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Capitalism and the Drug War Pt 2

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 11, 2022



A Twitter user plucked my last nerve last night by opining that the talk about psychedelics was nothing but the self-interested hype that is omnipresent in the unbridled capitalist economy of today. Although there was a lot of truth to that observation, I have never seen a Twitter post that so aggressively tossed a poor little innocent baby out with his bath water. The fact is that psychedelics have inspired entire religions, even in the western tradition at Eleusis. They gave Plato his view of the afterlife and allowed Francis Crick to visualize the DNA helix. While capitalism is sure to bring psychedelic hucksters to the fore, it does not follow that psychedelics themselves are mere placebos or worse. It simply means that we need to read the relevant literature to separate facts from sales pitches. As for the Twitter user in question, s/he seems to have read plenty about the downsides of capitalism while ignoring the admittedly well-hidden role of psychedelics in world history.

The skeptic who really wants to make a case against capitalism should highlight the bizarre approval of ketamine to treat depression, a drug that is known to cause urinary problems in long- and even moderate-term users. I say ketamine is "known" to cause urinary problems, but this information is completely hidden from a depressed person who searches for "ketamine" on Google. Why? Because Google's capitalist algorithms automatically take you to pay-to-play sites of hucksters who seek to profit handsomely from providing ketamine to the depressed at ridiculously high prices, considering the relatively low cost of "special K" on the street. The determined researcher will eventually find out that there are a host of scientific websites, especially in Asia, that discuss the urinary problems associated with ketamine, but these cautionary sites are hidden from the very people who need to read them: those who search for "depression treatments" and "ketamine."

This is why all psychoactive medicines should be available on a non-profit basis, so that no one will have a vested interest in lying about them, neither by demonizing them a priori (like the Drug Warrior always does) or by overselling their safety and benefits (which is the MO of the capitalist huckster).

I said above that the approval of ketamine was bizarre. Why? Well, take me, for instance. I am a chronic depressive who has waited four decades now for the US government to "approve" the bounty of Mother Nature which grows all around me and which has inspired entire religions around the globe. After 40 long years, the FDA still tells me that it is too dangerous for me to access these time-honored meds, and yet they give me the go-ahead to access a recently developed synthesized anesthetic that causes incontinence and kidney problems in even moderate-term users. One can only assume that there was self-interested wheeling and dealing behind that decision, not just "facts."

This is what happens when we follow the advice of folks like Neo Drug Warrior Kevin Sabet who calls for government to continue deciding which substances we can use, naively thinking that it can and will decide based on the facts.

Nonsense. A fact-based approach to psychoactive medicines is never going to happen in a country that advertises Big Pharma pills like candy on prime-time television. Like Lieutenant Kaffee in "A Few Good Men," unbridled capitalists cannot HANDLE the truth when it comes to psychoactive medicine. Instead, they practice an anti-scientific policy of demonizing criminalized "drugs" based on one-off horror stories that make a big stink in the press, meanwhile ignoring the millions that are suffering in silence for want of the medicines that the capitalists are thus bad-mouthing out of all context. But then context is always ignored by our so-called scientific establishment. Thanks to this willful blindness, today's drug researchers can take one single horror story about marijuana -- like the fact that it was supposedly implicated in a recent death by overdose -- and claim that this story represents a knock-down argument in favor of outlawing pot. Really? There are thousands of deaths around the globe every year that are associated with aspirin. Does that constitute a knockdown argument in favor of outlawing aspirin? Of course not. The hypocrisy of scientists in this regard can only be explained with reference to an unacknowledged ideological bias on their part against the substance upon which they purport to be "scientifically" opining.

