a review of essay number 2 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 25, 2025
The following remarks are part of a series of responses to the essays contained in the 2001 book "Hallucinogens: A Reader," edited by Charles Grob1. The comments below are in response to essay number 2: "The Role of Psychoactive Plant Medicines" by Ralph Metzner, PhD.
Sadly, Metzner has fallen prey to the Drug Warrior's invitation for us to self-righteously judge drugs up or down, based on our assessment of who uses them and why.
Thus, Metzner contrasts the blessed "Mother Coca" with supposedly evil cocaine, of which he writes:
"The concentrated extract cocaine, on the other hand, is purely a recreational drug, and its indiscriminate use as such causes numerous health problems.2"
It is just a lack of imagination that causes Metzner to make this statement. Suppose that I use cocaine on occasion because I like to have an amazingly focused mind? How exactly is that recreational use? What if I write songs or solve crimes (a la Sherlock Holmes) while under the influence? Is the use still recreational? Is drug use recreational as long as no utilitarian goals are achieved during inebriation? If so, why is recreational use wrong, considering that recreation itself can have physical benefits? The questions begged by Metzner's assumptions are legion. Metzner fails to realize that he has been shielded for a lifetime from any positive reports of cocaine use -- that he has only ever been able to see negative results. How might Metzner judge alcohol were he only to read, see and hear stories about the DTs and benders? This is the problem with most drug pundits, they fail to realize how thoroughly Drug Warriors enforce a pathological narrative about drug use through censorship.
Clearly, Metzner's judgment of cocaine is shallow indeed, and monstrously presumptuous, as he is setting himself up to tell the rest of the world whether or not it is worthwhile for them to be in a state of extraordinary mental concentration. This is not a question upon which Metzner has any expertise whatsoever. He can merely pass along his own biases on the topic of which mental states that he deems appropriate for Homo sapiens. If British talk show host Graham Norton praises cocaine and thrives on its use, this must be ignored -- because we have been taught to judge drugs "up" or "down," without regard to details. This is the problem, Ralph, NOT DRUGS! As Paracelsus told us 500 years ago, the difference between a medicine and a poison has to do with dosage and other details. Even Botox has safe uses. Drugs are not the problem, prohibition is the problem, prohibition which encourages us to judge drugs based on our feelings about the sorts of people whom we see using them.
I sometimes wonder why I can see through the half-baked philosophy of drug pundits like Metzner so easily and no one else can. I claim this is because I have "skin in the game." I have a unique psychology such that I need only the proper push and motivation to thrive, a push that is usually absent in my sober life -- -- hence it is outrageous to me that arm-chair philosophers like Metzner, who have far more sanguine personalities than I do, can sit back in their chairs at home and insist that I have no valid reasons for using a drug like cocaine, no doubt making these grand pronouncements while they are quaffing a brew or smoking a pipe. What if I were to respond that they themselves have no valid use for caffeine or alcohol or tobacco? Does Metzner not see that this is the whole problem with the Drug War: that it encourages us to judge our neighbor's drug use up or down, as if we can play God and decide how they should be running their lives. As Chesterton writes in "Eugenics and Other Evils."
"It is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens."3
Metzner is one of the many drug pundits who fails to realize that the Drug Warrior's concern has never really been about safety: otherwise the FDA would never approve drugs whose published side effects include death itself! The problem is that drug use is associated with a lifestyle that a Christian nation, sold on militaristic monotheism and the domination of nature, cannot abide. The concern is not with safety, Ralph; otherwise there would be an emphasis on education and safe use. The concern is about the facilitation of worldviews that the mainstream refuses to tolerate. And so our very fears about the supposed dangers of these drugs are manufactured by the one-sided focus on downsides in our conglomerate media.
Bill Clinton claimed to be interested in safety when he supported the continued outlawing of cocaine, but this was based on a racist fallacy: the idea that his brother could be saved from cocaine use by subjecting inner city residents to drive-by shootings (and by undermining the rule of law in America, and by empowering drug cartels to "disappear" 60,000 in Mexico, etc.). So, if prohibition saved Roger Clinton from himself, it only did so by killing Black children in the no-go zones created by America's racist drug policy -- and by further sending enough minorities to jail to ensure the election of America's first fascist president. For more on this topic, see my essay entitled "The Bill Clinton Fallacy.4"
The idea that cocaine can never be used validly for excellent reasons is completely false!
Suppose I am depressed because I have been turned into an eternal patient and I am sitting on my steps at 2 in the morning contemplating suicide because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help me get off of the dependence-causing Big Pharma antidepressants. Should I commit suicide, Ralph, rather than to use dirty evil cocaine -- a drug that could "pick me up" in real-time? Should I ask my materialist doctor for brain-damaging shock therapy instead, Ralph? is it more scientific for me to damage my brain than to use cocaine?
This is what infuriates me about modern drug pundits -- they have fallen for the Drug War lie that drug use should be limited by our own biased and limited imaginations about what one should need in this life. This kind of absurd presumption is intolerable to someone who lives and breathes the anxieties foisted upon humankind via our prejudiced-based prohibitions.
Metzner goes on to show his lack of imagination in his demonization of MDMA.
"Its irresponsible and widespread use in this second category by increasing numbers of people understandably made the medical and law enforcement authorities nervous."
