Why it's wrong to follow the science in the age of the drug war
in response to a 2025 essay by philosopher Pascal Boyer
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 9, 2025
I was so excited! I received an email this morning from the Institute for Arts and Ideas advising me of the publication of a new essay on their website from philosopher Pascal Boyer entitled 'Following the Science' is a Dangerous Illusion1. "Wow!", I thought to myself. "I myself have written multiple essays on that very topic23456. Could it be that another philosopher has joined me in realizing that science is political in the age of the Drug War and that we should therefore most definitely NOT follow the science when it comes to studying drugs and drug use? Could it be that my own essays on this topic have been discovered by the author in question and that I myself have played a role in alerting him to the issue at hand? Could it be that I have finally reached the big-time, philosophically speaking?" I even briefly entertained the flattering possibility that I had been plagiarized! Of course, I was just assuming that Boyer's article was about drugs -- but then what else could it be about? Surely the Drug War provides the perfect example of the dangers of following the science, insofar as science is political in the age of drug prohibition.
So thinking, I clicked on the proffered hyperlink... only to discover that the promoted adumbrations had nothing to do with drugs whatsoever! I found instead that Mr. Boyer had organized his attack on scientific omnipotence around the topic of divination. Yes, divination: the practice of "reading" horoscopes and entrails and the like. To be sure, Boyer was raising a valid point: namely, that science is a human endeavor and therefore cannot always give us the definitive and unbiased answers that we may wrongly expect of it. Moreover, scientists qua scientists approach human activities like divination in dogmatic ignoration of the utilitarian 789 value of such practices and their role in establishing social cohesion in a given community. Agreed, agreed, agreed. And yet, like all authors these days, Boyer has missed the 6,400-pound gorilla in the room: the fact that the Drug War is the glaringly obvious example of why we should not "follow the science." Why not? Because science is political in the age of the Drug War. Moreover, it is materialist in nature, which means that it is blind to all the obvious holistic benefits of drugs and drug use.
With such considerations in mind, I posted the following comment to Boyer's essay -- or rather I submitted the following comments to the IAI website. Whether they will actually publish them remains to be seen -- since freedom of speech10 is never a "given" these days for those of us who dare to question Drug War orthodoxy.
Although you focused on divination, there is a huge problem with "following the science" when it comes to studying drugs. This is because Western governments and their materialist scientists are focused exclusively on the potential downsides of drug use. Such "science" is political. This is why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse in America and not a National Institute on Drug Use. The scientists' job today is to prove that drugs are dangerous. They ignore all glaringly obvious holistic benefits of drug use. And so our materialist scientists gaslight Americans by telling us that drugs like coca and opium 11 have no positive uses whatsoever. Sigmund Freud knew better12. So did Galen, Paracelsus and Avicenna. But modern science is blind to anecdote, history and common sense. This is why our FDA promotes brain-damaging shock therapy for the depressed and yet refuses to approve of a wide range of drugs whose intermittent use could make shock therapy unnecessary13. This is what they call "following the science" in the age of the Drug War: depriving the depressed (and endless others) of all inspirational medicine -- you know, the kinds of medicines that inspired the Vedic religion14, the kinds of medicines that our predecessors considered to be panaceas!
This is why drug prohibitionists want us to "follow the science," because they know that materialist science is blind to the obvious when it comes to drug benefits. And so they hold drug use to standards that we set for no other risky activity on the planet, thereby forcing millions to go without godsend medicine, merely because such substances could be misused by white American young people -- the white American young people whom we refuse "on principle" to educate about safe drug use. This is why hospice kids in India go without morphine 15 today, because fearmongers and demagogues have taught us to fear drugs rather than to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humankind16. This is what comes of "following the science" in the age of drug prohibition.
This is all due, in turn, to a category error. It was a mistake to place passion-scorning materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. By so doing, we have created endless jobs for materialists -- but only at the cost of completely disempowering human beings when it comes to healthcare.
I do not mean to pick on Pascal, but his article is just one of endless examples of how we completely hide the topics of drugs and prohibition from the public discourse these days. Our libraries and bookstores are full of books about drug misuse and abuse -- with nary a single title about positive drug use. Every book about human consciousness, every book about depression, every book about the search for ultimate reality should discuss psychoactive drugs and what their use can tell us about such topics. But we live in a world of make-believe in which we insist on two absurd propositions: 1) that drug use can have no upsides, and 2) that drug prohibition can have no downsides. And so our authors who write on such topics reckon without their host: they write as if drugs do not exist. Boyer is, alas, no exception to this rule of self-censorship: otherwise, he would have driven his thesis home by explaining how government drug policy is the prime example of the problems with following the science. This is because following the science does not mean being objective in the age of the Drug War: it means unfairly evaluating holistic medicines from the myopic viewpoint of reductive materialism 17. Following the science thus means practicing a kind of pharmacological colonialism. By so doing, our scientists lend a veneer of science to the xenophobia of the Francisco Pizarros of the world.
There would be almost no recidivism 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.
The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.
Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.
America arrests people whose only crime is that they are trying to be all that they can be in life... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
(There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)
Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."
We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.
Here is a typical user report about a drug that the DEA tells us has no positive uses whatsoever:
"There is a profoundness of meaning inherent in anything that moves." (reported in "Pikhal" by Alexander Shulgin)
I have dissed MindMed's new LSD "breakthrough drug" for philosophical reasons. But we can at least hope that the approval of such a "de-fanged" LSD will prove to be a step in the slow, zigzag path toward re-legalization.
Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.
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