why Chicken Littles like Kevin Sabet do not deserve a place at the table
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 10, 2023
evin Sabet was recently bemoaning the fact that a discussion group on psychedelics failed to invite board-certified scientists to their meetings. I also read the post of another prohibitionist who was up in arms about the failure of another psychedelic group to discuss the topic of psychedelics as used by cults. The prohibitionists see this as great hypocrisy and a drop-dead argument that the debate on psychedelics is one-sided in the favor of substance legalization.
This isn't censorship, guys. It's a rejection of the whole idea that naturally occurring substances (including ergot-based LSD) have to be defended in this way. Nature belongs to human beings via Natural Law and its plants and fungi are never justifiably subject to prohibition, as John Locke makes clear in his Second Treatise of Government1. Science, moreover, is never neutral and fair in the age of the Drug War. To the contrary, modern science focuses almost exclusively on the downsides of drugs. Our government pays for advertisements treating drugs as a scourge. Our academics publish only papers about abuse and misuse because the drug-hating NIDA does not generally fund papers that speak otherwise2. Science is not science in such a milieu, it is politics. Kevin and his fellow Chicken Littles know this: that's why they want a place at the table so that they can advance their political cause: i.e., the suppression of medicines that are ours by right and which were used by all tribal cultures, time out of mind, until the west decimated these tribes and subjected them to the comparatively deadly drug of alcohol. (Note: When I refer to alcohol as "deadly," I am not blaming alcohol for anything. The misuse of alcohol is down to social factors, including the state policy of giving alcohol a monopoly on providing self-transcendence. Drug warriors generally admit this truth, while hypocritically denying that it pertains to any other psychoactive substances.)
And the cry about "cults" which employ psychedelics is an hysterical non-sequitur. It is based on the absurd belief that we should hold substances responsible for how people use them. It is this very premise that we legalizers reject as a childish way of thinking about the world. By associating evil with drugs rather than people, we throw millions of people under the bus in an effort to save poor little white kids in the suburbs (those poor little white kids whom we have refused to educate about safe use). When you demonize fentanyl, for example, you think that you're saving white teenagers, when what you're really doing is punishing kids in hospice3. How? By creating the kinds of laws that will make doctors reluctant to provide adequate pain relief for fear of being arrested. (The Washington Post recently reported that the shipment of opioid pills dropped 45% between 2011 and 2019 thanks to law enforcement crackdowns. During the same time, the deaths by overdose skyrocketed! Just imagine the world of suffering that prohibitionists have thus created for those in pain with their demonstrably counterproductive policy of prohibition.4)
Don't get me wrong. I am all in favor of unbiased science. But let's first define science's role. Drug warriors like Sabet want science to have the final say when it comes to legalization, but that is, so to speak, a category error. Psychoactive drugs are not used for medical reasons but for psycho-social and religious reasons. Scientists can tell us of the physical risks of use, perhaps, but they cannot tell us whether use is preferable in any one case because they do not know the value system of the user and what they consider to be the "good life" as Plato would define that term. Take me, for instance: I believe (with God in the Old Testament) that mother nature is actually good. For this reason, I believe (in common with the tribal peoples that America has helped decimate) that drug use is GOOD and can bring helpful dreams, ideas about cure, ideas about the nature of the universe writ large. Nor is this just a tribal view. William James believed that we needed to investigate altered states in order to understand reality and the nature of perception and human consciousness5.
Here's another reason why science is not scientific in the age of the Drug War. In the Drug War, scientists speak as if substances can be judged "up" or "down," as good or bad, but this is a very anti-scientific notion. Dosage counts. Reason for use counts. Time of use counts. No drug can be judged in the abstract. Yet that's what Drug Warriors do. And what's the practical result of this choplogic? Any drug that cannot be used safely today (by those white teenagers whom we have refused to educate about safe use) cannot be used by anybody, anywhere, for any reason, ever.
It is this anti-scientific mindset that outlaws and/or hamstrings research on potential treatments for Alzheimer's and autism and endless other maladies. It is this anti-scientific mindset that throws millions (perhaps billions) of potentially responsible users under the bus in order to "crack down" on a vast minority of what the Drug Warrior considers to be irresponsible users, who, of course, usually turn out to be minorities: minorities that can be thrown in jail in order to further shrink the voting power of the enemies of absurd prohibition6.
