Censored Bookstores in the Age of the Drug War

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Censored Bookstores in the Age of the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 8, 2025

Artificial Intelligence is like almost every subject under the sun: it takes on a very different and ominous meaning when we view it in light of the modern world's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine. Unfortunately, I seem to be the only one in the world who recognizes this fact; hence I have written this essay to attempt to awaken our indoctrinated and scientistic world to common sense.

I will begin my critique of this brainwashed blindness on the part of America's tech pundits by citing a typical triumphalist quote from Marc Andreessen, author of "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto":

"Medicine, among many other fields, is in the stone age compared to what we can achieve with joined human and machine intelligence."¹

When I read such starry-eyed blurbs, my immediate response is: "Fine, Marc, but let us first find out what the human mind can accomplish with the help of plants and fungi before turning ourselves into humanoids programmed by Big Data companies! Besides, why do you think that modern medicine is in the stone age in the first place, Marc? It is due to the fact that we have outlawed almost all psychoactive medicines: medicines which, when used wisely, can prevent addiction, prevent suicide, prevent school shootings, and completely end the need for damaging the brains of the depressed with shock therapy -- medicines that can make us content in our own skins and so make us less addicted to using computers in the first place."

Unfortunately, modern materialists (a category which, alas, includes the vast majority of techies and scientists) are also blind to the power of happiness and feeling good "inside one's own skin" (not to mention the many therapeutic knock-on benefits -- both physical and psychological -- that are the natural holistic result of such states of mind). That's why materialist doctors like Robert Glatter cannot figure out if laughing gas could help the depressed: because they feel that efficacy must be proven under a microscope, and so if a depressed individual is laughing, it means nothing to the scientific powers-that-be -- unless a lab-coated materialist can vouch for the metaphysical reality of that laughter on the basis of reductionist and behaviorist principles. This is why our FDA actually champions brain-damaging shock therapy, while they yet fail to approve almost all drugs whose use could render brain-damaging shock therapy unnecessary! (Of course, there are vocational and financial motives at work here, too; my point is that the FDA relies on materialist ideology to give an air of "scientific" plausibility to their maliciously motivated rejection of obvious godsends -- those many godsend meds that simply "work," without any theoretical "by your leave" from materialist science.)

In other words, Americans are doubly blind to common sense about drugs: first, thanks to the Drug Warrior's Christian Science notion that drugs are evil, and second, thanks to the materialist notion that drug benefits do not exist unless they can be established by looking under a microscope: and so we ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense when it comes to beneficial drug use. We are thus blinded twice over to the kinds of drug benefits that have been obvious to indigenous people for millennia. Soma ² inspired the Vedic religion, and yet the religion would have been outlawed had America's drug-hating sensibilities been operative in the Punjab in 1500 BCE. Such an outcome would have been hateful enough, of course, but imagine if we then told the Vedic people that we were going to solve all their problems in life by using computers, Big Data, and algorithms written by precocious but philosophically clueless coders in Silicon Valley.

What hateful presumption that would be! And yet this is precisely the kind of presumption that the tech community displays every time they discuss AI while yet ignoring America's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicines.

It is one thing to outlaw all substances that can inspire human concentration, religiosity and compassion; that is evil enough, in all conscience, since it is the outlawing of the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions in the past; but this injustice is ratcheted up to an absurdist level when the powers-that-be then start telling us about the wonders of becoming drug-free robots so that AI can help us achieve benefits. And which benefits is AI going to help us achieve? Why, the very benefits that we have refused to accept from the psychoactive medicines that grow at our very feet!

To better grasp the imperialist hypocrisy of such AI triumphalism, I ask the reader to take part in a little thought experiment.

ANALOGY

Think of psychoactive drugs as a large collection of complicated toys that we westerners have never learned how to use wisely for human benefit. We have never sat down and patiently tried to figure out how to use them sensibly for the benefit of real people. And now, like the spoiled children that we are, we are shoving those complicated toys aside, completely unused, as we search instead for the next big thing: in this case, artificial intelligence. Talk about taking things for granted!

