Addiction Therapy in the Year 2100
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 9, 2019
(a philosophical satire written to encourage a complete rethinking of our modern attitudes toward addiction and its treatment)
SCENE: 12 adults seated in a circle.
JOHN SMITH: My name is John Smith and I’m a miserable wretch.
[GROUP MEMBERS TITTER RELUCTANTLY, FINALLY BREAKING OUT INTO FULL-BLOWN LAUGHTER]
SMITH: What? What’s so funny?
[LAUGHTER CONTINUES]
LEADER: You’ll have to forgive us, Johnny boy, but you must not get around much these days.
SMITH: What do you mean? I thought the whole point of addiction therapy was for me to find the protestant God of the Bible.
LEADER: Oh, yeah?
SMITH: Or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.
[LAUGHTER RESUMES]
SMITH: That’s why I started out with the customary self-abasement and grovelling.
LEADER: That is so 21st century of you, dawg. The point of modern therapy is simply to SHOW YOU GOD – or “at least a reasonable facsimile thereof,” as you put it.
SMITH: What?
LEADER: Everything else follows from that point, bruh: self-respect, respect for others, temperance, you name it.
SMITH: And just how do you intend to show me God?!
LEADER: Earth to Smith: Americans stopped criminalizing Mother Nature over fifty years ago!!!
SMITH: Meaning?
LEADER: Meaning we have amassed a whole pharmacy worth of psychoactive plants and fungi with which we can now ceremonially lead you on a voyage of inner discovery…
SMITH: Yeah?
LEADER: …after which you’ll see the folly of addiction – always assuming, of course, that you enter our program in good faith, committed to learning from Mother Nature.
SMITH: Oh.
LEADER: Get it?
SMITH (reluctantly): Well… I guess…
LEADER: Good.
SMITH: All I can say is that the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous is probably rolling over in his grave right now.
LEADER: To the contrary, the legendary Bill W. was a big fan of treating addiction with LSD therapy…
SMITH: Really?
LEADER: Until a corrupt politician by the name of Richard Nixon criminalized the substance in his effort to crack down on hippies.
SMITH: Oh.
LEADER: That’s right: “Alcoholics be damned,” said Nixon, “as long as I can get my own back against Timothy Leary!”
SMITH: Fair enough, I guess, but…
LEADER: Yes?
SMITH: I still don’t get how you’re gonna make me see God.
LEADER: As far as the specifics of the process, I’d better turn you over to our team pharmacologist, Terence McKenna VIII. Terence?
TERENCE: Well, jefe, the precise combination of plants that we use is a trade secret, of course, kind of like the 11 herbs and spices still used to this very day by KFC.
LEADER: True dat. (Love me some KFC.)
TERENCE: But I can give you a random list of some of the big-hitters in our line-up of therapeutic plants.
LEADER: Proceed when ready.
TERENCE: We’ve got Acorus calamus, Amanita muscaria, Anadenantherea peregrina, Ariocarpus retusus Scheidw, Atropa belladonna, banisteriopsis caapi, Boletus manicus Heim—
LEADER: Enough, dawg. We don’t want to provide a shopping list for our competitors in the therapy biz.
TERENCE: Not to worry, bruh: these substances are useless (yea, even deadly) when used in the wrong doses…
LEADER: I heard that.
TERENCE: …or in the wrong set and setting.
JOHN: But then why are we sitting around in a circle?
LEADER: So you guys can get acquainted before we start our plant-guided rituals next week.
JOHN: Oh.
LEADER: Speaking of which, why don’t you introduce yourself again?
JOHN: OK.
LEADER: But this time, go easy on the self-abasement, would ya?
JOHN: Will do.
LEADER: I think we can take it as a given that we all have much to learn from our plant friends. No need to dwell morbidly on that fact during this introductory session.
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they connote.
My cousin says we should punish drug dealers. I say we should punish those politicians who created those drug dealers out of whole cloth by passing unprecedented laws against the use of Mother Nature's bounty.
Doc to Franklin: "I'm sorry, Ben, but I see no benefits of opium use under my microscope. The idea that you are living a fulfilled life is clearly a mistake on your part. If you want to be scientific, stop using opium and be scientifically depressed like the rest of us."
Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity. It is the outlawing of our right to take care of our own health.
Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" are horrible because they encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.
Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.
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.
Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.
America never ended prohibition. It just redirected prohibition from alcohol to all of alcohol's competitors.
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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass
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