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You Can't Handle the Truth!

why drug warriors ignore the obvious

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 7, 2025



Yesterday, my power was out for 12 hours thanks to the fall of less than an inch of icy rain. This means I could post no essays, read no ebooks and contact no followers.

Discussion Topics

I could not even play computer chess while I waited for the power company to repair the lines, given the meager power of my computer battery, which generally lasts just long enough for me to power down the system safely after an outage. True, I could use my phone for some activities for the first few hours of the service interruption, but it soon lost power too and then I was truly left to my own devices - my own battery-powered devices, that is, of which, as it turns out, I have precious few indeed. I found myself back in the 18th century as far as modern conveniences were concerned. "No boats, no lights, no motor cars," as the '60s theme song laments. "Not a single luxury." Okay, I did have a motor car, but you get the point. The entire technological revolution was suddenly a nullity as far as I was concerned. I was on my own.

It now occurred to me that the great electronic advancements of the last 50 years were like a Crystal Palace erected in a marsh. The structure itself was magnificent, but it was built on shaky ground, to put it mildly. As Annie Jacobsen reports in "nuclear war 1 2 3 : A Scenario4," just one well-placed thermonuclear explosion in the atmosphere over North America would set the United States back 200 years, technologically speaking, by frying our computers and smart phones. If it takes our utility companies an entire day to deal with some mildly inclement weather, imagine the downtime that would be brought about by a fried grid. The social impact of such a catastrophe does not bear thinking of, and I will spare the reader any morbid speculation on the topic. My point here is simply to show how far the politicians of our time have steered the American mind away from things that really matter: above all, the fact that we are all living under a nuclear sword of Damocles that could fall at any moment.

And how do politicians keep our minds off of the things that really matter in life? By beating the drums about immigrants, foreigners and, above all, drugs. They demonize the very substances whose widespread strategic use is clearly the only way to pull the "other-hating" species known as Homo sapiens back from the brink of mutual assured destruction via thermonuclear weapons. And there is proof that this could work. We would see this if we stopped cynically laughing about the Flower Children of the '60s and their Summer of Love and realized that they had the right goal in mind: namely, a world of universal brother and sisterhood. Had the government supported their effort to use drugs strategically on behalf of that goal, rather than drafting drug laws for the express purpose of locking them up and throwing away the key, the doomsday clock might not be "closer than ever" to Armageddon, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists declares today, just "89 seconds to midnight5."

The UK had its own drug-inspired Summer of Love in the 1990s, when ravers were using Ecstasy6. Here are some quotes from DJs active at the time.



In a sane world, the headline here would read: "British ravers find unprecedented peace, love and understanding with the help of Ecstasy!!!"

But in the cynical minds of the British MPs, the headline was simply: "British ravers found to be using dirty evil rotten DRUGS!!!"

Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth! Instead of praising the peaceful dance floors as a consummation devoutly to be wished, British MPs sought to shut them down. Who needs universal peace, love and understanding, after all? Who needs all that touchy-feely stuff? So they cracked down on Ecstasy use, after which the UK dance floors erupted into alcohol-fueled violence. Concert organizers suddenly needed to hire special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces. And why? Because UK politicians had come to believe their own campaign rhetoric, that all that matters are immigrants, foreigners and drugs. Nuclear annihilation thanks to a hate-filled humanity? Not so much.

This is why I say to Drug Warriors what Colonel Jessup said to Lieutenant Kaffee in the movie "A Few Good Men": "You can't handle the truth!" You can't handle the fact that we are on the brink of nuclear annihilation thanks to your hatred of peace, love and understanding. Speaking of which, drug pundits like Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan criticize the supposedly irresponsible hippies of the '60s, but what were the Republicans doing during this time? Answer: they were demonizing anyone who did not believe in the zealous pursuit of thermonuclear weapons. The chief complaint against Robert Oppenheimer brought by Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, amounted to the fact that the physicist had moral scruples about such weapons. In the spirit of the times, such namby-pamby sentiment pegged one as a communist and hence as a security risk7. This is the hate-filled backstory that the drug-war apologists ignore when they trash the Flower Children as irresponsible dreamers.

When hysterical Drug Warriors tell us that drug use is a matter of national security, they are right, but for the wrong reasons. It is common psychological sense that we require the widespread but informed use of entheogenic drugs to help screw our species' head back on straight. Unfortunately, common sense is at a premium these days, not just because of drug-war ideology but thanks to modern science itself, which, as David Bohm shows, is based on the idea that the world is made up of parts and that the pursuit of truth requires one to abstract oneself from the big picture, hence the proliferation of academic specialties that develop their own mutually exclusive vocabularies and seldom bother to talk to each other. This is ironic to Bohm, because both quantum theory and the theory of relativity have at least one thing in common. They both show us that the world cannot be understood except in context, that the whole does matter.

Speaking of this modern focus on parts rather than the whole, Bohm writes:

"A similar trend has already begun to dominate in psychology. Thus we arrive at the very odd result that in the study of life and mind, which are just the fields in which formative cause acting in undivided and unbroken flowing movement is most evident to experience and observation, there is now the strongest belief in the fragmentary atomistic approach to reality.8"


That this has actually happened in the field of psychology is abundantly clear. It is shown in the fact that materialist scientists lack all common sense in evaluating the potential benefits of psychoactive drugs. They are blind to all psychological benefits of drug use. They can see, for instance, no use for laughing gas in helping the chronically depressed. Laughing gas! Readers Digest has known for 100 years that "laughter is the best medicine," but modern doctors do not care how much a patient laughs while using laughing gas, nor how much they look forward to use and thereby reap the health benefits of positive anticipation. These materialists place their faith in the inhumane ideology of behaviorism, which tells them to pay attention only to what can be measured and quantified, that the overall picture means nothing, and that even patient testimony will not tell you if they are "really" happy, that only a scientist can make that call9.

