Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy

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Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy

an open letter to Joshua Falcon, author of Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

January 5, 2025

Hi, Joshua.

I just read your 2020 paper entitled 'Designing Consciousness ¹' and found it quite thought-provoking. Given your academic interests, I thought you might not mind if I shared some thoughts that I had on some of the topics that you raised.

I think that the greatest indictment of the western mindset is the fact that we made a conscious decision to develop thermonuclear weapons in the 1950s, rather than recognizing the horrifying dangers inherent in that pursuit and so working relentlessly with friends and enemies alike to prevent such development ². We should have created a Department of Peace just as we had created a Department of War (eventually to be rebranded as the Defense Department). We should have begun working tirelessly to find ways to bring people together, in which case the strategic use of entheogens would have been an obvious tactic.

The second greatest indictment of the western mindset is the fact that those who still hold these irresponsibly hawkish views are now steadfastly opposed to the use of entheogenic medicines, substances that could help bring the world together and make us simply not want to use such weapons. They would rather risk nuclear annihilation than allow 'drug use,' such are the warped priorities of the Drug Warrior. Even those who consider themselves to have an anti-colonialist mindset have been taught (chiefly by the propaganda of censorship) to fear entheogens. These are the sorts of people who wring their hands over school shootings and youth suicide ³ and yet are blind to the most obvious realistic answer to these problems: namely, the strategic use of empathogenic medicines to teach the hothead compassion and to convince the suicidal that life is worth living, not through words but by letting them experience feelings of acceptance and love and compassion.

Speaking of suicide, every suicidal individual should be equipped with a laughing gas kit, in the same way that we equip the allergy-prone individual with an epi pen. Instead, the FDA is now working to classify laughing gas as a 'drug,' a substance without positive uses, which is a double insult, insofar as laughing gas ⁴ was the substance that inspired the ontology of William James, by teaching him that what we experience is but a utilitarian ⁵ ⁶ -biased fraction of any supposed ultimate reality ⁷. This rating system is not science at work, it is politics and ideology.

Your paper also got me thinking about the western focus on utility. This puts evolution in a new and potentially colonial light. Evolution, after all, is all about finding utilitarian ⁸ reasons for everything in the animal kingdom. Does the peacock have a beautiful tail? 'Oh, that's just to attract a mate.' Does the dog have a cute expression? 'Oh, that's just to arouse our interest and make us feed it.' The theory seems custom-designed to legitimize the viewpoint of a cynic and to justify interventionism for financial and political purposes.

But the standard bearer of this utilitarian viewpoint was George Santayana. In his series of books on the 'Life of Reason,' he uses the term 'savage' no less than 21 times, in curt dismissal of non-western people. Santayana wants nothing to do with teleology or final causes: he simply wants to know the utility of the world as we experience it. 'What can the objective world do for Santayana?' that's what he wants to know. Whatever he himself may have thought about psychedelics, his philosophy remains a cover for the Francisco Pizarros of the world to oppress at will, as when they show disdain for the plant medicines of the Andes. Mystical states are nonsense, after all; they have nothing to do with the price of tea in China!

To combat that mindset, I recently published an essay on Santayana's 'Life of Reason' entitled: 'If this be reason, let us make the least of it!⁹'

Regarding the increasing acceptance of psychedelic drugs, I see this as a positive step. Unfortunately, the takeaway for many seems to be that 'psychedelics aren't evil 'drugs' after all,' whereas the greater lesson should be that there are no such things as evil 'drugs' and that all substances have potential positive uses at some dose, in some circumstance, for some reason ¹⁰. To think otherwise is anti-scientific and even superstitious.