The world clearly needs an adult in the room who will stand up at this point and tell us antsy westerners to "Finish what you started, guys! You need to make your peace with drugs FIRST before moving on to something big like AI!" I need hardly add that I am that adult in the room -- not because I deserve the role in preference to all other philosophers in the world but because almost all other philosophers in the world have been blinded by drug prohibition to the very existence of the problems that I have highlighted in this essay. This is not surprising since such pundits have been shielded for a lifetime from hearing, seeing or reading anything about the positive use of drugs, this thanks to propaganda carried on at the highest levels of American life, with the help of the White House, Hollywood, our conglomerate-controlled media, and academics themselves, who, like the AI pundits described above, also dutifully reckon without drugs when discussing every topic under the sun.

In response to this cradle-to-grave brainwashing, I will conclude this essay with some quotes depicting positive drug use, lest the indoctrinated reader be so bamboozled as to believe that the very term "positive drug use" is an oxymoron.

Sir Humphry Davy on the use of laughing gas:

"I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. "³

Mike Jay on the use of laughing gas:

"To breathe the gas was, simply and literally, inspiration."

⁴

English biochemist Robert S. de Ropp on the use of drugs for religious purposes:

"Drugs that exert these effects have long been endowed with a halo of divinity by the people who used them. The peyotl was sacred to the Aztecs, the coca to the Incas. The gods in the Vedas drank Soma, 'potent destroyer of grief,' and the hemp plant with its potent resin charas was described by the sages of India as the 'delight giver.'"⁵

Albert Hofmann on the use of LSD:

"The world was as if newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity, which persisted for the entire day."⁶

Charles Grob on drug use:

"All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots-- all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial."⁷

Mike Jay on the use of Harmaline:

"I think Harmal is an imagination-enhancer, rather than a true hallucinogen." ⁸

My comment: An imagination-enhancer! Just imagine! In a sane world, the fact that such drugs actually exist would be the big story! Instead, racist fearmongers have convinced us to think only of the potential misuse of such drugs by the white young people whom we refuse to educate about safe drug use!
Artificial Intelligence is like almost every subject under the sun: it takes on a very different and ominous meaning when we view it in light of the modern world's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine. Unfortunately, I seem to be the only one in the world who recognizes this fact; hence I have written this essay to attempt to awaken our indoctrinated and scientistic world to common sense.

I will begin my critique of this brainwashed blindness on the part of America's tech pundits by citing a typical triumphalist quote from Marc Andreessen, author of "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto":

"Medicine, among many other fields, is in the stone age compared to what we can achieve with joined human and machine intelligence."

When I read such starry-eyed blurbs, my immediate response is: "Fine, Marc, but let us first find out what the human mind can accomplish with the help of plants and fungi before turning ourselves into humanoids programmed by Big Data companies! Besides, why do you think that modern medicine is in the stone age in the first place, Marc? It is due to the fact that we have outlawed almost all psychoactive medicines: medicines which, when used wisely, can prevent addiction, prevent suicide, prevent school shootings, and completely end the need for damaging the brains of the depressed with shock therapy -- medicines that can make us content in our own skins and so make us less addicted to using computers in the first place."

Unfortunately, modern materialists (a category which, alas, includes the vast majority of techies and scientists) are also blind to the power of happiness and feeling good "inside one's own skin" (not to mention the many therapeutic knock-on benefits -- both physical and psychological -- that are the natural holistic result of such states of mind). That's why materialist doctors like Robert Glatter cannot figure out if laughing gas could help the depressed: because they feel that efficacy must be proven under a microscope, and so if a depressed individual is laughing, it means nothing to the scientific powers-that-be -- unless a lab-coated materialist can vouch for the metaphysical reality of that laughter on the basis of reductionist and behaviorist principles. This is why our FDA actually champions brain-damaging shock therapy, while they yet fail to approve almost all drugs whose use could render brain-damaging shock therapy unnecessary! (Of course, there are vocational and financial motives at work here, too; my point is that the FDA relies on materialist ideology to give an air of "scientific" plausibility to their maliciously motivated rejection of obvious godsends -- those many godsend meds that simply "work," without any theoretical "by your leave" from materialist science.)

