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Behaviorism and the War on Drugs

or why doctors and researchers are blind to common sense

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 22, 2024



I have written many essays on the connection between materialism 1 and substance prohibition. I have shown how a dogmatic reductive materialism blinds drug researchers to common sense and helps them toe the Drug War party line by professing to be in doubt about the efficacy of many drugs that oh-so-obviously work, not only according to user reports and historical records, but according to psychological common sense (like the once-simple notion that drugs that cheer one up do actually cheer one up, even if they fail to do so in a way that materialist scientists can demonstrate on a pie chart!) However, I have not yet specified the name of the psychological theory that seems to have greenlighted this dogmatic obtuseness in the first place. That psychological theory is Behaviorism.

The icy coldness of that psychological doctrine is clear in the following words of its founder, JB Watson 2 , as quoted in the 2015 book "Paradox" by Margaret Cuonzo:

"Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic.3"


What counts is what one can measure -- and since anecdotal and historical accounts of life-affirming drug use cannot be quantified, they are to be ignored. You say a drug helps you? What do YOU know? Doctors are the experts after all: doctors who are dogmatically deaf to your laughter and blind to your smiles while you are under the influence.

Behaviorism is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it lends a veneer of science to their inability to deal with human emotions. The Behaviorist is Dr. Spock with an attitude. The doctrine seems to justify all their inability to live large and fully. Indeed, taken to extremes, such curmudgeons would have to foreswear music itself, since there is nothing logical and quantifiable about the emotions that it inspires, even in Behaviorists. Such feelings are, after all, just "heritages of a timid savage past akin to magic."

Unfortunately, the attitude of such curmudgeons has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive drug usage reports and historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide what can help them. No need to even discuss one's hopes and dreams with the doc because that is all touchy-feely stuff and anti-scientific. Behaviorism is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with Drug War ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants 4.

That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a pie chart.











Notes for essay entitled Behaviorism and the War on Drugs: or why doctors and researchers are blind to common sense:

1: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
2: JB Watson Britannica (up)
3: Paradox Cuonzo, Margaret, 2015 (up)
4: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.

Today's Washington Post reports that "opioid pills shipped" DROPPED 45% between 2011 and 2019..... while fatal overdoses ROSE TO RECORD LEVELS! Prohibition is PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.

The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.

After watching my mother suffer because of the drug war, I hate to hear people tell me that the problem is drugs. WRONG! That's a western colonialist viewpoint. God loved his creation (see Genesis). He did not make trash. We need to use entheogenic medicines wisely.

The so-called "herbs" that witches used were drugs, in the same way that "meds" are drugs. If academics made that connection, the study of witchcraft would shed a lot of light on the fearmongering of modern prohibitionists.

We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.

Drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.

Alcohol makes me sleepy. But NOT coca wine. The wine gives you an upbeat feeling of controlled energy, without the jitters of coffee and without the fury of steroids. It increases rather than dulls mental focus.

Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.

Jim Hogshire described sleep cures that make physical withdrawal from opium close to pain-free. As for "psychological addiction," there are hundreds of elating drugs that could be used to keep the ex-user's mind from morbidly focusing on a drug whose use has become problematic for them.


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