more obvious uses for the substances that Americans love to hate
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
July 29, 2025
Hercules had it easy. Cleaning the Augean stables may not have been a cakewalk, and it's no doubt difficult for even the strongest of men to kill a man-eating bird or a triple-headed dog. But if King Eurystheus had REALLY wanted to play hardball with the Greco-Roman hero in response to his god-inspired murder of Megara and her kids, he would have tasked the hero with transferring a database-driven website from one hosting platform to another. Now THAT is a challenge! I know this all too well, for that is the Herculean labor over which I myself have been slaving over the last week and which I have found to require the firing of every single available neuron in my brain, including many which I fear have grown dusty over the years with non-use.
This, of course, has everything to do with drug prohibition, insofar as anti-scientific and racist politicians have outlawed all the medicines that could have helped me to improve my brain power and so to handle this host-switching task with relative ease, that is, both calmly and in an organized manner. This is the evil of the Drug War: it allows these self-interested demagogues called "Drug Warriors" to dictate the limits of my mental power -- all in the name of protecting white American young people from so-called "drugs," the same young people whom America refuses on principle to educate about safe use. What kind of moronic principle is that?!
It is amazing to me that Americans do not see this for the anti-scientific evil that it is. Both common sense and a scientific mindset tell us that a drug that can increase mental focus has all manner of beneficial uses, especially when we actually teach how to use them wisely -- and yet the Drug Warrior tells us that we all must go without godsend benefits from drugs -- merely because the drugs could, in theory, be misused by a white American young person, whom we refuse to educate about safe use.
This is paleolithic nonsense, a mindset that is inherently racist and xenophobic. Americans have yet to understand that saying things like "Fentanyl 1 kills" is philosophically identical to shouting "Fire bad!" Those who utter such inane bromides are counseling us to fear dangerous substances rather than to learn to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of human beings. This is superstitious fearmongering.
We are surrounded by all sorts of possible godsend medicines for achieving mental focus -- not just cocaine 23 and Ritalin but drugs like Harmaline and the kinds of phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. And yet we are not allowed to use any of them! This is an outrageous state of affairs, especially given the astonishing fact that the vast majority of Americans have no problem with this hateful status quo whatsoever. How depressing is THAT?! They fail to realize that this status quo represents nothing less than the outlawing of human progress. Let me repeat: drug prohibition is the outlawing of human progress.
We will only leave this Prehistoric mindset behind when we start responding to the downsides of drug use in the way that we now respond to the downsides of liquor consumption: calmly, and with an eye toward educating people rather than arresting them!
Drugs that activate the mind's neural networks have prima facie potential in the fight against dementia and yet Drug Warriors show by their actions that they prefer dementia to the use of drugs -- that they prefer suicide 4 to the use of drugs, that they prefer brain-damaging shock therapy to the use of drugs. This is why we have make-believe healthcare in the United States. This is why we have entire make-believe libraries these days, full of books whose authors have dutifully ignored drug prohibition. These authors completely ignore what drug use could tell us about the topics which they pretend to cover so thoroughly -- for after a century of politically inspired propaganda, Americans now consider drug prohibition to be a natural baseline from which to research and study the world around us.
Switching web hosts would not have been a Herculean task if I had lived in a world wherein individuals like myself had sovereignty over their own mental and emotional states. In such a world, I would be able to wisely use substances for the purposes of focusing my mind in the times and circumstances where such focus was beneficial for me. In the absence of those time-honored freedoms, however -- that is, in the age of the unprecedented, superstitious and racist war on mind medicine -- I can only envy Hercules for having gotten off so easily when it comes to his appointed tasks. Capturing the Cretan Bull may have had its challenges and it no doubt takes a real diplomat to steal a girdle worn by the Queen of the Amazons -- but just you try focusing laser-like on creating successful PHP code when your government has outlawed every possible substance in the world that might help you to do so. Now, that is a challenge worthy of Hercules himself.
"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses.
The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.
In the board game "Sky Team," you collect "coffees" to improve your flying skills. Funny how the use of any other brain-focusing "drug" in real life is considered to be an obvious sign of impairment.
I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!
We don't need people to get "clean." We need people to start living a fulfilling life. The two things are different.
Some fat cat should treat the entire Supreme Court to a vacation at San Jose del Pacifico in Mexico, where they can partake of the magic mushroom in a ceremony led by a Zapotec guide.
Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.
Just saw a People's magazine article with the headline: "JUSTICE FOR MATTHEW PERRY."
If there was true justice, their editorial staff would be in jail for promoting user ignorance and a contaminated drug supply.
It's the prohibition, stupid!!!
How would we even KNOW that outlawed drugs have no positive uses? We first have to incorporate them in a sane, empathic and creative way to find that out, and the drug war makes such a sensible approach absolutely impossible.
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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