In other words, Americans are doubly blind to common sense about drugs: first, thanks to the Drug Warrior's Christian Science notion that drugs are evil, and second, thanks to the materialist notion that drug benefits do not exist unless they can be established by looking under a microscope: and so we ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense when it comes to beneficial drug use. We are thus blinded twice over to the kinds of drug benefits that have been obvious to indigenous people for millennia. Soma inspired the Vedic religion, and yet the religion would have been outlawed had America's drug-hating sensibilities been operative in the Punjab in 1500 BCE. Such an outcome would have been hateful enough, of course, but imagine if we then told the Vedic people that we were going to solve all their problems in life by using computers, Big Data, and algorithms written by precocious but philosophically clueless coders in Silicon Valley.

What hateful presumption that would be! And yet this is precisely the kind of presumption that the tech community displays every time they discuss AI while yet ignoring America's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicines.

It is one thing to outlaw all substances that can inspire human concentration, religiosity and compassion; that is evil enough, in all conscience, since it is the outlawing of the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions in the past; but this injustice is ratcheted up to an absurdist level when the powers-that-be then start telling us about the wonders of becoming drug-free robots so that AI can help us achieve benefits. And which benefits is AI going to help us achieve? Why, the very benefits that we have refused to accept from the psychoactive medicines that grow at our very feet!

To better grasp the imperialist hypocrisy of such AI triumphalism, I ask the reader to take part in a little thought experiment.

ANALOGY

Think of psychoactive drugs as a large collection of complicated toys that we westerners have never learned how to use wisely for human benefit. We have never sat down and patiently tried to figure out how to use them sensibly for the benefit of real people. And now, like the spoiled children that we are, we are shoving those complicated toys aside, completely unused, as we search instead for the next big thing: in this case, artificial intelligence. Talk about taking things for granted!

The world clearly needs an adult in the room who will stand up at this point and tell us antsy westerners to "Finish what you started, guys! You need to make your peace with drugs FIRST before moving on to something big like AI!" I need hardly add that I am that adult in the room -- not because I deserve the role in preference to all other philosophers in the world but because almost all other philosophers in the world have been blinded by drug prohibition to the very existence of the problems that I have highlighted in this essay. This is not surprising since such pundits have been shielded for a lifetime from hearing, seeing or reading anything about the positive use of drugs, this thanks to propaganda carried on at the highest levels of American life, with the help of the White House, Hollywood, our conglomerate-controlled media, and academics themselves, who, like the AI pundits described above, also dutifully reckon without drugs on every topic under the sun.

In response to this cradle-to-grave brainwashing, I will conclude this essay with some quotes depicting positive drug use, lest the indoctrinated reader be so bamboozled as to believe that the very term "positive drug use" is an oxymoron.

Sir Humphry Davy on the use of laughing gas:

"I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. "

Mike Jay on the use of laughing gas:
"To breathe the gas was, simply and literally, inspiration."

English biochemist Robert S. de Ropp on the use of drugs for religious purposes:

"Drugs that exert these effects have long been endowed with a halo of divinity by the people who used them. The peyotl was sacred to the Aztecs, the coca to the Incas. The gods in the Vedas drank Soma, 'potent destroyer of grief,' and the hemp plant with its potent resin charas was described by the sages of India as the 'delight giver.'"

Albert Hofmann on the use of LSD:

"The world was as if newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity, which persisted for the entire day."

Charles Grob on drug use:

"All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots-- all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial."

Mike Jay on the use of Harmaline:

"I think Harmal is an imagination-enhancer, rather than a true hallucinogen."

