Fighting Drugs with Drugs (2025)

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Fighting Drugs with Drugs (2025)

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

October 20, 2025

Author's note: November 2025

Please keep in mind in reading the following that for most people, cocaine is a cure for depression. A cure. Sigmund Freud himself understood this ¹. No one asked the depressed how they felt about the drug, however. Instead, cocaine was demonized by self-interested doctors who focused only on downsides, exactly as if they were to evaluate alcohol by only looking at alcoholics. Their jobs were at risk, after all. To make a living, they needed to TREAT depression, not cure it.

End note

The Drug War is based on a web of lies, misunderstandings, and false assumptions. One of those false assumptions is that drugs can never - BUT NEVER - be used to fight drugs, that quitting drugs must be done by the gnashing of teeth and the rending of garments - combined with weekly meetings in 12-step groups wherein participants are encouraged to describe the particular gnashing and rending that has taken place in their life over the last seven days ². For the default expectation of every rehab group is that the participants are going to strive to "get clean," which means basically that they are going to forswear all drugs, with the possible hypocritical exception of Big Pharma ³ "meds." The goal is not really to help the participants to achieve their dreams in life, but rather to help them achieve the group's goal of turning them into drug-hating Christian Scientists a la Mary Baker Eddy ⁴.

Have you ever stopped to think why withdrawal programs in general have such a high recidivism rate? Look no further. It is our refusal to fight drugs with drugs that turns each case of so-called addiction into a nightmare and guarantees us a moral story that can be served up to Americans on shows like 48 Hours ⁵ in order to remind the viewer that drugs are a dead end. Well, of course they're a dead end when we have closed all the byways with which tragedy can be avoided. I write from experience. I spent a decade attempting to get off of Valium, something that I now see would have been easy had I been allowed to use alternative medicines that could both elate me while helping me reconsider my priorities in life. Sure, I have no medical proof that such freedom would have gotten me off of Valium quickly, but I do not need medical proof, for it is, frankly, common psychological sense that such therapies would work. Unfortunately, common sense is not something that materialist science is known for, since it cannot be properly charted and graphed and so communicated intelligibly to one's potential funders.

The physical side of addiction can be overcome with pharmacologically enhanced sleep cures, treatments that were already in place in 1999 when Jim Hogshire published Opium for the Masses ⁶. I assume that such treatments have proliferated and improved over time insofar as all technology seems to be advancing, although it's worth noting that Drug Warriors are not exactly crying out for such improvements: for the fact is that addiction is the boogieman with which racist politicians seek to frighten Americans into renouncing their Constitutional freedoms. Solve the addiction problem and the Drug Warrior is out of business. This is why we never hear talk of a Manhattan Project to end addiction, which would be their cause célèbre if politicians were as worried about the topic as their fatalistic chatter would seem to suggest. But they don't want to end addiction: they want to keep using it as an excuse to crack the heads of minorities, especially those who would never vote for them in a million years ⁷.

As for psychological cures, the world is our oyster when we start strategically using plant medicine like shamans to combat a specific problem in a specific individual - in contrast to the materialist desire to treat human beings as identical biochemical widgets, each amenable to the same pill. The work of drug researchers like Ross Heaven ⁸, James Fadiman ⁹ and Stanislav Grof ¹⁰ are full of anecdotal evidence of positive life changes wrought by psychoactive medicine. Alexander Shulgin ¹¹ created hundreds of drugs that work like MDMA ¹² to inspire positive thinking and a realignment of misplaced values. The book Plants of the Gods ¹³ introduced the west to hundreds of natural psychoactive substances which could change a user's attitudes when employed in shamanic fashion, both their attitude toward drugs and their attitude in general. By using such drugs in empathic protocols, the withdrawal process could be tailored to the user's desires and not required to jibe with the tenets of Christian Science ¹⁴ (no drugs allowed) or Reductive Materialism ¹⁵ (no psychologically obvious cures allowed).

Yet the reigning prejudice is that it is absurd to fight drugs with drugs (as if "drugs" were an objective category in the first place and not a catchall term for substances of which pharmacologically clueless politicians disapprove ¹⁶).

Take me, for instance. I'm told that to get off SNRIs, I must... wait for it, folks... get off SNRIs. No naughty plant medicine can be used! That's the withdrawal protocol of modern science in the 21st century! In other words, I'm told that I must get off those drugs entirely before the doctor can even think of prescribing another drug.

This reminds me of Steve Martin's prescription for becoming a millionaire in the movie "The Jerk":

"First, get yourself a million dollars."

The fact is that the use of psychoactive medicine to change behavior for the better is a no-brainer, or it would be in a world that valued psychological common sense. But materialist science has no faith in common sense, just as it scorns both anecdote and history. Today's materialist even denies that laughing gas can help the depressed ¹⁷. Why? Because they do not have microscopic evidence of such efficacy. True, the user may be laughing right in their face, but that means nothing. The materialist refuses to see what used to be obvious to everyone, namely that feeling good is therapeutic, and that looking forward to feeling good is therapeutic as well. It's a virtuous circle powered by happiness and anticipation ¹⁸, but materialists refuse to recognize such power since they cannot properly quantify it and add it to a PowerPoint presentation for their next funding appeal. This willful myopia in turn gives cover to the DEA when they make the outrageous claim, in the teeth of thousands of years of evidence, that psychoactive plant medicine has no positive uses whatsoever.

But then modern scientists are forced to feign ignorance about the glaringly obvious, because once they admit that feeling good is helpful, it immediately follows that any uplifting drug is a potentially valid antidepressant in some circumstance, at some dose, for some person, at some time. If a suicidal patient perks up because they are allowed to use cocaine or opium every weekend - or psilocybin if you prefer, since the modern American has been taught to be as censorious as a schoolmarm on this topic -- so be it.

Here's where another Drug War lie comes to the rescue of the Drug Warrior, however: the idea that drugs can be judged "up" or "down," and so if a drug can be misused by one demographic at some dose, in some circumstances, then the Drug Warrior insists that it must not be used for any demographic, at any dose, in any circumstances. This, of course, is the antithesis of a scientific understanding of drugs, which has always held that the context of drug use matters and that no substance is bad in and of itself, no, not even cyanide or botox, both of which "deadly" toxins have positive uses at some dose, in some circumstances. Yet the scientist must accept the Drug Warrior prejudices without comment lest they offend their wealthy benefactors. It's called the censorship of science, in fact, though one waits in vain for most scientists to acknowledge it as such ¹⁹.

The standard objections to this human-centered protocol that I am describing are based on yet more Drug War lies, like the idea that regular daily use of "drugs" is wrong and constitutes addiction by itself. And yet drug law does all it can to give users problems and hence turn their daily use into addiction as defined by Webster's dictionary ²⁰. Moreover, modern science has no leg to stand on when it scorns daily use, since we live in a time when the depressed are encouraged by the mainstream media to "keep taking their meds" every day of their life, until death do they part. The idea that this is justified while "drug" use is not is mere hypocrisy and scientism, the idea that a materialist treatment is science and therefore HAS to be right and (lacking a better word in an officially Godless universe) moral. In reality, using opium daily makes just as much sense as taking an antidepressant daily: in fact, it makes more sense insofar as opium has been recognized as the closest thing to a panacea by the great doctors of the past (Avicenna, Paracelsus, Galen) while no regular user of Big Pharma meds would ever make that claim about antidepressants ²¹.

Yet we arrest folks for using opium while we praise them for using Big Pharma meds, a state of affairs that says all one needs to know about Drug War hypocrisy.

It will be argued that such an approach as mine has never been tried before, and yet this is not so. It is a way of life in all tribal societies, including the ones in Latin America that the west decimated in the 16th century and which we are still decimating today with our insistence that the plant medicines that they use are evil. (This attitude toward life has a name, by the way: it is called Cosmovision ²².) That's why I am personally headed to the Andes in my attempts to get off of SNRIs, since at least a handful of shamanic medicines are still legal down there despite America's attempts to strong-arm the world into having them criminalized. My goal is to use San Pedro cactus ²³ in particular to help me to psychologically withdraw from SNRIs. This will take some nuanced research to avoid complications with a rare phenomenon called "serotonin syndrome," especially since the variety of "helper plants" to which I will have access are strictly limited, even in Mesoamerica. But since no one seems to be doing clinical research for my demographic - namely, those who want to get off Big Pharma meds with the help of plant medicine - I am forced to be something of a pioneer in this area.

I conclude with this biographical reference to demonstrate that I am doing more than writing about this thesis, that we should fight drugs with drugs; I am practicing what I preach, to the limited extent that international drug law will allow me to do so, of course.

Finally, I have said that the goal of withdrawal therapies should not be to render the user drug free, since that is to enforce the precepts of the drug-hating religion called Christian Science. That said, however, there is nothing wrong with an individual choosing a drug-free life as their goal, even in the drug-aided therapy that I advocate. For psychedelic meds in particular demonstrate the power to help us clarify and achieve goals, even if the goal is pharmacological abstinence.

Personally, of course, I cannot understand a life of total abstinence, since there are drugs out there which can exalt our sense of smell, of sight, of sound, of touch, and greatly heighten our appreciation of Mother Nature, etc. Why would one NOT want to partake, at least in certain circumstances, at certain times, especially given the fact that we are only just beginning to study the vast pharmacopoeia of psychoactive medicine with an eye toward using it for the benefit of humanity? To say no to such meds a priori at this point seems to me to be a very poor choice, indeed. In fact, it's a choice that I find inexplicable unless I suppose it to have been influenced by unacknowledged Drug War prejudices.

Recidivism is usually caused by specific instances in time. I might go 22 hours a day without wanting the hated substance, but those 2 other hours may face me with extreme psychological angst. Now, it is just plain common sense that substances like coca, laughing gas, opium, etc. (and hundreds of non-addictive phenethylamines) could get me over those rough patches -- and that's all I need. But modern doctors entirely lack common sense when it comes to human psychology. This myopia can be traced to their acceptance of scientific materialism ²⁴, combined with their acceptance of Drug War lies, according to which we are told that psychoactive substances can have no positive uses.

Notes for essay entitled Fighting Drugs with Drugs (2025):

1: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
2: Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing DWP (up)
3: 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)
4: Christian Science is the religion of Mary Baker Eddy, who believed that drug use was wrong because all problems, mental and physical, were to be solved by praying to Jesus Christ. (up)
5: 'Synthetic Panics' by Philip Jenkins DWP (up)
6: Opium for the Masses: Harvesting Nature’s Best Pain Medication Hogshire, Jim (up)
7: Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America Hansen, Helena, 2023 (up)
8: Shamanic Plant Medicine - San Pedro: The Gateway to Wisdom Heaven, Ross, everand, 2016 (up)
9: Fadiman, James. Psychedelicexplorersguide.com. 2011. https://www.psychedelicexplorersguide.com/. (up)
10: “The Transpersonal Vision : The Healing Potential of Nonordinary States of Consciousness : Grof, Stanislav, 1931- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2022. Internet Archive. 2022. https://archive.org/details/transpersonalvis0000gro (up)
11: Alexander Shulgin: American Hero DWP (up)
12: Listening to Ecstasy: The Transformative Power of MDMA Wininger, Charles, 2021 (up)
13: Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers Schultes, Richard, 1979 (up)
14: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition DWP (up)
15: Materialism and the Drug War DWP (up)
16: There are no such things as drugs DWP (up)
17: Glatter, Robert. 2021. “Can Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide) Help People with Treatment-Resistant Depression?” Forbes, June 9, 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2021/06/09/can-laughing-gas-nitrous-oxide-help-people-with-treatmentresistant-depre (up)
18: The Therapeutic Value of Anticipation DWP (up)
19: Self-Censorship in the Age of the Drug War DWP (up)
20: The aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependency DWP (up)
21: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
22: ANDEAN TRILOGY, A PERFECT UNION OF THE THREE ANDEAN WORLDS Inkayni Peru Tours, 2024 (up)
23: ICEERS The International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service ICEERS The International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service (up)
24: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.

Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.

Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.

We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.

Materialist puritans do not want to create any drug that elates. So they go on a fool's errand to find reductionist cures for "depression itself," as if the vast array of human sadness could (or should) be treated with a one-size-fits-all readjustment of brain chemicals.

Whether we judge people only by the words that they say or only by the substances of which they partake, we are ignoring the most important things: what they really mean and how they really behave.

The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.

To treat opioid use disorder, we should re-normalize the peaceable smoking of opium at home as an alternative to drinking alcohol.

By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.

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

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

No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).

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.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

(up)

Fighting Drugs with Drugs (2025)

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