Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs

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Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 6, 2024

I've been on beta blockers for anxiety for years now and I recently decided that I finally wanted to quit.

How naive of me.

Discussion questions

I found out that quitting may be impossible. Why? Because we have outlawed all alternatives to Big Pharma meds of this kind. Meanwhile, the daily use of a beta blocker has changed my body's biochemical baseline such that my body 'panics' when it no longer senses the drug in its system.

DOGMATICALLY BLIND PSYCHIATRISTS

In researching this issue online, I was surprised to find a lot of glib praise for anxiolytic beta blockers from psychiatrists... and almost no talk about the difficulty of withdrawal, except for the usual sanctimonious and self-serving spiel admonishing us to see one's doctor for help in getting off such meds. Yes, they want us to 'get help' from the same doctors who got us hooked on these drugs in the first place. This is 'all of a piece' with the psychiatrist's support for dependence-causing antidepressants ¹. Psychiatrists see no problem with mucking about with a patient's biochemical baseline, provided that they can do so in a way that turns that patient into a client for life.

Such indiscriminate praise for beta blockers is not just bad science, it's bad philosophy: it conveys the idea that drugs should be used merely to make life livable and not to help a person thrive. In fact, both beta blockers and antidepressants seem designed to KEEP a patient from thriving.

A WAR ON CREATIVITY

I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing 'Howl!' while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like 'Howl!', which is a caustic lament against the unimaginative materialism ² of Americans-- nor do they want authors like HP Lovecraft writing opium ³ -inspired stories like 'Celaphais,' in which the homeless protagonist wanders through 'the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams,' nor do they find any benefit whatsoever in the exquisite appreciation of nature provided by the use of drugs like morphine ⁴ , as described most particularly by Edgar Allan Poe in 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.'

So when materialist psychiatrists approve only of psychiatric drugs that neither elate nor inspire (in contradistinction to time-honored plant medicines, for instance, which often do both), they are not giving us some scientifically objective verdict about what actually works in this world: they are telling HOW they think we should go about curing ourselves: namely, in a seemly way that does not conduce to undue happiness or excitement on our part.

In short, 'Everything as it should be, just like good Christians,' as the phlegmatic old nanny wistfully remarks in 'Uncle Vanya' by Anton Chekov.

But such assumption-laden pharmacological beliefs can be philosophically gainsaid by ordinary people without a medical degree... unless, of course, we legally require Americans to approach the world from a materialist viewpoint. How? By outlawing all substances that would help us approach the world of spirituality, healing and medicine from an holistic point of view, the nature-friendly viewpoint that is both explicitly and implicitly adopted by indigenous credos around the world, as in the Cosmovision of the Andes.

ALLEN GINSBERG V MATERIALISM

Speaking of Allen Ginsberg, he was way ahead of his time in diagnosing the materialistic tyranny of the War on Drugs, as is demonstrated by the following citation from the beat poet as referenced by editor Oliver Harris in 'The Yage Letters Redux' by William Burroughs.

'A materialist consciousness is attempting to preserve itself from dissolution by restriction and persecution of experience of the transcendental. One day perhaps the earth will be dominated by the illusion of separate consciousness, the bureaucrats having triumphed in seizing control of all roads of communication with the divine and restricting traffic. But sleep and death cannot evade the great dream of being and the victory of the bureaucrats of illusion is only an illusion of their separate world of consciousness.' -- Allen Ginsberg ⁵

Unfortunately, almost all the 'movers and shakers' in the war against the Drug War are materialists and work in environments where the funding comes ultimately, directly or indirectly, from the pockets of chemically dependent Americans like myself. (Where else do you think that Big Pharma gets its enormous budget for studying psychiatric meds?) I'm talking about authors like Rick Strassman ⁶, Rick Doblin ⁷, DJ Nutt ⁸ and Carl Hart ⁹. They are dogmatically incapable of understanding the full injustice of the materialistic War on Drugs, at least to the extent that they are true to their materialistic bona fides and remember upon which side their toast is buttered. And why? Because as materialists, they are obliged to ignore all glaringly obvious and time-honored benefits of drugs (all uses that make sense merely because of common sense psychology) and to search instead for proof of efficacy under a microscope and/or in studies that attempt to meticulously ignore all the contextual psychological 'biases' that are crucial in making holistic drugs effective in the first place.

These are the kind of authors who talk about 'treatment-resistant depression,' thereby implying that SSRIs and SNRIs have 'sorted' depression,, as the Brits would say, but that there are a minority of folks whose finicky biochemistry does not accept these wonderful cures, in the same way that 30% of milk drinkers are lactose intolerant and cannot enjoy the blessings of milk.

But if materialists have 'sorted' depression, I never got the memo. Was I happy and did not know it? No. It's just that my definition of an effective antidepressant is one that allows me to live large, not one that merely makes my gloominess survivable, which is the low bar set by materialist science for such drugs.

