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Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 5, 2025



My 94-year-old mother is in a memory care facility, where she often complains to me of having 'knots' in her stomach, which is her way of saying that she is anxious as hell.

Author's follow-up for August 05, 2025

This complaint always depresses me because I know that in a Drug War society, there is absolutely nothing that medical science can (or rather WILL) do for her. Why not? Because the Drug War has outlawed all the psychoactive medicine that might be of help to her in a non-addictive fashion. But it's really worse than that, because the Drug War ideology of substance demonization keeps us from even considering the ways that such medicines might help.

Like all good Americans, the stateside doctors have been indoctrinated since childhood to despise Mother Nature's psychoactive pharmacy. They probably even got a teddy bear from the state police during grade school as their reward for saying no to Mother Nature's godsend medicines. As for Big Pharma , they make their money off of addictive and dependence-causing medications, so they're of no help. To the contrary, the Drug War shunts thousands of women off onto such addictive meds because that's the only legal road that Drug War prohibition leaves open for the relief of such anxiety. That's why the Betty Fords of the world become hooked on Valium, not because drugs are bad per se (as Americans like to think) but because the Drug War has outlawed all but the intentionally addictive kinds of drugs, those for which dependency is not a 'bug' but a feature.

In a world in which scientists were free to work with any medicine that held prima facie promise in ameliorating my mother's anxiety, there would be all sorts of anti-anxiety therapies and trials underway in America, first and foremost using drugs like MDMA 1 and psychedelics, in all sorts of regimens, doses, settings, and overall approaches. At the risk of giving drug-hating Americans a stroke, the approaches could even include the non-addictive use of coca and opium . For drug-war propaganda notwithstanding, drugs like coca and opium can be used non-addictively. That surely comes as such a shock to brainwashed Drug Warriors that I'd better repeat that sentence in order to let it sink in: drugs like coca and opium can be used non-addictively.

Such therapy sounds impossible to westerners who are used to playing a passive role in their recovery from illness. If they have condition 'A,' they expect to take pill 'B' for a cure and then sit back and let pharmacology do all the heavy lifting. But if we get out of the materialist habit of referring dysphoric emotional states to 'illness,' then we can begin imagining anxiety and depression cures of a shamanic nature in which a pharmacologically savvy 'empath' works with a specific individual to craft a drug-using plan that alleviates anxiety without addicting the 'patient' to the various nostrums thus employed.

The only way that we can do this and begin helping folks like my mother is to abandon the anti-scientific Drug War notion that psychoactive substances can be judged a priori as being good or evil, without regard for precisely how they are used: in what doses, what settings, for what reasons, for which people, etc. etc. To put it another way: pharmacologically clueless politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan should no longer have the last word in deciding what medicines are available for giving my mother peace of mind.

I know this is 'a big ask,' because helping my mom (and future anxious mothers like her) requires not simply the re-legalization 2 of Mother Nature's bounty, it also requires our abandonment of the illness paradigm in which 'patients' are considered to be interchangeable units, each theoretically amenable to the exact same addictive Big Pharma treatment, a treatment in which the patient's one and only job is to swallow pills (and don't get me started on the absurd amount of ineffective pills that Big Pharma 3 4 has my mother swallowing on a daily basis). Only a shamanic approach (or more precisely, an approach informed by shamanistic holism) can lead us to the individualized therapies that can successfully leverage the vast relegalized pharmacy of Mother Nature for the benefit of the anxious (as well as the depressed, the lonely, etc.).

Until then, we may as well live in the Dark Ages when it comes to treating anxiety in the elderly (or in anyone else for that matter). The Drug War simply forbids us to treat such conditions effectively, the same way that it reduces our treatment for addiction to cold turkey and Narcan. Such shabby and stinting 'non-treatments' give the lie to America's claimed status as a scientific and forward-looking country.

