Why the Drug War is the Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
my application for joining the Philosophy Forum
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 25, 2025
Membership in the Philosophy Forum1 is by invitation only and the moderator requests a letter of introduction from potential members. I will be very interested to see if I am "allowed in." I know nothing about the site moderator, but I do know that philosophers in general ignore the Drug War completely and seem to think that it is bad manners even to mention the topic. But fingers crossed. Check back to this page from time to time to see whether the Philosophy Forum will let your old pal Rudolph join in any reindeer games!
Hello, Jamal.
I was wondering if I might join your Philosophy Forum.
I am a 66-year-old philosopher in spirit if not in title. I have written hundreds of philosophically oriented essays against the War on Drugs and drug prohibition as The Drug War Philosopher at abolishthedea.com. I have also written essays for Sociedelic magazine. I received a BA in Philosophy from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1989. I was offered a job as a TA at the time, but unfortunately, I turned it down. I have come to regret that decision since I now see that my lack of credentials has rendered me more or less invisible online in the world of philosophical discussions.
I am, however, the only professed philosopher who protested on behalf of William James against the FDA's recently announced plan to regulate laughing gas as a "drug.2" As I am sure you know, it was the use of such anesthetics that gave James his view of reality and that he urged philosophers to study the effects of such substances as well.
'No account of the universe in its totality,' wrote James, 'can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.3'
But many (most?) philosophers are afraid to challenge the drug-war ideology of substance demonization. William James founded the psychology department at Harvard University, and yet Harvard's online bio of James does not even mention his use of such substances or how they shaped his views of reality4.
Don't worry: whenever I post on such subjects in forums, I always make supported inductive or deductive arguments and/or quote identifiable sources: I do not simply rant against the status quo, even though I am depressed that so few philosophers push back against the Drug War, given the fact that it is, in my view, the great philosophical problem of our time. I believe that it represents the triumph of illogical argumentation over common sense, arguments based on unfounded yet unspoken premises -- in other words, it represents a world view which philosophers as such might be thought to be uniquely qualified to anatomize and rebuke, were they not afraid to do so. This is one of the benefits of working outside academia: I can afford to be braver than tenured professors.
I have, in fact, written hundreds of letters to philosophers on this subject, almost all of which have been ignored, however5. The Drug War has frightened academics into silence, which alone is a good enough reason to end it, were there not many other reasons to do so as well, such as the fact that it has brought about the end of the rule of law in Latin America, while turning America's inner-cities into no-go zones and causing unnecessary drug overdoses by refusing to teach safe use and to regulate product. We are also under a sort of intense form of propaganda as westerners, thanks to which almost no reports of positive drug use can be published or depicted in movies or other media - this despite the fact that user reports in books by researchers such as Alexander Shulgin6 (and James Fadiman7, William Richards8, Stanislav Grof9, etc.) imply endless potential for common-sense therapeutic drug use. Consider the following user reports in Shulgin's book "Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story10":
"The breakthrough I had... the following day... was of the highest value and importance for me.11"
"The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people.12"
"I am experiencing more deeply than ever before the importance of acknowledging and deeply honoring each human being. And I was able to go through and resolve some judgments with particular persons.13"
Meanwhile, science is censored. Many stories in magazines like Science News and Psychology Today only make sense under the assumption that drug prohibition is a natural baseline14. Is "depression" really "a tough nut to crack," as both magazines maintain, or is that not simply the case because we have outlawed every substance that could help treat the condition in question, many of which could cheer the user up "in a trice," like the many non-addictive phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin? Clearly, the magazines are using words like "treat" and "cure" in a very debatable fashion, indeed, one that assumes the truth and sufficiency of behaviorism and reductive materialism in the realm of mood and mentation.
I write on other subjects as well and I will never try to hijack original posts in order to make a point about substance prohibition. I do find, however, that almost all philosophical topics have an eventual tie-in to Drug War ideology that is just waiting to be exposed. In fact, I believe that there should be Drug War Studies departments at universities, so numerous are the anti-scientific implications of the prohibitionist mindset, many of which have yet to be identified and exposed, let alone fleshed out by philosophers. The very creation of such departments would serve as an implicit rebuke to Drug Warriors by implying that their populist demagoguery about drugs is simplistic and immature. Topics to be covered in such a department would include: "Behaviorism versus common sense in establishing drug efficacy," "How the FDA ignores all downsides of NOT approving drugs," "How drugs inspired the Hindu religion," "Replacing psychiatrists with pharmacologically savvy empaths," "Drug War Materialism versus the holistic Cosmovision of the Andes," and "Why our safety requirements for drug use are higher than those for any other risky activity on earth, including drinking and driving."
