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Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition

how the drug war protects Christianity from competition

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





July 9, 2022



written in response to Julian Buchanan's excellent blog post on Drug Testing entitled Drug Testing: Misleading Simplicity Masking Complex Issues

Hi, Julian. Thanks for the refreshing honesty about drug testing. I'd like to add just a few thoughts to expand on what you've said.

First, I would stress that "drug testing" only makes sense to the average person because "drugs" is a politically created word meaning "substances that have no value whatsoever and therefore should be completely avoided." The fact is, there are no substances of this kind in the world: even the highly toxic Botox has legitimate uses. In the cases of psychoactive substances, all of them have potential uses in some dosage, for some reason, in some therapeutic, religious or psychosocial setting. Drug war hysteria notwithstanding, substances like morphine 1 , opium and coca (and indeed even crack cocaine 2 3 ) can be used non-addictively, if an educated person sets out to use them in that way. But the Drug Warrior never explains how to use drugs safely since the party line is to insist that such a thing is not possible. Joe Biden 4 5's Office of National Drug Policy actually worked by a rule that beneficial uses of criminalized "drugs" were never even to be considered. But to think that substances can be bad without regard for how they are used is to adopt the view of Mary Baker Eddy toward drugs, which is that they are morally wrong, period, full stop. But this is a religious view, not a scientific one.

The real problem is that the Drug Warrior completely ignores the most obvious reason for drug use: and that is the human desire for self-transcendence. Only by ignoring this "primum mobile" for drug use can they seem to plausibly maintain such use has no positive purpose. Having drawn that misguided conclusion, they then feel justified in "treating" the "substance user" as a sick person, one who is to be cured by forcing him or her to become "sober" (at least as that term is hypocritically defined in a pill-popping and booze6-swilling country). Recidivism is the natural result of such "cures" because the treatment fails to acknowledge, let alone cater to, the "user's" original motivation for "using": namely to acquire self-transcendence. Why? So that they could escape the limitations imposed upon them by their own personal psychology, as well as the stark perceptual limitations imposed upon human beings in general by what Maupassant called our five "miserable senses":

"...our eyes which are unable to perceive what
is either too small or too great, too near to, or too far from us...
our sense of smell which is smaller than that of a dog ...
our sense of taste which can scarcely distinguish the age of a wine!"
- Le Horla, Maupassant


The drug users know (at least at some level) that there are substances in this world that let us see and feel more in life - and even help us BE more by quieting those niggling inner voices (arising from nature and/or nurture) that have otherwise continually told us to "hang it up," that "the likes of YOU can never accomplish that!"

Far from being pathological, this desire for pharmacological self-transcendence has been the inspiration for entire religions, including the Vedic religion in the Indus Valley, the mushroom cults in Mesoamerica, and the psychedelic Eleusinian Mysteries, from which Plato is thought to have gleaned his concepts of an afterlife7.

Seen in this light, drug-testing is the tool of a Christian Science inquisition, designed to "out" those who seek transcendence in ways that are unacceptable to WASP westerners, which is another way of saying that the Drug War is a war on religion - indeed, a war on the very wellspring of the religious impulse. It is not just a way to shield alcohol and liquor from competition; it is a way to shield Christianity itself from competition - Christianity, that is, as practiced in the politically non-threatening way that western capitalists are familiar with.


Related tweet: October 14, 2022



Drug testing (in the rare cases that it's needed) should be for identifying impairment. It should not be a fishing expedition to find traces of substances that are hated by botanically clueless politicians.



Author's Follow-up: January 15, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




If Labor hadn't been hornswoggled by Drug War ideology, the outlawing of indiscriminate drug testing would be their cause célèbre. Why? Because such drug testing represents the political castration of the American worker. What could be more humiliating than being required to submit your urine to a potential employer -- not to find out if you're impaired, but simply to make sure that you practice the drug-hating faith of Christian Science with respect to psychoactive substances?

I also state above that drug testing is a way to shield Christianity from competition. Let me add here that there is a long history of this oppression. The time-honored psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries inspired renowned westerners like Plato and Cicero for almost 2,000 consecutive years. But it was finally outlawed by a Christian Emperor in 392 A.D. as a threat to Christianity.

Regarding my allusion to the failure of rehab, I have since realized that prohibition ensures the failure of rehab. It does this by outlawing all the drugs that could get one through those few tough weary hours of the day that are the bane of the recidivist -- when they sit alone in a quiet house, typically in the early hours of the morning, ready to climb the walls.

