Common Sense and the Drug War

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Common Sense and the Drug War

How prohibition and materialistic science work together to turn Americans into babies when it comes to psychoactive medicine

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 30, 2024

The answer to most addiction problems is glaringly obvious. Any drug that elates and gives solace, however temporary that break might be, can be used as part of a program to make withdrawal palatable. This is just plain psychological common sense. But science has jettisoned common sense when it comes to psychoactive drugs. Why? Because scientists are not the experts when it comes to such substances. It was always a category error to think so. A materialist scientist may well be an unparalleled master in discussing drugs like penicillin and Pepto-Bismol, but they have no expertise in the psychological motivations of human beings, unless we grant their premise that humans are just biochemical robots, and surely rational people can beg to differ from that dictum. Real people, after all, are motivated by the anticipation of positive events. (It's weird that I even have to remind the materialists of this.) And it follows that they can be cheered up to some degree by the knowledge of some imminent emotional relief that they are about to receive from a mood-elevating substance, no matter how much money politicians have spent on demonizing the substances in question.

Again, it's embarrassing to have to dilate at length on such an obvious truth, but since materialists feel dogmatically obliged to ignore the obvious, let me provide a "for instance," an example of how anticipation changes attitudes in the real world.

Case 1: I am getting off of Valium and I am obsessing daily about my nervousness, always quick to associate it with my withdrawal scheme. I see no silver lining, no light at the end of the tunnel. I am sorely tempted to go back to my normal dosing with Valium.

Case 2: I am getting off of Valium and about to start obsessing about my nervousness - when I suddenly recall that I will be taking a "trip" on psilocybin tomorrow - or using cocaine ¹ ² , or smoking opium ³ , etc. etc. - and I relax. The mere knowledge of that upcoming psychological relief provides a relief of its own in the here-and-now. I feel better NOW thanks to anticipation and I have no desire to backslide on my plan to end my use of Valium.

Let me repeat: This is all just common sense. But the materialist scientist never likes combining drugs, if only because it increases the number of variables for which they must account, thereby preventing them from achieving that aura of omniscience for which they strive. And so to them such a plan as described above in "case two" is a non-starter. But they usually contrive to give a moral turn to their hatred of excessive variables, and so they cry, "What? You want to use a drug to help you get OFF a drug?!", thereby implying that there is a logical reason why such behavior is wrong and even immoral. And yet any American with elderly parents knows that doctors do not have any problem with combining drugs with more drugs, indeed with many more drugs. The hackles only rise when the drugs in question have been demonized by politicians - at which point the medical doctor tells us the big lie: that such drugs have not been proven efficacious.

One can only scream in dumbfounded reply: "What? The only reason we have ever heard of such drugs is because people have always considered them to be damned efficacious, so efficacious that they'd risk life and limb to obtain the same!" Or, as Horatio might have put it: "There needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this!" The well-known effects of these drugs typically compose a litany of precisely those traits that you would want to cultivate in a person getting off an unwanted substance: patience, dispassionate mentation, and a feeling of empowerment. If materialist science has not proven efficacy to its own satisfaction, so much the worse for materialist science. Let them go back to their labs and look for the proof that satisfies obtuse materialists- but do not expect us to wait - we, the anxious, the depressed, the addicted - while you make glacial progress in your attempts to verify common sense.

Yes, materialists can tell us if there is a generic medical risk to combining certain psychoactive drugs with other medicines - but that is the extent to which they can advise us. For unless a given drug combination is disastrous in every case, at every dosage, for every person, the scientist qua scientist can never tell us if the risk of use is worth it. Why not? Because he or she does not know the nature of the psychological benefits that the user is seeking viz. psychoactive drugs, nor the extent to which the user values those benefits. And you cannot perform a risk/benefit analysis about drugs if you are ignorant about the perceived benefits of use. And yet today's scientists at the FDA feel free to trash a drug like MDMA without even recognizing its enormous benefits: like bringing peace and love to the dance floors of Britain and providing ways that hotheads could be weaned off of acts of mass murder.

This is another reason why scientists should not be in charge of approving psychoactive drugs: because the decisions about such drugs have broad policy implications, on subject matters wherein the scientists have no expertise: like, how should we prioritize world peace and the safety of our young people in public schools? When the FDA drags its feet on MDMA ⁴ , it is basically telling us that 100% "drug safety" is more important than the lives of children in schools or the safety of folks on a dance floor - or than our ability to come together as citizens of the world and avoid the nuclear armageddon ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ toward which we are too palpably heading today. Those are not medical decisions, those are not scientific decisions - and yet those are the decisions that the FDA makes when they do their best to keep a compassion-making drug out of the hands of a suffering and endangered public.