How do Americans live with themselves, knowing that the Drug War that they endorse is allowing for so much unnecessary emotional suffering in the world, if not for themselves, then for their friends and loved ones? I suspect that it has something to do with our Puritan heritage which tells us that there is a moral value in suffering, and so at some fundamental religious level, we would rather see our loved ones suffer than to see them achieving peace of mind using the kinds of medicines that our forebears have always associated with witchcraft and 'savages.' But that's a subject for another essay.



Author's Follow-up:

August 05, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up







In the age of the Drug War, the Hippocratic Oath has become "First, do no good." Why? Because our political, moral and materialist prejudices compel us to focus exclusively on the potential downsides of drugs, and never on their obvious benefits -- like the fact that mind and mood medicines have inspired entire religions!

Is it just me? Am I the only one who looks at the needless suffering of humanity -- as in the case of my own mother -- and am outraged that we Americans actually prefer this suffering to drug use?

Consider the following reports of positive drug use -- bearing in mind that scientists are dogmatically and politically incapable of recognizing any of the following benefits AS benefits!

"The world was as if newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity, which persisted for the entire day."5


"To breathe the gas [nitrous oxide] was, simply and literally, inspiration." 6


"Intense intellectual stimulation, one that inspired the scribbling of some 14 pages of handwritten notes."7


"The afterglow was benign and rich in empathy for everything. "8


"I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world."9


Hello? My mother was not from Mars. She could have benefited from feeling good, just like anybody else. All drugs that inspire and elate have obvious uses for treating psychological distress -- not just thanks to materialist effects but because of holistic effects as well: like the fact that feeling good has obvious knock-on benefits -- or benefits that used to be obvious until Americans insisted on judging drug efficacy only under the lens of a microscope.

And let's not forget that the Drug Warrior first went after a drug that Avicenna and Paracelsus considered to be a panacea: namely, opium . If opium were legal, then much of the nostrums peddled by drug stores would be irrelevant today. (No wonder the Drug War has staying power!)

And yet, in the words of 19th-century physician Thomas Sydenham:

"Among the remedies which it has pleased the Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium 10 ."11


And yet my Mom could receive no relief from that time-honored godsend. Why not? Because materialists, moralists, racists and xenophobic fearmongers have convinced the world that powerful drugs can only be abused. What willful know-nothing obscurantism -- obscurantism with a body count! What a power grab by government, denying us the right to tend to our own healthcare! What a perfect crime, to which the western world has been blinded by Drug War propaganda, chiefly in the form of the censorship of all positive uses for drugs.


SUMMARY

It has become clear over the last 50 years that there are a potentially endless list of drugs that could provide benefits of the kind reported above -- in plants, in fungi, on animal skins, and in laboratories where we synthesize phenethylamines and beta-carbolines in response to hints provided by Mother Nature. There is thus an ever-growing gap between common sense and the rabid drug demonization of the Drug Warrior. Surely, at some point, even the slow kid in the room is going to wake up to the fact that we are literally outlawing "everything that works" for anxious people like my mother -- to say nothing of those who merely want to reacquire the mental, spiritual and emotional freedom that was their birthright as a human being until racist and xenophobic politicians began strategically outlawing godsends by associating their use with the hated "other": read Blacks, Hispanics, the Chinese, and so forth.


I close with an insight from Thomas Szasz in support of the points made above. The following citation is drawn from page 67 of the hardback edition of Szasz's groundbreaking 1992 classic entitled Our Right to Drugs:

"The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs."12
















Notes for essay entitled Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology:

1: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
2: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
3: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
4: 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)
5: “Artificial Paradises - Mike Jay.” 1999. Mike Jay. May 18, 2025. https://mikejay.net/books/artificial-paradises/. (up)
6: “Emperors of Dreams : Drugs in the Nineteenth Century : Jay, Mike, 1959 December 14- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/emperorsofdreams0000jaym/page/n3/mode/2up. (up)
7: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (up)
8: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (up)
9: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (up)
10: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
11: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
12: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)




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"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.

I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing "Howl!" while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like "Howl!"

The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.

Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.

People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.

The drug war is a scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.

If the depressed patient laughs, that means nothing. Materialists have to see results under a microscopic or they will never sign off on a therapy.

It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.

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.

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


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