Understandably, Ralph? This nervousness is only understandable because the media and politicians focused exclusively on the downsides of Ecstasy while completely ignoring its obvious benefits!!! This is the problem with all lukewarm drug pundits: they are completely blind to how a Drug War society frames drug use as problematic and so controls the very discussion -- completely ignoring all obvious benefits to drug use.
With friends like Metzner in the drug re-legalization debate, who needs enemies? MDMA brought unprecedented peace, love and understanding to the British dance floors -- and has proven to be phenomenally safe over the last half century, especially when we take into account the alcohol use that it has prevented while doing so. Ecstasy kills no one: the few Ecstasy-related deaths are always brought about by the prohibitionists' refusal to teach safe use. Moreover, we live in a world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon thanks to our species' propensity to hate its fellows, and yet Ralph is going to tell us that the ravers' use of MDMA was irresponsible? What enormous blindness on Metzner's part.
When Metzner demonizes Ecstasy, he is not just opining about a drug: he is implicitly telling us how much he values peace, love and understanding in life -- which is to say very little indeed. It is not even considered to be a benefit of Ecstasy use for Metzner. Safety comes first, which sounds great, perhaps, until we realize that Metzner requires a safety level for so-called drug use that we require for no other risky activity on earth, not hang-gliding, not free-diving, not free-climbing, and certainly not gun firing or liquor drinking.
Conclusion: Like many Drug War pundits, Metzner never sufficiently recognizes the crazed standards to which we hold drug use: standards that completely ignore obvious benefits. Metzner should have known better for he himself recognized that the Drug Warriors have a worldview that feels threatened by the empowering effects of drug use. Yet he takes the Drug Warriors at their word when they claim that they are interested in public health -- a claim that is bizarre given the Drug Warriors' acceptance of the psychiatric pill mill upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life. How can the Drug Warrior be interested in public health when they loathe the idea of gun control and have no problem with liquor that kills 178,000 a year5? These clowns are not interested in public health, Ralph. They are interested in limiting how and how much their neighbors can think and feel about the world!
Like Albert Hofmann, Ralph Metzner has fallen for the drug-war lie that safety is the big concern about drug approval. Ralph is so convinced of this lie, that he himself is blind to the obvious -- nay, glaringly obvious -- benefits of drugs like cocaine and Ecstasy. Yes, they are not panaceas, yes, they can be misused, but the idea that they cannot be used wisely is mere drug-war prejudice -- an anti-scientific prejudice and anti-progress prejudice at that. And if Ralph cannot personally find any positive uses for such drugs, I wish that he would stop trying to speak for humankind on this topic. That is the whole problem with the Drug War mentality: it encourages us all to judge drugs up and down based on our own prejudices -- whereas the propriety of drug use must always be judged on an individual basis in light of the specifics of any case -- which, of course, is why it was always folly to make the materialist medical establishment the gatekeepers for drug use in the first place: the drug users know best what works for them personally, as humbling and financially disempowering as this long-ignored truth may be for the status quo.
I am bothered by the fact that Metzner is speaking for me when it comes to cocaine, deciding in advance that a drug that drastically improves mental concentration can yet have no conceivable positive uses -- that it must always necessarily be misused. What does Metzner know about it? Has he been able to get inside my head and experience the psychological state that I experience in my sober mind? Has he decided that my sober state is all that I should need in life? Does he not see the enormous presumption of speaking for others when it comes to what incentives they should need in life, psychologically speaking?
This is no doubt why my essays are always ignored by the movers and shakers in the drug debates. Unlike most pundits, I have skin in the game -- and so I cannot be expected to accept their ex cathedra drug demonization with a good grace -- for it is this very attitude of theirs which has deprived me of godsends for a lifetime -- under the hateful notion that medical professionals and politicians know better than I do how and how much I should think and feel in this life.
Hallucinogens: A Reader
In 2001, Charles Grob published 'Hallucinogens: A Reader," containing interviews and essays on the subject of drugs. Watch this space for philosophical essays on each essay in the book.
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as free as Benjamin Franklin.
Here's one problem that supporters of the psychiatric pill mill never address: the fact that Big Pharma antidepressants demoralize users by turning them into patients for life.
This massive concern for safety is downright bizarre in a country that will not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.
There are endless common-sense treatments for depression. They are all outlawed thanks to two things: 1) drug laws and 2) the scientific belief in the passion-scorning tenets of reductionism and behaviorism.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
When folks die in horse-related accidents, we need to be asking: who sold the victim the horse? We've got to crack down on folks who peddle this junk -- and ban books like Black Beauty that glamorize horse use.
Properly speaking, MDMA has killed no one at all. Prohibitionists were delighted when Leah Betts died because they were sure it was BECAUSE of MDMA/Ecstasy. Whereas it was because of the fact that prohibitionists refuse to teach safe use.
The MindMed company (makers of LSD Lite) tell us that euphoria and visions are "adverse effects": that's not science, that's an arid materialist philosophy that does not believe in spiritual transcendence.
Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
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You have been reading an article entitled, Cocaine and Ecstasy are not evil: a review of essay number 2 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob, published on June 25, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
You have been reading an article entitled, Cocaine and Ecstasy are not evil: a review of essay number 2 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob, published on June 25, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
