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Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation

an open letter to Mitch Horowitz, author of Uncertain Places

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 2, 2025



Hi, Mitch!

My name is Ballard Quass and I have been studying the philosophy of the Drug War for the last ten years.

April 2025 Update

I am currently enjoying your book of essays entitled 'Uncertain Places.' 1

I am writing to suggest to you that the ultimate 'damned' facts today, in the Fortean sense of that word, are facts concerning the benefits of drugs. No facts are more totally damned. While UFOs and PEAR studies have been largely scorned by materialist society, one can now write about such things without being totally ostracized. But no one can write freely about common-sense drug benefits without being ghosted by mainstream society.

I have learned this the hard way over the last five years. During that time I have written hundreds of letters to top-ranked philosophers around the globe on this topic -- including many non-fiction authors -- and less than five have ever responded to me, and even then it was usually just a curt 'thank you' rather than the beginning of the productive discussion that I was hoping to facilitate by corresponding with them. Not only have my letters been ignored, but my posted comments have been blocked on websites that supposedly discuss drugs freely.

Here are just a few of the glaringly obvious drug benefits that no one is free to discuss these days without being totally marginalized:

1) The power of laughing gas 2 to cheer up the depressed.

2) The power of MDMA 3 to bring people together in peace and harmony.

3) The blatantly obvious power of opium to inspire and elate.

Indeed, before the west 'damned' upbeat stories about opium , the drug was considered an actual panacea.

This list of positive drug benefits could go on and on. Many of the benefits are just basic common sense, but again, materialists ignore common sense thanks to their adherence to behaviorist and reductionist principles.

When the FDA evaluates psychoactive drugs these days, it ignores all OBVIOUS benefits of drug use 4 . Not only that, but it ignores all OBVIOUS downsides of prohibition. This is because society has 'damned' all facts that point to such truths. Why? Because Americans have a 'previous commitment' to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.

Meanwhile, our science mags tell us that depression is a tough nut to crack -- but that is only true because we have outlawed everything that obviously works for depression.

So thoroughly have such topics of discussion been 'damned' that I doubt that you yourself are going to respond to this email. I say this with all due respect, not because I know the first thing about you personally, but because I have written literally hundreds of letters like this to established authors over the years and few have ever responded -- and even those few have ignored the substance of my comments.



Nevertheless, I am enjoying your book... and I hope that you will contemplate my proposition: namely, that today's most fiercely 'damned' facts are those that concern the positive uses for drugs, closely followed by those facts that concern the negative effects of prohibition.

Thanks for your valuable time!

PS Positive facts about psychedelics are slowly approaching mainstream status in academia, perhaps, but no one dares point out that opium and coca have obvious positive uses, let alone the hundreds of phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin 5 6. Meanwhile, Americans have been taught to think of daily opium 7 smoking as outrageous, while they tell us that we have an actual duty to 'keep taking our meds.' I would go so far as to say that Charles Fort 'didn't know from damned,' insofar as he wrote before America had damned psychoactive drug benefits wholesale. These kinds of drug-related facts are so damned that even Forteans themselves damn them, as is shown by their ongoing failure to respond to my letters to them on this very topic.



Author's Follow-up:

April 06, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


It's been over a month and Mitch has not yet seen fit to respond. What delicious irony! As a Fortean himself, Mitch's failure to respond to my claims constitutes proof of their veracity. Positive talk about drug use is indeed the ultimate "damned" fact of all time!











Notes for essay entitled Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation: an open letter to Mitch Horowitz, author of Uncertain Places:

1: Uncertain Places: Essays on Occult and Outsider Experiences Horowitz, Mitch, Inner Traditions, 2022 (up)
2: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
3: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
4: The FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive drugs DWP (up)
5: Alexander Shulgin: American Hero DWP (up)
6: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
7: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




I hope that scientists will eventually find the prohibition gene so that we can eradicate this superstitious way of thinking from humankind.

Had the DEA been active in the Punjab and 1500 BCE, there would be no Hindu religion today.

If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault.

If I should die of some unusual concatenation of circumstances, I want my survivors to pass "Brian's Law," a law stating that we will no longer pass laws based on hard cases and so needlessly fill our prisons by taking common-sense discretion out of the hands of judges.

ECT is like euthanasia. Neither make sense in the age of prohibition.

There is something wrong with a country that thinks it can decide what human beings around the world are allowed to ingest.

That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.

I've always wondered why we don't just let heroin users be -- or better yet, re-legalize drugs and give them choices. Why are they punished for using heroin daily while we praise 1 in 4 women for taking an even more dependence-causing drug every day of their life?

I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.

We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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Book Cover

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

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Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

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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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