Besides, the use of the term 'lactose intolerant' is just a linguistic exercise in blaming the victim: it is used by PR firms to whitewash the downsides of milk. This is a linguistic indulgence that we never dispense for demonized drugs. Far less than 30% of cocaine users are 'cocaine intolerant,' since the vast majority of drug users use responsibly, as Carl Hart reports in 'Drug Use for Grownups,' but we never blame users for their misuse of psychoactive substances but rather the substances that they misuse (bearing in mind that the term 'misuse' is often just a synonym for mere 'use' in the fanatically biased Christian Science lexicon of the Drug Warrior).

BLAMING DRUGS

This is the whole anti-scientific problem with substance prohibition: it blames drugs for problems that are caused by human beings and their bad social policies (including fearmongering, a refusal to educate, and a refusal to provide regulated product for desired substances). The Drug War is therefore superstitious and anti-scientific and just plain silly: it is as ignorant as outlawing fire because it can burn our fingers. And the worst part about it is: the Drug War is an eternal war. Agencies like the DEA do not want to end drug problems -- to do so would be to end their perceived relevance in the world and jeopardize their shamefully large multi-billion-dollar budget. They want to keep screaming 'drugs' (PCP ¹⁰, ICE, crack cocaine ¹¹ ¹² , oxy, Fentanyl!) thereby promoting their use by rebellious young people whom we refuse to educate about safe use (and whom we refuse to supply with regulated product), with the hope that more young people will die and that the agency can then turn around and blame these new DEA-caused deaths on drugs themselves, thus 'justifying' still more obscene allocations of money on behalf of locking up American minorities and killing socially conscious protestors in Latin America (see, for instance, 'Drug War capitalism ¹³ ' by Dawn Paley ¹⁴). What an enormous and seemingly never-ending scam!

In short, the Drug War kills far more Americans than would have ever died had the country not taking the unprecedented step of outlawing Mother Nature, a step which is so palpably anti-democratic and anti-Christian that the mind boggles, especially when so many of the defenders of this policy claim to be Christians themselves -- Christians whose ancestors came here to escape religious persecution, the same persecution that these 'Christians' now lavish upon those who find spiritual and emotional support in time-honored plant medicines and fungi, substances which the Judeo-Christian God himself told us were good.

THOMAS SZASZ WAS RIGHT

Thomas Szasz was right: Americans just need to grow up when it comes to drugs ¹⁵. This means, first and foremost, that we need to stop holding drug use to safety standards that we do not apply to any other risky activity on planet Earth, no, not even to free-climbing or swimming with sharks -- or to driving a car, for that matter! If we had the same risk sensitivity for these latter activities, Americans would still be riding horses -- and even that activity would have been banned after the well-publicized death of Christopher Reeves, which would have scared us into renouncing horseback riding once and for all.

To repeat: the claim that antidepressants 'work' is a philosophical claim, not a scientific one, since the veracity of that claim depends entirely on how one defines the word 'work,' that is, on what one believes would or should constitute a 'cured' state for the depressed. For folks like myself, a cure for my depression would mean that I would be allowed to 'live large' and be the kind of person I want to be in life, but if antidepressants 'work,' they do not do so in that fashion. To the contrary, they hold me back from being all that I can be -- and the most that I can say for them after 40 years' worth of use is that they make depression livable, which is faint praise indeed, especially when we consider that outlawed drugs can exceed that stinting result by leaps and bounds.

PAUL STAMETS' CURE FOR STUTTERING

Paul Stamets ¹⁶ cured his teenage stammering problem in one single afternoon with the help of a handful of psilocybin mushrooms, but the materialist does not consider such cures to be 'real.'¹⁷ Why not? Because the materialist expects to find proof of efficacy under a microscope or in studies so controlled as to ignore the potential for holistically inspired healing entirely. The best we can expect from them is for them to eventually schedule a clinical trial in which psilocybin is specifically studied for its power to end stuttering -- which will be decades from now, however, since the piecemeal approach of the materialist means that they must first study psilocybin for treating PTSD, then depression, then anxiety.... all under the absurd assumption that these conditions have nothing whatsoever to do with each other and are as causally unconnected as an ankle sprain and a headache. But again this is not objective science at work: it is dogmatic materialistic presumption which imposes separation where there is none in order to produce the shameless disease-mongering of the DSM manual.

CONCLUSION

It's no wonder that psychiatrists would be slow to jettison their materialist assumptions about drugs, however. They stand to lose a lot of money once they accept the proposition that drugs like psilocybin can be used holistically to achieve actual cures. Just think how much money the healthcare industry could have gotten out of Paul Stamets over the years had they gotten to him before he ingested those mushrooms. They could have diagnosed his problem as anxiety and put him on beta blockers for life. The money in psychiatry comes from TREATING the problems of patients, after all, not from curing them.