If Chicken Little and co. are not invited to the table to discuss time-honored godsend medicines, it is because it is well-known that they will bring this anti-scientific and politically-motivated mindset with them to the table. These critics of substance re-legalization do not want to protect us from cults and dangerous medicines. They want to protect their narrow and anti-historical Christian Science view of the world, which they feel is challenged when folks are allowed to improve their minds and mental power with plant medicine. For while the tribal mentality considers such meds to be godsends7, the fearful Drug Warrior of western society associates them with witches (i..e. overly assertive women of the Middle Ages) and poisoning.
Finally, it's ironic that these Drug Warriors complain about censorship. Censorship is what the Drug War is all about. That's why almost no academic papers are written about the positive effects of drugs8. That's why the plots of prime-time TV shows are tweaked to contain anti-drug messages provided by the White House. That's why articles in so-called scientific magazines like Scientific American and Science News never mention drugs of which our politicians disapprove9. This self-censorship is so profound that the authors of such articles never even notice it. And so they take prohibition to be a natural baseline from which to do scientific research on subjects like consciousness and anxiety and depression.
Until scientists escape this fog of self-imposed amnesia about the world, science is little more than the handmaiden of the Drug War, helping to normalize a wholesale prohibition of psychoactive medicines that is unprecedented in human history.
Author's Follow-up: January 18, 2024
When scientists talk about the cost/benefit analysis of drugs, they are blind to a host of factors. Here are some of the benefits that they completely ignore: the ability of a user to appreciate music, to experience compassion, to have some peace from non-stop negative inner voices, etc. The fact is, these things have values that a scientist is not even qualified to rate. Their importance depends on what one values in life -- and should not be determined by materialist scientists, who, because of their reductive dogma, cannot even determine if laughing gas could help the depressed.
As for risks, scientists ignore all the risks that come from OUTLAWING substances: like the destruction of the rule of law in Latin America, the risk of luring poor young people into lives of crime by giving them hugely profitable opportunities, the risk of turning inner cities into shooting galleries, the risk of throwing so many minorities in jail that only law-and-order conservatives are elected. Instead, they argue with childish simplicity as follows: "This drug could hurt Johnny Whitebread and so should not be available anywhere, at any dose, for any reason, ever, even if it means outlawing drugs that could help treat Alzheimer's or autism or could provide pain relief for children in hospice." This is racist and xenophobic politics, not a scientific evaluation of costs and benefits.
Scientists think they can ignore all these risks and benefits and still be taken seriously. What a joke.
In fact, we should not even do them the favor of calling them scientists, for any true scientist would know that no substance is good or bad in and of itself, and that even cyanide has beneficial uses, and that it's all about the nuances of dose and context, nuances that our so-called scientists completely ignore in the age of the anti-scientific Drug War.
Censorship
The Drug War is all about censorship. If you don't believe it, just ask yourself how many movies and magazine articles you've seen about the safe and wise use of opium, or of coca, or of MDMA, or of psychedelics. As Carl Hart reminds us, most people use these drugs wisely, but you will not see such use portrayed in movies or books. Instead, you will see books and movies in which drugs are personified as evil incarnate in the form of "Cocaine Bears" and "Meth Gators." This is because the drug-war propaganda of censorship has rendered Americans childish about drugs. The American government is all about keeping us infantile in this way. The government is engaged in a full-blown campaign of drug-related censorship, with the White House actually working with TV producers to spread the party line on drugs in TV shows. That is why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse and not a National Institute on Drug Use.
Meanwhile, the government's FDA refuses to approve MDMA, a drug which has killed no one, properly speaking, and yet they approve Big Pharma drugs whose side effects as announced on prime-time television include death itself, this in a world in which liquor causes 178,000 deaths a year. This is the same FDA that approves brain-damaging shock therapy for the depressed while refusing to sign off on naturally occurring drugs that could make ECT unnecessary. This fact is obvious. Common sense itself screams out loudly and clearly that this is so. But scientists ignore common sense these days for two reasons: first, because of their fealty to the drug war ideology of substance demonization, and second because of their stubborn belief in the inhumane tenets of behaviorism, which tell us that user feelings and opinions do not matter when it comes to studying drug use, that all that counts is quantifiable data about brain chemistry and genetics.
By the way, if you want to be personally censored, just try publishing an article about safe and wise drug use online -- say, about the wise use of opium. Such accounts are simply not allowed by most publishers -- not because they are not true, but because they spread a message that is contrary to the drug-war ideology of substance demonization and so must be suppressed. I myself have been blocked numerous times from posting comments and publishing articles simply because I point out positive real uses of drugs -- safe and productive drug use that has actually taken place despite the fact that the government does everything it can to make drug use risky by refusing to regulate product and refusing to teach safe use. The Mad in America website solicits life stories from victims of the psychedelic pill mill, but they refuse to publish mine, despite the fact that I have used such drugs for 40 years now. The life story that I submitted to them contained neither lies nor proselytization, and yet the organization told me that it might be seen as medical advice. This is how publishers shut down free speech about drugs, by claiming that factually honest accounts about drug use constitute medical advice.
They will then tell us that we should see our doctors about such topics -- failing to realize that it was our doctors themselves who rendered us dependent on Big Pharma to begin with! Their drugs cause greater dependence than anything nature has to offer, and yet we are only allowed to discuss drugs with these folks whose entire careers depend on the psychiatric pill mill itself!
This is why I say that the drug war is a cancer on the body politic and must be eliminated if Americans want to restore democracy and make it last this time.
If we need to censor any speech, it should be the speech of drug warriors. They are the ones who advocate policies that have turned inner cities into shooting galleries around the world and resulted in the disappearance of 60,000 Mexican citizens in the last 20 years, while turning the rule of law into a joke in much of Latin America.
What am I advocating after all? Merely intellectual and spiritual freedom. Merely the end of censorship. Merely the renewed freedom of religion. Merely the return of freedom of speech. Merely the informed use of psychoactive drugs, especially entheogens like MDMA, to help bring people together in this age when hate has put our species on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
And yet I am beyond the pale? Say rather that the Drug War Industrial Complex is beyond the pale -- supported as it is by the same sort of short-sighted idiots who made the criminal decision in the 1950s to develop thermonuclear weapons, the same people who were to denounce the peace-loving 'flower children' of the next decade as Communist subversives.
Incidentally, anyone who doubts our society's willingness to suppress free speech need only look at the blacklisting of Americans by HUAC in the 1950s. It must be remembered that this persecution of dissenters was not based on the outing of any supposed criminal activities that they had committed but rather on their mere championing of ideas that were anathema to the powers-that-be. The government loves censorship and always has.
And the Internet Age has not changed anything. To the contrary, it has rendered censorship far more easy and efficient for cowardly publishers thanks to the use of algorithms written anonymously by philosophically challenged techies.
Using the billions now spent on caging users, we could end the whole phenomena of both physical and psychological addiction by using "drugs to fight drugs." But drug warriors do not want to end addiction, they want to keep using it as an excuse to ban drugs.
The whole drug war is based on the anti-American idea that the way to avoid problems is to lie and prevaricate and persuade people not to ask questions.
UNESCO celebrates the healing practices of the Kallawaya people of South America. What hypocrisy! UNESCO supports a drug war that makes some of those practices illegal!
"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley
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.
Health is not a quality, it's a balance. To decide drug legality based on 'health' grounds thus opens a Pandora's box of different points of view.
The Drug War is the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.
My approach to withdrawal: incrementally reduce daily doses over 6 months, or even a year, meanwhile using all the legal entheogens and psychedelics that you can find in a way likely to boost your endurance and "sense of purpose" to make withdrawal successful.
Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.
Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, When Drug Warriors cry 'Censorship!': why Chicken Littles like Kevin Sabet do not deserve a place at the table, published on October 10, 2023 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
evin Sabet was recently bemoaning the fact that a discussion group on psychedelics failed to invite board-certified scientists to their meetings. I also read the post of another prohibitionist who was up in arms about the failure of another psychedelic group to discuss the topic of psychedelics as used by cults. The prohibitionists see this as great hypocrisy and a drop-dead argument that the debate on psychedelics is one-sided in the favor of substance legalization.
You have been reading an article entitled, When Drug Warriors cry 'Censorship!': why Chicken Littles like Kevin Sabet do not deserve a place at the table, published on October 10, 2023 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