I think that the creation of such a department may someday turn out to be an important step in re-legalizing godsend medicine, although it may yet be decades before universities have the bravery and the perceived freedom to take such a step. The women's movement and the advancement of minority rights were both promoted by the creation of separate university departments with focused agendas: perhaps this could be a meaningful M.O. for at last changing the prohibitionist mindset of western society. For the current mindset, in effect, is nothing less than the following anti-scientific and inhumane credo: namely, that a psychoactive substance that can be theoretically misused by a white American young person at one dose and for one reason must not be used by anyone at any dose for any reason, ever.
But enough of that. My point here is simply that the Drug War is supported by a raft of unspoken assumptions that need to be addressed and which are, instead, almost totally ignored.
To conclude...
Please do not take this personally, but I make this request to join your forum with some trepidation. This is because I am quite used to being blocked and banned online these days merely because I mention such subjects. I get the feeling that it is considered impolite to bring up such subjects in today's academia. Again, this is not the only topic on which I write, but you requested biographical material from a prospective new member, and so I felt obliged to be upfront about my major philosophical focus. If it sounds to you like I take the Drug War personally, however, you are right. I hold it responsible for denying me godsend medicines for my depression while shunting me off onto dependence-causing Big Pharma meds that neither inspire nor elate. I therefore have a motive to unveil the seemingly endless false assumptions (and corrupt motivations) that have rendered the Drug War as plausible social policy in the public mind.
I hope this backstory does not frighten you and will instead convince you to "let me in."
Thanks very much for your time!
PS Last night I was reading the opening chapter on "Appearance and Reality" in Bertrand Russell's "The Problems of Philosophy," in which the author makes the following claim:
"Any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong.15"
It struck me that this claim is only true because we use a presumptive and imprecise language as westerners, one which "encourages" us to make acontextual claims about the world, such as "This table IS blue" and "That table IS red," without regard to the perceiver's condition or location.
Russell's claim might not be true were we to use a different language: one that had no noun for "red" but allowed us instead to speak of objects as "participating in redness." We could all perhaps agree that a conventionally "red" table "participates in redness," even though we might never all agree that a table is specifically "red" (i.e., from all perspectives, etc.).
This insight, by the way, could be tied into Drug War ideology, in the appropriate venue.
For the psychological doctrine of "behaviorism" (which is operative today in drug research) is like our human language, in that it too seeks to eliminate context in the interest of providing us with certainty. And so it jettisons all but quantifiable data about the effects of substance use, leaving us with "certain" yet absurd results -- like the idea that laughing gas cannot necessarily help the depressed (see "Can laughing gas help those with treatment-resistant depression?" by Robert Glatter in Forbes magazine, 202116). Reader's Digest has known for a hundred years that "laughter is the best medicine." However, behaviorism teaches us to doubt that once-obvious fact. It dogmatically blinds researchers to anecdote, to history and to psychological common sense - all in the name of establishing a sort of faux certainty about human beings, in the same way that our spoken language, as noted above, creates a faux certainty about the outside world - in the latter case, by using acontextual statements such as "the table IS blue" or "the table IS red."
Author's Follow-up: March 30, 2025
Are you sitting down? I don't want to have your coronary on my conscience. For I have some shocking news to vouchsafe...
Are you ready? Vouchsafing in 3, 2, 1....
Jamal has not yet seen fit to respond to my request for membership in the Philosophical Forum! I know, I know, it's hard to believe, isn't it?
Sure, philosophers have ignored me for the last six years and 29 days, but who would have GUESSED that they would ignore me after six years and THIRTY days?!
Perhaps I should explain. I am a dogmatic Humean and so I refuse to learn from the past insofar as there is no metaphysical reason for me to do so! I am what you might call the exact opposite of a fortune teller. Not only can I not foretell the future, but I find no principled reason to believe even that the sun will rise tomorrow.
Don't mind me, I am just being silly in order to take my mind off the fact that I am being ghosted by yet another philosopher. Well, I guess that's the fate of the Drug War heretic.
I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
The drug war is the defeatist doctrine that we will never be able to use psychoactive drugs wisely. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the government does everything it can to make drug use dangerous.
The book "Plants of the Gods" is full of plants and fungi that could help addicts and alcoholics, sometimes in the plant's existing form, sometimes in combinations, sometimes via extracting alkaloids, etc. But drug warriors need addiction to sell their prohibition ideology.
"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.
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.
This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.
Our tolerance for freedom wanes in proportion as we consider "drugs" to be demonic. This is the dark side behind the new ostensibly comic genre about Cocaine Bears and such. It shows that Americans are superstitious about drugs in a way that Neanderthals would have understood.
The Drug War is based on a huge number of misconceptions and prejudices. Obviously it's about power and racism too. It's all of the above. But every time I don't mention one specifically, someone makes out that I'm a moron. Gotta love Twitter.
Outlawing opium wOutlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.
as the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.
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, Why the Drug War is the Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time: my application for joining the Philosophy Forum, published on March 25, 2025 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, Why the Drug War is the Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time: my application for joining the Philosophy Forum, published on March 25, 2025 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)