The answer to most depression is equally obvious. Give the depressive individual experiences that are compelling and teach - like psychedelic experiences - and allow for the occasional use of substances that simply cheer a body up. Psychiatrists will condemn this as "treating the symptoms," but that trope was always nonsense. The whole reason for today's mass dependency on ineffective antidepressants ⁹ is that science tried to "cure" human sadness via biochemistry, which was folly from the start. You should never even try to cure such a basic and multiform condition as human sadness. It is sheer hubris to make the attempt, and you will eventually be punished by the gods for doing so (in this case, with the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia in human history, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma ¹⁰ ¹¹ meds for life ¹²).

Moreover, there is nothing wrong with treating the symptoms, unless there is something wrong with having a drink of beer after a long day. Should we throw out all first-aid kits on the grounds that it's wrong to treat the symptoms? It's just psychological common sense that it helps a depressed person (or indeed anyone, for that matter) to feel good. Come on, folks! Yes, the Drug Warrior has made us fear addiction, but we are adults, remember? Most of us can use drugs wisely if you give us the information we need. Yes, there will always be losers in any game, and drug re-legalization ¹³ will no doubt create a few pharmaceutical equivalents of the drunkard Otis from The Andy Griffith Show, but we would then be doing without the drug cartels and the mass deaths of young people on American streets.

I've said much of this implicitly in previous essays concerning the enormous lack of common sense about drugs, but I decided to make it more explicit here after I got so much pushback from my recent talk about using psilocybin microdosing to help me get off of Effexor ¹⁴. That plan merely made common sense, you see, and all the seemingly progressive websites out there were urging me to desist. Scientists, I was told, are the experts about such things, not mere users. The Surviving Antidepressants website tut-tutted me because I was apparently speaking positively about unproven "drugs."

Unproven? Psilocybin shrooms have been proven to the satisfaction of the Mazatec people of Mexico for millennia. And the list of typically encountered benefits reads like a wish list for someone trying to get off an unwanted substance. Besides, the heart has its own reasons. I simply know that the drug would help me and I need no one else to believe that. In any case, scientists are NOT experts when it comes to psychoactive drugs - since they have no knowledge of the simple human psychology that renders their use important to real people in the real world. People love these substances as arrest records show-- and if the materialist doctors think that they're wrong, they should join a Christian Scientist group, not use science to crack down on drugs that they do not understand and which they even disdain to use themselves.

This is why America needs to grow up, as Thomas Szasz used to say. We need to start using common sense when it comes to drug use. The first step would be to put purblind materialist scientists out of the business of second-guessing our individual desires for improving our mood and mental outlook in this life.

Notes:

1: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
2: “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)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
4: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
5: 8 Nuclear Close Calls that Nearly Spelled Disaster Davidson, Lucy, History Hit, 2022 (up)
6: 35 Facts About Goldsboro Accident Hartwell, Therese, Facts.Net, 2025 (up)
7: A Darkening Horizon: Nuclear Dangers Around the World with Matthew Bunn Bunn, Matthew, Harvard Kennedy School, 2023 (up)
8: “Google Books.” 2019. Google.com. 2019. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Command_and_Control/H0-CJckES44C?hl=en. (up)
9: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
10: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
11: 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)
12: Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection, from Soul to Psychedelics Holland, Julie, HarperWave, New York, 2020 (up)
13: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
14: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)

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I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.

The U.S. Congress considered the following to be a scientific fact back in 1924: "A person taking narcotics regularly impedes evolutionary progress and tends to degenerate backwards toward the brute." -- Richmond Hobson

Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.

Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.

High suicide rates? What a poser! Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the US has outlawed all substances that elate and inspire???

Alexander Shulgin is a typical westerner when he speaks about cocaine. He moralizes about the drug, telling us that it does not give him "real" power. But so what? Does coffee give him "real" power? Coke helps some, others not. Stop holding it to this weird metaphysical standard.

Outlawing drugs is outlawing obvious therapies for Alzheimer's and autism patients, therapies based on common sense and not on the passion-free behaviorism of modern scientists.

In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.

It's disgusting that folks like Paul Stamets need a DEA license to work with mushrooms.

Alcohol makes me sleepy. But NOT coca wine. The wine gives you an upbeat feeling of controlled energy, without the jitters of coffee and without the fury of steroids. It increases rather than dulls mental focus.

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Common Sense and the Drug War

How prohibition and materialistic science work together to turn Americans into babies when it comes to psychoactive medicine

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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