My comment: An imagination-enhancer! Just imagine! In a sane world, the fact that such drugs actually exist would be the big story! Instead, racist fearmongers have convinced us to think only of the potential misuse of such drugs by the white young people whom we refuse to educate about safe drug use!
Artificial Intelligence is like almost every subject under the sun: it takes on a very different and ominous meaning when we view it in light of the modern world's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine. Unfortunately, I seem to be the only one in the world who recognizes this fact; hence I have written this essay to attempt to awaken our indoctrinated and scientistic world to common sense.

I will begin my critique of this brainwashed blindness on the part of America's tech pundits by citing a typical triumphalist quote from Marc Andreessen, author of "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto":

"Medicine, among many other fields, is in the stone age compared to what we can achieve with joined human and machine intelligence."

When I read such starry-eyed blurbs, my immediate response is: "Fine, Marc, but let us first find out what the human mind can accomplish with the help of plants and fungi before turning ourselves into humanoids programmed by Big Data companies! Besides, why do you think that modern medicine is in the stone age in the first place, Marc? It is due to the fact that we have outlawed almost all psychoactive medicines: medicines which, when used wisely, can prevent addiction, prevent suicide, prevent school shootings, and completely end the need for damaging the brains of the depressed with shock therapy -- medicines that can make us content in our own skins and so make us less addicted to using computers in the first place."

Unfortunately, modern materialists (a category which, alas, includes the vast majority of techies and scientists) are also blind to the power of happiness and feeling good "inside one's own skin" (not to mention the many therapeutic knock-on benefits -- both physical and psychological -- that are the natural holistic result of such states of mind). That's why materialist doctors like Robert Glatter cannot figure out if laughing gas could help the depressed: because they feel that efficacy must be proven under a microscope, and so if a depressed individual is laughing, it means nothing to the scientific powers-that-be -- unless a lab-coated materialist can vouch for the metaphysical reality of that laughter on the basis of reductionist and behaviorist principles. This is why our FDA actually champions brain-damaging shock therapy, while they yet fail to approve almost all drugs whose use could render brain-damaging shock therapy unnecessary! (Of course, there are vocational and financial motives at work here, too; my point is that the FDA relies on materialist ideology to give an air of "scientific" plausibility to their maliciously motivated rejection of obvious godsends -- those many godsend meds that simply "work," without any theoretical "by your leave" from materialist science.)

In other words, Americans are doubly blind to common sense about drugs: first, thanks to the Drug Warrior's Christian Science notion that drugs are evil, and second, thanks to the materialist notion that drug benefits do not exist unless they can be established by looking under a microscope: and so we ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense when it comes to beneficial drug use. We are thus blinded twice over to the kinds of drug benefits that have been obvious to indigenous people for millennia. Soma inspired the Vedic religion, and yet the religion would have been outlawed had America's drug-hating sensibilities been operative in the Punjab in 1500 BCE. Such an outcome would have been hateful enough, of course, but imagine if we then told the Vedic people that we were going to solve all their problems in life by using computers, Big Data, and algorithms written by precocious but philosophically clueless coders in Silicon Valley.

What hateful presumption that would be! And yet this is precisely the kind of presumption that the tech community displays every time they discuss AI while yet ignoring America's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicines.

It is one thing to outlaw all substances that can inspire human concentration, religiosity and compassion; that is evil enough, in all conscience, since it is the outlawing of the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions in the past; but this injustice is ratcheted up to an absurdist level when the powers-that-be then start telling us about the wonders of becoming drug-free robots so that AI can help us achieve benefits. And which benefits is AI going to help us achieve? Why, the very benefits that we have refused to accept from the psychoactive medicines that grow at our very feet!

To better grasp the imperialist hypocrisy of such AI triumphalism, I ask the reader to take part in a little thought experiment.

ANALOGY

Think of psychoactive drugs as a large collection of complicated toys that we westerners have never learned how to use wisely for human benefit. We have never sat down and patiently tried to figure out how to use them sensibly for the benefit of real people. And now, like the spoiled children that we are, we are shoving those complicated toys aside, completely unused, as we search instead for the next big thing: in this case, artificial intelligence. Talk about taking things for granted!