Nor is it just psychedelics whose use can conduce to a greater appreciation of Mother Nature. In the right person, at the right dose, in the right circumstance, many non-psychedelic drugs can have that effect. morphine can provide an almost surrealistically clear view of the natural world. In 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains' by Poe, the protagonist has the following experience under an 'immoderate' dose of that drug:

'In the quivering of a leaf—in the hue of a blade of grass—in the shape of a trefoil—in the humming of a bee—in the gleaming of a dew-drop—in the breathing of the wind—in the faint odors that came from the forest—there came a whole universe of suggestion—a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought.¹¹'

But the Drug War says we are not allowed to have that experience. This is why I say that, 'When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw far more than drugs.'

Unfortunately, strategic fearmongering tells us that we will never learn to use drugs like morphine wisely. But this is just a defeatist lie, spouted for the purpose of supporting a Drug War that locks up minorities by the millions, thereby handing elections to fascists. As Carl Hart reports in 'Drug Use for Grown-Ups', most people use drugs wisely, and this despite the fact that drug law does all it can to make drug use dangerous ¹².

When all drugs are re-legalized and we teach safe use (and use drugs to fight drugs, as in my essay on that topic ¹³), we can benefit from a wide array of mental states, psychedelically provided and otherwise, without developing unwanted dependencies, or at least with a psychologically obvious way to combat them should they occur. We should remember, too, that all risky activities have victims -- whether we're talking about rock climbing, shooting a gun, or driving a car -- and that this reality should prompt us to teach, not to outlaw.

We should also be honest with ourselves about dependency. Currently, we believe it is highly immoral to be dependent on morphine , but we consider it a medical duty for the depressed to 'keep taking their meds.' The difference between the two is neither logical nor scientific, but merely based on the attitudes that we have been taught to associate with each usage pattern. One of the founders of Johns Hopkins University was a regular morphine user and was just as vocationally able as he would have been had he been taking Prozac - probably far more so in that morphine conduces to great concentration, especially in well-educated people who seek to leverage its power in this regard. morphine 's biggest downside compared to antidepressants ¹⁴ was simply that the morphine ¹⁵ user had to hide his drug and was taught by society to feel guilty about using it. In reality however, drugs are drugs, no matter how they're whitewashed by social narratives.

Finally, nothing could be more colonial than the DEA's scheduling system. It tells us that the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions have no positive uses. This is only plausible to Americans because we see drugs through the lens of reductive materialism ¹⁶ and behaviorism, thanks to which drug efficacy is established by looking under a microscope. And so the fact that a depressed person laughs while using a drug means nothing to western researchers. The fact that they may have spiritual revelations means nothing.

This illustrates a huge but seldom recognized problem with the western mindset: that it is obliged by reductive materialism to ignore psychological common sense, like the fact that feeling good helps, that looking FORWARD to feeling good helps, and that laughter is laughter ¹⁷. This dogmatic blindness is, in turn, the result of a category error. Materialists are not the experts when it comes to drug use. The real experts are those pharmacologically savvy empaths who know what safe use looks like and can imagine creative protocols to put drugs to work on behalf of real people, based on their own psychosocial goals in life, not based on what hubristic materialist science believes should work for them according to theory.

But science magazines do not acknowledge this category error. In their articles on subjects like consciousness, fear and depression, the authors never contemplate the role that 'drug' use can play in enlightening us on these topics. Instead, they pretend that substance prohibition is a natural baseline and so discuss only legal substances ¹⁸. This is false science, however. It purports to be giving us the latest state of knowledge, but it is really giving us a partial viewpoint based on what the government will allow it to contemplate. All such articles should come with a disclaimer, stating that the authors are ignoring the insights that might come from the consideration of illegal drugs and their current and historical use. But no such disclaimers are ever published - and so the Drug War gets off 'scot-free' for its censorship of academia ¹⁹.

And much of today's censorship is self-censorship, which should not be surprising considering that we all were subject to Drug War indoctrination starting in grade school ²⁰.

I just read a book by historian Ronald Hutton entitled: 'Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present.²¹' Like all academics on this topic, he points out the obvious fearmongering of the witch hunters of eld and of those who, to this very day, believe in witches and magic.

But these academics never look in the mirror.