It is no wonder that this attitude has staying power in the field of psychology, because once we renounce this dogmatic reductionism, it becomes blazingly clear that any drug that elates is an antidepressant. The Drug Warrior will tell us that we will never be able to use such substances wisely and safely, but this is a defeatist statement that slanders human creativity. The statement only seems to be true because a reform in our drug attitudes requires a whole new way of thinking about the subject, a shamanic view in which drug deaths are considered no different than traffic deaths: regrettable outcomes that oblige us to educate those who engage in said activities, not to arrest them. Meanwhile, we have to realize that the experts when it comes to the use of psychoactive drugs are the users themselves, not materialist scientists. To put scientists in charge of deciding if mind and mood medicine works is like putting Dr. Spock of Star Trek in charge of deciding if hugging works. "This hugging of yours is highly illogical, Captain. But perhaps it is 'working' on some biochemical basis that I have yet to understand. I am afraid that many well-funded studies will be required to determine if hugging actually works."

In short, Dr. Spock 'just doesn't get it,' and neither do modern scientists when it comes to drugs. And it is not because the truth is hard to see: to the contrary, the truth is glaringly obvious. Drugs can help! They can help us survive, both individually and as a species. It is simply that Drug Warriors cannot handle that truth. They cannot handle a world of peace, love and understanding, where people can live with themselves and do not feel the need to go out into the world and cause trouble. They cannot handle a world wherein Mexicans and Chinese and Russians are our brothers and our sisters just as surely as are the men and women who live next-door. They cannot handle a world in which touchy-feely things like love actually matter.

Rodney King famously asked the American people, "Can't we all get along?", after the L.A. riots of the '90s.

The Drug Warriors' answer to that question is: "Not if WE can help it!"


AFTERWORD

Bohm explains how our belief in a world made up of separate, unrelated parts can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, a habit of thought that is difficult to transcend. He asks us to consider the case of a man who believes that the world is out to get him. His mistrustful attitude will inspire contempt and hatred on the part of others, and so the man will consider that his belief about humanity has been shown to be true by the behaviors that he observes in the real world. "See?", says this man, "People are behaving just like I thought that they would!" Whereas, in reality, the man has essentially created a world in which the people he meets will be disposed to dislike him and to treat him accordingly.

Bohm goes on from this analogy to criticize the modern tendency to consider theories (even his own) as being absolutely and unconditionally true. For when we assume the absolute truth and applicability of a theory, we create a world in which our theory seems to be proven by everything that happens to us, just as the man mentioned above finds that his own cynical philosophy of life is "proven" by every problematic engagement that he has with people in the world. As Bohm writes in his 1980 book "Wholeness and the Implicate Order":

"If we supposed that theories gave true knowledge, corresponding to 'reality as it is', then we would have to conclude that Newtonian theory was true until around 1900, after which it suddenly became false, while relativity and quantum theory suddenly became the truth. Such an absurd conclusion does not arise, however, if we say that all theories are insights, which are neither true nor false but, rather, clear in certain domains, and unclear when extended beyond these domains."


And what happens when we consider our national world view to be infallible? Answer: Our Drug War goes global. And so if a white young person might have problems using a drug for one reason at one dosage, then nobody in the world can use that drug for any reason at any dosage. This is an imperialist outrage that outlaws common-sense healing, spiritual practices and religious inspiration worldwide.



Discussion Topics

May 23, 2025

cartoon figures conversing

Attention Teachers and Professors: Brian is not writing these essays for his health. (Well, in a way he is, actually, but that's not important now.) His goal is to get the world thinking about the anti-democratic and anti-scientific idiocy of the War on Drugs. You can stimulate your students' brainwashed grey matter on this topic by having them read the above essay and then discuss the following questions as a group!

  1. Why does Brian liken our technology-based society to "a Crystal Palace erected in a marsh"?

  2. How do politicians keep our minds off things that really matter -- like avoiding nuclear annihilation?

  3. What is 'the hate-filled backstory that the drug-war apologists ignore when they trash the Flower Children as irresponsible dreamers'?

  4. Contrast purblind behaviorism with the holistic insights of David Bohm.

  5. Who are the real experts when it comes to the use of psychoactive drugs?

  6. What happens when we consider our worldview to be infallible?











Notes for essay entitled You Can't Handle the Truth!: why drug warriors ignore the obvious:

1: 8 Nuclear Close Calls that Nearly Spelled Disaster Davidson, Lucy, History Hit, 2022 (up)
2: Global Nuclear Warhead Stockpiles (1945-2024) Voronoi, 2023 (up)
3: Nuclear Near-Misses: The Close Calls That Almost Changed the World Atomic Toasters, 2024 (up)
4: Nuclear War: A Scenario Jacobsen, Annie, 2024 (up)
5: Science and Security Board Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (up)
6: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
7: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer Bird, Kai (up)
8: Wholeness and the Implicate Order Bohm, David, 1980 (up)
9: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




I'm going to get on the grade-school circuit, telling kids to say no to horses. "You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!"

Almost every article about suicide is shallow because it takes drug prohibition as a natural baseline, even though drug prohibition outlaws substances that could so clearly elevate mood.

Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.

The reasons that people use drugs are psychologically obvious. Academics gaslight us on this topic and invent new diseases to explain away our desire to live large.

When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!

The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.

To treat opioid use disorder, we should re-normalize the peaceable smoking of opium at home as an alternative to drinking alcohol.

I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.

Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.

Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use drugs that speed up and sharpen mental processes.


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






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