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Too Honest to Be Popular?

Why Drug Warriors hate me, God bless 'em

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 22, 2024



My follower count keeps bouncing up and down like a heartbeat on an EKG machine attached to Charles Atlas in his glory days. The overall trend is up, thank goodness, but it's been a long and winding road to the dizzying heights of my (ahem) 1,000+ followers.

[wait for applause]

2025 update

Of course, such numbers mean nothing, insofar as the lion's share of my followers may be serial killers for all I know (present company excepted, of course) - or more likely still, trolls and bots, and/or sworn enemies of mine who are keeping an eye on their nemesis with a view toward hoisting him by his own petard at the first possible occasion. ("Did he cite a problematic statistic in one of this hundreds of essays? Time to pounce!") But what to make of all this coming and going? Whence this fleeting fame? How am I so quickly turning everybody off after turning them on?

My guess is that I have blasphemed the modern God of Science. For even some of the most vocal enemies of the Drug War firmly believe that science has things "sorted" when it comes to fighting depression and anxiety, etc., and that "drugs" are only for recreational and/or spiritual purposes at best, but not for psychological conditions, which, so we're told, are susceptible to the one-size-fits-all cures of modern materialism 1: i.e., to blessed MEDS! Even Charles Hart2, author of "Drug Use for Grownups," toes that line, as does Rick Doblin3 and DJ Nutt4.

They all believe, tacitly or otherwise, that the only drugs that are legal today for the depressed (out of the thousands imaginable) just happen to be the ones that work. Of course, they have not been on the receiving end of those treatments for 40 years like myself, finding that they are depressed as ever, and now ineligible for psychedelic therapy thanks to serotonin syndrome. They are not, like my relative, living their life in a bedroom and faithfully switching from SSRI to SSRI, desperately convinced by their blind faith in science alone that there is a Big Pharma drug out there (or some miracle combination of those drugs) that is made just for them: one of these years they'll be sure to find it! (Meanwhile the clock of life keeps ticking, one missed opportunity at a time.)

Wake up, folks. Laughing gas or MDMA 5 would get these people out of their bedrooms in double-time and into the real world, ready to start anew. A puff on an opium pipe would do the same, followed by a moderate dose of cocaine 6 7 tomorrow morning, then by the guided use of salvia divinorum and then huachuma cactus, on the third and fourth days respectively of this common sense protocol. But scientists are blind to common sense in the age of the materialist Drug War. That's why Dr. Robert Glatter is actually unsure if laughing gas 8 could help the depressed9, an astonishingly naïve viewpoint that only spurs on the FDA in their attempts to demonize the substance like any other "drug," notwithstanding the fact that William James10 himself told us that we must study the effects of such drugs in order to understand ultimate reality. In short, scientists WANT my relative to stay in her bedroom until such time as they COMPLETELY solve her depression with a one-size-fits-all-pill. My relative is clearly a luddite if she settles for a scientifically unacceptable cure.

I get it. I was a member of the Holy Church of Science 30 years ago. Science could solve any problem. I myself used to look down at people who scorned antidepressants 11 as luddites - just like Jim Hogshire in "Pills a-Go-Go,"12 wherein the usually spot-on provocateur picks up the wrong end of the stick thanks to his blind faith in the ability of science, completely overlooking the goals of Big Pharma companies in flogging these highly dependence-causing pills and, worst of all, like almost all other authors these days, reckoning without the Drug War. For the question is not about antidepressants in the abstract, but the question is: do they make sense given the existence of all the criminalized alternatives available today in the real and synthetic worlds, all of which can be use far less addictively than modern antidepressants and some of which have inspired entire religions?!

Clearly not, Jim. For these miracle drugs in which you believe not only dull the brain, changing the personality unpredictably, but they ultimately render the user ineligible for godsend alternative therapies using psychedelics and entheogens. (What other drugs make it impossible to use alternative drugs, anytime, ever???) That's why SSRIs and SNRIs are an investor's wet dream: they turn the user into a patient for life, both by the fact that they cause dependence and by the fact that they render alternative drug therapies impossible thanks to contraindications such as serotonin syndrome, a generally mild side effect which, however, incentivizes clinicians, therapists and retreat managers to reject this demographic for fear of liability concerns and potential bad PR - concerns that they disguise, of course, in condescending boiler-plate blather about the potential impact on client health.