The Drug War is the greatest example of strategic fearmongering in world history. And yet academics do not see this, even those who specialize in writing about the strategic fearmongering of witch hunters. And so these academics write of the 'herbs' used by witches, failing to realize that these 'herbs' were nothing but drugs, in the exact same way that 'meds' are drugs. They do not bring this connection to the fore, of course, because they simply 'do not want to go there,' as it is impolite these days (not to say dangerous to one's career prospects) to talk honestly about drugs.

I wrote to Ronald, suggesting to him that the impulse and motivations of the witch finder have never disappeared from society ²². The witch hunter is today's Drug Warrior and the new witches are drug dealers. They are hated for strategic reasons: namely, because they pose a threat to the medical industry (as being a common sense alternative to the myopic behaviorism of modern doctors) and for helping to facilitate mental states that are mistrusted and feared by the powers that be.

My conclusion is that colonialism is alive and well. It is hiding behind the twofold veneer of 'materialist science' and the Drug War. Both work to make us dismissive of the holistic mind and mood medicines of indigenous peoples, the former via pseudoscience and the latter via fearmongering. The sad irony is that such non-materialistic drug use is the human species' last best hope for eradicating the hatred and suspicion that has our species on the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Drugs are not the enemy: hatred is the enemy.

Thanks again for the thought-provoking paper!

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes for essay entitled Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy: an open letter to Joshua Falcon, author of Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness:

1: Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness Falcon, Joshua, Academia.edu, 2020 (up)
2: An interview with Annie Jacobsen, author of ‘Nuclear War: A Scenario’ Jackobsen, Annie, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2024 (up)
3: Suicide and the Drug War DWP (up)
4: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
5: We have an absolute right to use drugs DWP (up)
6: Why John Stuart Mill is irrelevant to the drug debate DWP (up)
7: James, William. 2016. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820.The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience. (up)
8: Drug Prohibition should be protested on principle, not on utilitarian grounds DWP (up)
9: If this be reason, let us make the least of it! DWP (up)
10: There are no such things as 'killer drugs' DWP (up)
11: “Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (Text-02A).” 2026. Eapoe.Org. 2026. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/raggeda.htm. (up)
12: “Drug Use for Grown-Ups by Dr. Carl L. Hart: 9781101981665 | PenguinRandomHouse.Com: Books.” n.d. PenguinRandomhouse.Com. Accessed August 29, 2026. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/534657/drug-use-for-grown-ups-by-dr-carl-l-hart/. (up)
13: Fighting Drugs with Drugs DWP (up)
14: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
15: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
16: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
17: Common Sense and the Drug War DWP (up)
18: Why science is a joke in the age of the drug war DWP (up)
19: Coverup on Campus DWP (up)
20: Self-Censorship in the Age of the Drug War DWP (up)
21: The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present Hutton, Ronald, Yale Press, 2017 (up)
22: Drug Dealers as Modern Witches DWP (up)

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against the hateful war on US

The drug war is a slow-motion coup against democracy.

SSRIs are created based on the materialist notion that cures should be found under a microscope. That's why science is so slow in acknowledging the benefit of plant medicines. Anyone who chooses SSRIs over drugs like San Pedro cactus is simply uninformed.

What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.

Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.

Despite the 50 year-long war on drugs, the global cocaine supply has grown by 400%. --Elma Mrkonjic

Drug warriors aren't just deciding for us about drugs. They're telling us that we no longer need Coleridge poems, Lovecraft stories, Robin Williams, Sherlock Holmes, or the soma-inspired Hindu religion.

Problem 2,643 of the war on drugs: It puts the government in charge of deciding what counts as a true religion.

There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill.

No drug causes addiction after one use. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis.

What bothers me about AI is that everyone's so excited to see what computers can do, while no one's excited to see what the human mind can do, since we refuse to improve it with mind-enhancing drugs.

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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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Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy

an open letter to Joshua Falcon, author of Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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

Diary of a Drug Fiend