Besides, science and facts should not have the final say when it comes to the approval of psychoactive medicines. Why not? Because safety is only ONE of the factors that a potential user considers in deciding whether to partake of a psychoactive substance. Moreover, safety is never the PRIMARY consideration. Safety comes in second place to the potential user's goal of achieving self-actualization in life and/or self-understanding or self-improvement. Take an actor, for instance. If they suffer from debilitating stage fright which coca could help them overcome, they could make a perfectly rational decision to use the substance despite the risks. The FDA would say this is unsafe, but the FDA is not looking at the full circumstances of the case. Any fair evaluation of such situations must include the fact that actors would lose their job and have their family go hungry were they unable to perform as needed -- not to mention the fact that they would feel like absolute crap. But these latter down sides of NOT using drugs are never considered by the academics that we ask to "scientifically" evaluate drug safety. The scientist says, "Just the facts," but the potential user says, "Just the self-actualization," or "Just the necessary achievement so that I can hold my head up high and feed my family."

Needless to say, this unscientific demonizing of criminalized medicines helps perpetuate the capitalist myth that there are two types of substances in the world: "drugs," which are bad at all times, in all situations, at any dose, for any person -- and "meds," which are so scientific and flawless that it is our medical duty to take them every day of our lives.

In his 2021 book on psilocybin mushrooms, researcher William Griffiths tells us that the jury is still out on whether psilocybin is addictive, or rather on whether it CAN be addictive. As usual, though, scientists are considering this question out of all context. As Griffiths himself acknowledges, any substance can be habit-forming given the complexity of human psychology. But scientists behave as if they need to merely identify a handful of actual psilocybin addictions in order to justifiably outlaw the substance for everyone, again based on some unacknowledged metaphysical bias against the substance in question. They thereby scheme to deny godsend medicine to millions based on a handful of negative outcomes, most of which are caused by the pharmacological ignorance that the Drug War encourages, for the Drug Warrior asks us to fear "drugs," not to understand them. Moreover, this concern on the part of psilocybin researchers about potential addiction is entirely disingenuous. Why? Because these same researchers have never even noticed the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent upon Big Pharma 1 2 meds for life. If dependency is a problem, surely that latter fact describes a full-blown pharmacological dystopia.

So, while I denounce that Twitter user for throwing the psychedelic baby out with the bath water of capitalism 3 , I have to admit that the water in question is rank indeed. That's why the government should recuse itself entirely from deciding what medicines we can use and let civilians decide such things for themselves, ideally with the help of a drug information clearing house called the Drug EDUCATION Agency, which would take the ignominious place of the Drug ENFORCEMENT Agency, (after we abolish it and put its leaders on trial for knowingly lying about Mother Nature's bounty for the last 40-plus years). Of course, the idea of letting humans decide what substances they will ingest seems novel and troubling in today's Drug War society, where racist Chicken Littles have been shouting the supposed danger of the hypocritically defined category called "drugs" for the last 100+ years. But the change is truly a conservative one, for it merely realigns our approach to "drugs" to the consensus view held by humanity for millennia prior to 1914: namely that substance misuse is the result of poor education, not the result of the intrinsically evil nature of the modern boogieman called "drugs."









Notes for essay entitled Capitalism and the Drug War Pt 2:

1: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
2: 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)
3: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.

Drug War censorship is supported by our "science" magazines, which pretend that outlawed drugs do not exist, and so write what amount to lies about the supposed intransigence of things like depression and anxiety.

The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.

This just in on the drug scene: A new New York Times report shows that America has been flooding the world with antidepressants, alcohol and cigarettes!

The DEA should be tried for crimes against humanity. They have been lying about drugs for 50 years and running interference between human beings and Mother Nature in violation of natural law, depriving us of countless potential and known godsends in order to create more DEA jobs.

The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.

It is far better to "treat the symptoms" than to irreversibly modify brain chemistry in one particular way based on the theories of a financially-motivated biochemical determinist working for a pharmaceutical company.

William James claimed that his constitution prevented him from having mystical experiences. The fact is that no one is prevented from having mystical experiences provided that they are willing to use psychoactive substances wisely to attain that end.

Most substance withdrawal would be EASY if drugs were re-legalized and we could use any substance we wanted to mitigate negative psychological effects.

In the 19th century, author Richard Middleton wrote how poets would get together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses."


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