Make no mistake, however: they are concerned about their business's bottom line. For when it comes to drug use, safety comes first, unlike in any other risky activity on the globe. Horseback riding is the number-one cause of traumatic brain injury in the States, but equestrians unapologetically teach even kids to ride a horse. Why? Because we value freedom and personal growth - things that we put on the back shelf when the activity is drug use.

Of course, westerners have been taught from grade school to fear drugs, so they can see nothing but chaos resulting from their relegalization 13 in America, or anywhere around the globe for that matter, since Americans are imperialists when it comes to drugs: for them to be drug free, they believe that the entire world has to follow suit: in other words, it's Christian Science uber alles: Mary Baker Eddy's way or the highway. But the problem has never been drugs, but rather our attitude toward drugs. And what is our attitude toward drugs? America's "philosophy of drug use" (to the extent that a hodgepodge of hateful biases merits such a lofty designation) is completely illogical and riddled with hypocrisy. If you want to see a rational attitude toward drugs, read up on the Cosmovision of the Andes. It is an entire humble philosophy of life, not just of drugs, whereas America's hatred of drugs is based on a variety of unexamined and false assumptions that recognize no guiding principles whatsoever, except insofar as the haphazard invocation of such tenets proves fortuitous in justifying a particular anti-drug law or action.

Do Caucasian Americans want to use peyote? No problem. The court can just manufacture a new principle out of whole cloth: that the right to practice a given religion is determined by your genetic makeup! Your genetic makeup! These are the kinds of outrageous ad hoc rulings that come about when you wage a Drug War based on nothing but expediency and the end result: you trash the American Constitution, in fact, which is how the 4th Amendment to the Constitution has already been de facto nullified by the War on Drugs.

We've got to end this infantile idea that substances can be evil in themselves. That attitude has negative consequences for which the Drug Warrior is never honest enough to take credit: violence, cartels, the militarization of police forces, the overriding of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, the election of despots like Donald Trump thanks to the sidelining of millions of minority voters, etc. etc.

And as if killing off democracy is not a big enough crime for the Drug Warrior, their substance demonization campaign has turned addiction treatment into a billion-dollar industry - one which works for everybody but the addict, whom we could easily cure if we stopped insisting that drugs and drug use are the root of all evil.

For answers to addictions are not hard to find. There are many common sense solutions that use drugs to fight drugs, protocols that rely on the value of anticipation, inspiration and motivation. But these are all touchy-feely subjects in the eyes of today's reductive materialist. ("What is this inspiration of which you speak? It does not show up on any of my charts?") Besides, America's Christian Science weltanschauung still makes it impossible for us to think of drugs as anything but a snare. That's why we've invented the word "meds," so that we can deceive ourselves into thinking that Big Pharma 14 15 pills are somehow qualitatively different from all other psychoactive substances and so can be considered inoffensive, nay, positively meritorious.

But we are just fooling ourselves and, alas, the entire gullible world. Drugs are not the problem: the childish American mindset is the problem, one that refuses to see the blessings of Mother Nature as blessings. Until we stop our prehistoric demonization of inanimate objects, we ourselves are to blame for all the downsides that we so conveniently blame on "drugs," including the much-ballyhooed addiction problem, which is just a natural result of substance prohibition. Nor do we have an excuse. We all know that liquor prohibition created the Mafia as we know it today. To pretend that today's substance prohibition causes no problems is to play dumb in an inexcusable attempt to shift blame for social problems onto the backs of the poor and disenfranchised, by turning them into criminals and removing them from public life.

Uh-oh. My follower count just dropped to 998! See what I mean? One does not attack the prevailing religion without consequences. But who cares, right? They were probably just a couple of axe murderers anyway.



Author's Follow-up: April 22, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


You can hardly blame them. I mean, my short-lived followers should obviously not kill people with axes. But if they're currently using SSRIs and are optimistic about their results, I am the last person that they will want to be reading. And if they're psychiatrists who have been prescribing such drugs for decades, they certainly do not want to hear my message. But I am not running for political office, I am simply stating what for me is the hard-earned truth, without attempting to judge past actions, the more so in that I myself was a cheerleader for "Science uber alles" in my youth.



Author's Follow-up: January 4, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




To think that less than a year ago I was taking life in this manner. Dear, oh dear! Since publishing the above, however, I have resolved to give up all hope of being "noticed" in this life and to simply keep stating the truth on a daily basis. I have resolved further to give up all hope of even being praised for that latter resolution!

Marcus Aurelius would approve of this new strategy of mine. And even Marcus Aurelius as filtered through Schopenhauer would agree. I would point out, however, that Marcus Aurelius liberally partook of opium 16 . And if I had that option, I would never have felt the need to publish the above in the first place -- or I would have done so in a more playful, self-deprecating and diplomatic fashion.

Incidentally, I think that all future essays should be of this kind. They should contain updates providing the author's view of his work subsequent to its original publication. This is an improvement on Montaigne made possible by the digital world.

As for my supposed unpopularity, X is a platform run by an insurrectionist conspiracy theorist and faithful follower of the anti-democratic Donald Trump. God knows who my followers are on that platform. If I knew who they were, then I myself might delete them -- along with the many bots that X generates to give one the false impression that they are making headway. In any case, quality readers are few and far between, present company excepted, as always. To act as if one believes otherwise is simply to display one's own ignorance about the world as it is. That's what good old Marcus would say, and my buddy Schopenhauer would surely add, "Hear, hear!"

Author's Follow-up: January 5, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




Not that Schopenhauer sets a good example for dispassionate philosophizing. In his work on Sufficient Reason17, he calls Hegel a "scribbler of nonsense" and a "notorious charlatan." And such putdowns are not just written in a transitory fit of pique. His original German translator urged him to redact the attack on philosophers in that work, but Schopenhauer refused. He likens the German philosophers of his day to ostriches that close their eyes in the belief that their nemeses will thereby be made to disappear from the world.

Nor is he shy about bragging. To illustrate his discussion of causality in the aforementioned work, he does not simply refer the reader to his essay on Free Will, but to his prize essay on Free Will. And all the time he makes it clear that he is the savior of the world when it comes to properly understanding Immanuel Kant 18 , nay, in correcting him as needed and fleshing out the fraught conclusions that deductively follow from his analysis.

That said, he also often seems to have truth on his side, at least by comparison with the materialists against whom he was fighting.












Notes for essay entitled Too Honest to Be Popular?: Why Drug Warriors hate me, God bless 'em:

1: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
2: Drug Use for Grownups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear Hart, Carl (up)
3: Rick Doblin Doblin, Rick (up)
4: Drug Science Nutt, DJ (up)
5: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
6: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
7: “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)
8: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
9: Glatter, Robert. 2021. “Can Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide) Help People with Treatment-Resistant Depression?” Forbes, June 9, 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2021/06/09/can-laughing-gas-nitrous-oxide-help-people-with-treatmentresistant-depre (up)
10: James, William. 2016. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820.The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience. (up)
11: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
12: Pills-a-go-go : a fiendish investigation into pill marketing, art, history and consumption Hogshire, Jim, 1999 (up)
13: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
14: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
15: 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)
16: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
17: On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature: Two Essays (revised edition) Schopenhauer, Arthur (up)
18: What drug use could tell us about the rationalist triumphalism of Immanuel Kant DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau

Hollywood presents cocaine as a drug of killers. In reality, strategic cocaine use by an educated person can lead to great mental power, especially as just one part of a pharmacologically balanced diet.

The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.

Scientists are making entire livings from trying to figure out what's best for ME as a chronic depressive. They owe their jobs to drug prohibition.

All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.

If fearmongering drug warriors were right about the weakness of humankind, there would be no social drinkers, only drunkards.

The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.

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.

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.

If opium were legal, then most of the nostrums peddled by drug stores today would be irrelevant. (No wonder the drug war has staying power!)


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






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