Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology

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Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology

by 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

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes:

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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The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.

No wonder the "Justice" Department relies on plea deals; otherwise juries could use nullification to free those charged with mere drug possession.

Scientists hold holistically working drugs to reductionist standards, thereby practicing a sort of pharmacological colonialsm.

The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."

The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.

When is the Holocaust Museum going to recognize that the Drug War has Nazified American life? Probably, on the same day that the Jefferson Foundation finally admits to having sold out Jefferson by inviting the DEA onto his estate in 1987 to confiscate his poppy plants.

That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.

In 2017 alone, 1,632,921 drug arrests were made with 85.5 percent of those solely for possession. -- War On Us

Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.

In his treatise on laws, Cicero reported that the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries gave the participants "not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope."

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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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