The world clearly needs an adult in the room who will stand up at this point and tell us antsy westerners to "Finish what you started, guys! You need to make your peace with drugs FIRST before moving on to something big like AI!" I need hardly add that I am that adult in the room -- not because I deserve the role in preference to all other philosophers in the world but because almost all other philosophers in the world have been blinded by drug prohibition to the very existence of the problems that I have highlighted in this essay. This is not surprising since such pundits have been shielded for a lifetime from hearing, seeing or reading anything about the positive use of drugs, this thanks to propaganda carried on at the highest levels of American life, with the help of the White House, Hollywood, our conglomerate-controlled media, and academics themselves, who, like the AI pundits described above, also dutifully reckon without drugs on every topic under the sun.

In response to this cradle-to-grave brainwashing, I will conclude this essay with some quotes depicting positive drug use, lest the indoctrinated reader be so bamboozled as to believe that the very term "positive drug use" is an oxymoron.

Sir Humphry Davy on the use of laughing gas:

"I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. "

Mike Jay on the use of laughing gas:
"To breathe the gas was, simply and literally, inspiration."

English biochemist Robert S. de Ropp on the use of drugs for religious purposes:

"Drugs that exert these effects have long been endowed with a halo of divinity by the people who used them. The peyotl was sacred to the Aztecs, the coca to the Incas. The gods in the Vedas drank Soma, 'potent destroyer of grief,' and the hemp plant with its potent resin charas was described by the sages of India as the 'delight giver.'"

Albert Hofmann on the use of LSD:

"The world was as if newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity, which persisted for the entire day."

Charles Grob on drug use:

"All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots-- all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial."

Mike Jay on the use of Harmaline:

"I think Harmal is an imagination-enhancer, rather than a true hallucinogen."

My comment: An imagination-enhancer! Just imagine! In a sane world, the fact that such drugs actually exist would be the big story! Instead, racist fearmongers have convinced us to think only of the potential misuse of such drugs by the white young people whom we refuse to educate about safe drug use! We are in the Stone Age when it comes to such substances, living life by the cowardly motto of "Fire bad!"

Notes:

1: Marantz, Andrew. 2024. “Among the A.I. Doomsayers.” The New Yorker. March 11, 2024. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/among-the-ai-doomsayers. (up)
2: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
3: “Artificial Paradises - Mike Jay.” 1999. Mike Jay. May 18, 2025. https://mikejay.net/books/artificial-paradises/. (up)
4: “Emperors of Dreams : Drugs in the Nineteenth Century : Jay, Mike, 1959 December 14- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/emperorsofdreams0000jaym/page/n3/mode/2up. (up)
5: “Artificial Paradises - Mike Jay.” 1999. Mike Jay. May 18, 2025. https://mikejay.net/books/artificial-paradises/. (up)
6: “Artificial Paradises - Mike Jay.” 1999. Mike Jay. May 18, 2025. https://mikejay.net/books/artificial-paradises/. (up)
7: Hallucinogens: a reader Grob, M.D., editor, Charles, Penguin Putnam, 2002 (up)
8: “Blue Tide - Mike Jay.” 2025. Mike Jay. May 18, 2025. https://mikejay.net/books/blue-tide/. (up)

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Cocaine is not evil. Opium is not evil. Drug prohibition is evil.

Mad in America publishes stories of folks who are disillusioned with antidepressants, but they won't publish mine, because I find mushrooms useful. They only want stories about cold turkey and jogging, or nutrition, or meditation.

A generally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear. --James B. Stockade.

Many articles in science mags need this disclaimer: "Author has declined to consider the insights gained from drug-induced states on this topic out of fealty to Christian Science orthodoxy." They don't do this because they know readers already assume that drugs will be ignored.

We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.

If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"

In fact, there are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???

Someday the world will realize that Freud's real achievement was his discovery of the depression-busting power of cocaine.

By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.

Opium and cocaine have a vast host of potential rational uses -- yet we all have to pretend otherwise in the age of the Drug War.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Censored Bookstores in the Age of the Drug War

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

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