Author's Follow-up: January 4, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

Note that I am not saying that beta blockers are bad. To the contrary, they may have some good uses and may, for aught I know, be the best thing that's available for certain heart patients. I am not a Drug Warrior, and so I do not believe that drugs are bad in and of themselves, no, not even beta blockers and antidepressants. I may believe that we have not yet found a sensible use for these drugs -- or that most uses are ultimately negative in that they unnecessarily turn the user into a patient for life -- unnecessarily, given that we have outlawed better options. We must, of course, also distinguish between symptomatic use and daily lifetime use in making such judgments. It is far easier to sign off on symptomatic use, whereas daily lifetime use requires a much stricter standard of evaluation.

The main point is this: While prohibition is in force and it outlaws so many potential alternatives to the modern psychoactive pharmacopoeia, our evaluation of such drugs is 'rigged.' We may find that beta blockers, for instance, are the best thing out there for conditions A, B, and C -- but this is a false statement in the age of prohibition -- or at least it is a conclusion that we have no right to draw in light of prohibition, which has outlawed so many potential alternatives and rendered them difficult to even study.

Meanwhile, we cannot help but be suspicious about the fact that the nostrums continually advanced by big pharma for our mind and mood always seem to require us to take them daily for life. The fact that psychiatrists do not even acknowledge this as a downside shows how little value they place on human independence and self-respect. In some ways, I would rather be dependent on a drug dealer than a psychiatrist, for the former does not require me to be a 'patient' but rather just a customer. The former does not consider me sick. The former does not ask me about the last time I considered suicide. The former just charges me for the drugs, not for the privilege of being catechized on my emotional condition.

And yet even lifetime dependency is not bad in and of itself. What is bad is UNWANTED lifetime dependency. And therein lies the problem of prohibition. One may say that they are happy with a lifetime dependency on big pharma meds, but this declaration can only be made in ignorance. Why? Because one just has to assume that the vast pharmacopoeia of outlawed substances has nothing better to offer one. That's all too easy to assume, however, in the age of prohibition since the Drug War has discouraged precisely the kind of research that might convince us otherwise. The media encourages this ignorance by refusing to publish movies ¹⁸ and articles that illustrate the positive use of demonized drugs.

And yet the Drug War focuses all talk about drugs on downsides, clearly demonstrating that the Drug Warrior is a hypochondriac by proxy when it comes to drugs. That is one particular world view, a neurotic one at that, not an objective view with which all rational minds must consent.

The answer is to re-legalize substances so that folks can self-prescribe for mood and mind medicine based on their own values and their own ideas about the meaning of life -- self-prescribe, that is, with the ever-available help of pharmacologically savvy empaths ¹⁹ that can teach them drug use strategies that have been proven to be effective in helping a would-be user to achieve the psychosocial outcomes that they desire -- that THEY desire, mind, not their doctors nor the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.

Discussion Topics

June 02, 2025

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!

List some of the many problems associated with "getting off" of SSRIs and SNRIs.

What does Brian mean by "assumption-laden pharmacological beliefs?

In what ways are drug dealers superior to 'mental health' doctors, generally speaking?

Why do so many doctors fail to see the downsides of a lifetime dependency on Big Pharma ²⁰ ²¹ pills?

Fearmongering

Getting Off Drugs

Materialism

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes:

1: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
2: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
4: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
5: The Yage Letters Redux, edited by Oliver Harris Burroughs, William S, 2005 (up)
6: Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman DWP (up)
7: Rick Doblin Doblin, Rick (up)
8: Drug Science Nutt, DJ (up)
9: What Carl Hart Missed DWP (up)
10: Kirkpatrick, Jonathan. 2023. “Filter.” Filter. October 10, 2023. https://filtermag.org/pcp-meth-news-media/. (up)
11: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
12: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
13: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)
14: ThriftBooks. 2026. “Drug War Capitalism.” ThriftBooks. 2026. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/drug-war-capitalism/9217021/?resultid=e8667266-257a-41bf-83e3-78200e3527f3#edition=8539401&idiq=10283063. (up)
15: “Ceremonial Chemistry – Syracuse University Press.” 2026. Syr.edu. 2026. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1114/ceremonial-chemistry/. (up)
16: Paul Stamets The Joe Rogan Experience (podcast), 2017 (up)
17: Fantastic Fungi: The Big-Screen Revival Tour Stamets, Paul (up)
18: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
19: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism DWP (up)
20: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
21: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

If MAPS wants to make progress with MDMA they should start "calling out" the FDA for judging holistic medicines by materialist standards, which means ignoring all glaringly obvious benefits.

We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).

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 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.

I wonder if Nixon knew what a favor he was doing medical capitalism when he outlawed psychedelics. Those drugs can actually cure things, and there's no money in that.

What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.

Psychiatrists prescribe drugs that muck about with a patient's biochemical baseline, making them chemically dependent and turning them into patients for life.

Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.

Drug warriors think only about young people misusing drugs. They never think about the millions of the depressed whom they're condemning to a lifetime of totally unnecessary misery by outlawing drugs.

The term "hard" is just our modern term for the kinds of drugs that doctors of yore used to call panaceas

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(up)

Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs

Author's Follow-up: January 4, 2025

Discussion Topics

June 02, 2025

Fearmongering

Getting Off Drugs

Materialism

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend