise close elections to demagogue politicians whose one and only social policy is to crack down on drugs and to finance the police departments and prisons that are required for that task. America is an arrestocracy in which racist politicians blame all social problems on drugs. I also might have added above that the drug-war has led to enormous censorship. If you do not believe that, look for reports of positive drug use in books and movies ¹¹ ¹² . You will also look in vain for science magazines that acknowledge that scientists are censored by drug laws which force them to ignore the practical and philosophical implications of using a vast pharmacopoeia of psychoactive substances. Non-fiction writers self-censor across the board in every subject involving emotions and free will because they simply pretend that outlawed substances do not exist.

Censorship is everywhere. The bio for William James at James's alma mater, Harvard University, does not even mention the fact that the use of laughing gas ¹³ gave James his view of reality. Americans are forbidden everywhere they go from hearing or reading anything positive about drugs, meanwhile academia cravenly pretends that they are not censored by drug law. At least Galileo recognized that he was censored. Drug Warriors have learned how to censor a society so thoroughly that even the victims do not see what's going on.

The U.S.-inspired Drug War south of the border caused 60,000 Mexicans to be "disappeared" over the last two decades ¹⁴. 67,000 have died in inner cities over the last ten years ¹⁵. Meanwhile, millions suffer in silence without godsend medicine -- and yet we're told that ending the Drug War is complicated. It is cowardice and lack of leadership that is preventing change, not practical considerations.

I must remember, however, that most people have been brainwashed by censorship into knowing nothing about positive drug use -- so let me end this update with some quotes from users of the phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin. As you read, just think of all the sad sacks moldering away in nursing homes or contemplating suicide ¹⁶ in silence -- and then, if you're a Drug Warrior, ask god for forgiveness for keeping such meds as described below from suffering humanity:

"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."

"A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."

"This is total energy, and I am aware of my every membrane. This has been a marvelous experience, very beautiful, joyous, and sensuous."¹⁷

And the DEA tells us such substances have no known uses? LIARS! Someone should put them on trial for withholding godsend medicines from the depressed. It's a crime against humanity!

Notes for essay entitled There's nothing complicated about it -- legalize Mother Nature's plants now!:

1: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
2: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
4: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
5: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
6: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)
7: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
8: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
9: 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)
10: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition DWP (up)
11: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
12: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
13: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
14: Mexico's war on drugs: More than 60,000 people 'disappeared' 2020 (up)
15: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
16: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
17: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)

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The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.

Prohibition turned habituation into addiction by creating a wide variety of problems for users, including potential arrest, tainted or absent drug supply, and extreme stigmatization.

No wonder conservatives are terrified of drugs. It is not safety that worries them, else they would demand education. They are terrified of new ways of seeing life. The outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of whole mindsets. It is a meta injustice.

Drug prohibition began as a racist attempt to prevent so-called "miscegenation." The racist's fear was not that a white woman would use opium or marijuana or cocaine, but that she might actually fall in love with a Chinese, Hispanic or Black person respectively.

The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.

David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.

The Shipiba have learned to heal human beings physically, psychologically and spiritually with what they call "onanyati," plant allies and guides, such as Bobinsana, which "envelops seekers in a cocoon of love." You know: what the DEA would call "junk."

I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.

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.

NOW is the time for entheogens -- not (as Strassman and Pollan seem to think) at some future date when materialists have finally wrapped their minds around the potential usefulness of drugs that experientially teach compassion.

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There's nothing complicated about it -- legalize Mother Nature's plants now!

Author's Follow-up: March 24, 2025

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

Diary of a Drug Fiend