If such sufferers had access to laughing gas 8 , or opium 9 , or coca, or MDMA 10 , or any of a wide list of empathogens created by Alexander Shulgin -- or better yet, to all of these drugs in a go-to pharmacopoeia -- there would be no recidivism. Those seeking to get off a specific drug would find the psychological ability to do just that. This is just plain psychological common sense. But Drug Warriors ignore common sense -- as do the myopic materialist scientists that advise on drug policy these days. For more on this topic, please see my essay on "Fighting Drugs with Drugs."

For more on how Drug Warriors, doctors and scientists ignore psychological common sense, please see my essay entitled "Common Sense and the Drug War."





Notes:

1: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School (up)
2: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis (up)
3: On Cocaine (up)
4: America’s War on Drugs Has Always Been Bipartisan—and Unwinnable (up)
5: Joe Biden’s Drug War Record Is So Much Worse Than You Think (up)
6: Blast-off for Planet Hypocrisy! (up)
7: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
8: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide (up)
9: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
10: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts (up)


Christian Science




On a superficial level, Christian Science may be seen as a drug-hating religion and so its very existence tends to support the effort of drug warriors to outlaw godsend psychoactive medicines. On a deeper level, however, the religion's founder Mary Baker-Eddy was fighting not so much against drugs as against the failure of modern science to acknowledge the power of the human mind. In Mary's case, of course, this was the mind as influenced by Jesus Christ, but yet she recognized a principle with which even a non-believer can agree and which, moreover, is clearly true in light of drug user reports from the Vedic days to the present: namely, that the human mind has a great as-yet untapped power to control one's outlook on life and to therefore positively affect overall human health to some as-yet undetermined degree. Mary does seem to have overestimated the mind's ability to cure the body, of course, but it is worth noting in her defense that the government has outlawed the very research that would be required to determine exactly where the line should be drawn between the mind-curable condition and that which is beyond the help of this sort of holistic healing.

We would need to be able to use psychoactive medicines freely in order to generate the sort of user reports that could help us answer such questions adequately. And this would be research of the greatest philosophical importance, because it would essentially be a search into the true nature of mind-body dualism.

Mind-body dualism is like the weather when it comes to the field of philosophy: everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Well, here is a chance for philosophers to launch a first-hand investigation of the interaction between mind and body and to thereby determine the nature of each -- as well as the nature of the interactive whole which they in some sense comprise. Philosophers just have to decide: Do they want to perform the kind of hands-on philosophic research that William James advocated viz. altered states, or do they want to keep pretending that the drug war does not exist and that it has no downsides for philosophical research. For the opposite is so obviously true: namely, that drug prohibition forbids us from performing the kind of research that could blow the whole "mind-body" problem wide open from the western point of view and so inspire whole new fields of research.

For more on this subject, please see my essay entitled "Christian Science and Drugs: what Mary Baker-Eddy Got Right.



  • Addicted to Christianity
  • America's Puritan Obsession with Sobriety
  • Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Heroin versus Alcohol
  • How the DEA determines if a religion is true
  • How the Drug War Banned my Religion
  • Libertarians as Closet Christian Scientists
  • Meister Eckhart and Drugs
  • Psychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches: LSD, Cannabis, and Spiritual Sacraments in Underground America
  • Take this Drug Test
  • The Christian Presuppositions of the Drug War and Why They're Important
  • The Church of the Most Holy and Righteous Drug War
  • The Drug War = Christian Science
  • The Drug War as Religion
  • Using Ecstasy in Church
  • Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than a Religion
  • Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition
  • Eight Reasons to End Drug Testing
  • PROTEST DRUG TESTING NOW!
  • Surprise Drug Test!
  • Testing Employee Urine for Fun and Profit
  • The Joy of Drug Testing
  • Urine Testers Needed
  • Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia
  • America's Imperialist Christian Science War on Drugs
  • American Sharia
  • Boycott Singapore
  • Christian Science and Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab
  • Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition
  • Drug War Uber Alles
  • Even Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug War
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Our Short-Sighted Fears about Long-Term Drug Use
  • PROTEST DRUG TESTING NOW!
  • The Christian Science SWAT Teams of the Drug War
  • The Drug War = Christian Science
  • What You Can Do
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.

    Getting off some drugs could actually be fun and instructive, by using a variety of other drugs to keep one's mind off the withdrawal process. But America believes that getting off a drug should be a big moral battle.

    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.

    Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.

    The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.

    There would be almost no recidivism for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.

    If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.

    I'll never understand Americans. Most of them HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control how and how much they can think and feel in this life. Talk about warped priorities.

    I have dissed MindMed's new LSD "breakthrough drug" for philosophical reasons. But we can at least hope that the approval of such a "de-fanged" LSD will prove to be a step in the slow, zigzag path toward re-legalization.

    I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.


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






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    The Mother of all Western Biases


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