Finally, a drug war opponent who checks all my boxes

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Finally, a drug war opponent who checks all my boxes

an open letter to Julian Buchanan

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 28, 2024

The following correspondence is in response to Julian Buchanan's thoughtful message to me on Monday, February 26, 2024, on the Academia.edu website. Julian is a professor of social and culture studies at the Victoria University of Wellington. Our correspondence is in regard to Julian's 2018 post on WordPress entitled "Breaking Free From Prohibition: A Human Rights Approach to Successful Drug Reform."¹

Hi, Julian.

Thanks for that. I have just read (or rather re-read) your excellent post entitled "Breaking Free From Prohibition: A Human Rights Approach to Successful Drug Reform," and I agree that we are, indeed, on the same page. Frankly, I seldom read something that I find as both new and useful when it comes to the Drug War (there is so much unacknowledged "group think" out there, even from those who seem to be on the "right" side of these issues), but your warnings about problematic regulation seem to qualify. State regulation, as you write, is not a panacea, since we first have to recognize that denying psychoactive substances to human beings in the first place is the real problem.

This kind of prohibition is particularly worrisome in light of the ethnobotanical research of folks like Richard Schultes, who tell us that all tribal people have used psychoactive drugs for personal and religious reasons ². The outlawing of such substances takes on imperial overtones in light of this fact. It's as if the western world was not satisfied with simply dispossessing these cultures of their lands, but we now want to eradicate the very nature-friendly ideology upon which their societies have thrived.

Another thing that strikes me in reading your article, which is something I have said many times myself though in different ways, is that the Drug Warrior never does a true cost/benefit analysis of legalization proposals (or rather of re-legalization proposals). They focus exclusively on the potential downsides of legalization for young suburban Americans while ignoring the potential downsides of criminalization for all sorts of other demographics, like pain patients, the depressed, or the philosopher looking to follow up the study of altered states that was pioneered by William James ³ (not to mention the Blacks who will be killed in drive-by shootings and the Latin Americans who will become victims of civil wars, etc., and certainly not the poorly educated poor who will be lured into drug dealing, and thus into jail, with the financial incentives that prohibition creates for such illicit activities ⁴).

And so I appreciate your acknowledgement that there are other stakeholders in the drugs debate besides "impressionable young people," because this is something that even legalization ⁵ proponents generally fail to address in public, as if they too believed that the debate is all about keeping suburban white people safe.

I believe that the whole idea that "something must be done" (outside of merely decriminalizing private drug use and drug production for personal purposes) is a result of Drug Warrior fearmongering via agencies like the DEA and NIDA, as described by Philip Jenkins in "Synthetic Panics."⁶ Of course, as a practical matter, the long-term answer will no doubt require some sort of benign government oversight, but this fact, as you suggest, should not stop us from doing the right thing in the here and now: namely ending substance prohibition.

I think, instead, that what needs to change is the world's mindset toward drugs. The world needs to simply "grow up" when it comes to psychoactive substances. We need to start thinking of psychoactive drug use in the same way that everyone now thinks of other potentially dangerous activities like horseback riding or driving a car: yes, they can be dangerous and even fatal, but we never consider outlawing these activities based on horror stories in the tabloid press ⁷. Neither should a well-publicized drug overdose of a rock star lead us to outlaw drugs, let alone to deny the drug in question to anyone anywhere, at any dose, for any reason, ever. (This is the absurd logic of the Drug War: that a substance that has one bad use can never be used wisely anywhere ever.) This, I think, dovetails with your point that the problem is prohibition itself and that regulation schemes cannot help us if they are in denial about this fundamental fact.

We will also have to guard against a powerplay on the part of the healthcare industry to claim the right to decide for us if psychoactive substances are safe enough to be legal, since psychoactive drug use is all about attempts at personal improvement, self-transcendence and even religious experience, topics about which doctors qua doctors have no expertise whatsoever. All that they can tell us about psychoactive drugs is their potential physical actions at certain doses. So while they can define risks, they cannot themselves perform a risk/benefit analysis of psychoactive drug use given the highly personal psychological and sometimes spiritual nature of the benefits in question ⁸.

I could go on and on, of course: that's why I have made this topic the focus of my retirement years, which, I believe, is another thing that we have in common.

Best of luck in your ongoing efforts.

Brian Quass
Abolishthedea.com

PS I also appreciate your reference to the medical benefits that we are forgoing in the name of prohibition. This is something that is rarely pointed out. I myself have come to the conclusion that we are living in a new Dark Ages thanks to prohibition, because science is currently blinded to all potential beneficial uses of outlawed psychoactive substances. Perhaps you are familiar with "The Book of the Damned ⁹ " by Charles Hoyt ¹⁰. He wrote in the early 1900s about how certain facts are "damned" (i.e. ignored) by science whose goal is to organize the world according to certain preconceptions. I believe Hoyt "didn't know from damnation," however, because since his time, we have damned all reports about positive effects of "drugs," and so dogmatically gone without an untold number of potential godsends, both psychological and physical.

PPS Sorry, but I can't resist one plug: I have launched a new radio station called Drug War Radio to combat Drug War ideology. I'm trying to mix good music with a great message! If you can think of those who might be interested, feel free to share a link.¹¹

I'm still casting about for the best format, but I think it will be top-ranking alternative hits alternating with snippets of anti-drug-war chatter, quotes, parodies, etc. My real goal is to make prohibition literally laughable and to encourage others to do the same. We need plays and movies ¹² ¹³ and books that highlight the absurdities to which Drug War ideology has led us: including that self-imposed ignorance about potential medical breakthroughs.

Open Letters

People

Notes for essay entitled Finally, a drug war opponent who checks all my boxes: an open letter to Julian Buchanan:

1: Breaking Free From Prohibition: A Human Rights Approach to Successful Drug Reform Buchanan CPA, DSW, MA, PhD, Julian, Drugs, Human Rights & Harm Reduction, 2018 (up)
2: Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers Schultes, Richard, 1979 (up)
3: William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas DWP (up)
4: The Invisible Mass Shootings DWP (up)
5: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
6: “Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs | Office of Justice Programs.” 2024. Ojp.Gov. 2024. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/synthetic-panics-symbolic-politics-designer-drugs. (up)
7: Horses Kill The Partnership for a Death Free America (up)
8: How Science News Reckons Without the Drug War DWP (up)
9: The Book of the Damned continued DWP (up)
10: Charles, Fort. 2025. “The Book of the Damned.” Gutenberg.Org. 2025. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22472/pg22472-images.html. (up)
11: Drug War Radio DWP (up)
12: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
13: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Almost every article about suicide is shallow because it takes drug prohibition as a natural baseline, even though drug prohibition outlaws substances that could so clearly elevate mood.

Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.

Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.

We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.

Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."

If NIDA covered all drugs (not just politically ostracized drugs), they'd produce articles like this: "Aspirin continues to kill hundreds." "Penicillin misuse approaching crisis levels." "More bad news about Tylenol and liver damage." "Study revives cancer fears from caffeine."

So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.

There would be little or no profiling of blacks if the Drug War did not exist.

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.

Americans outlaw drugs and then insist that those drugs did not have much to offer in any case. It's like I took away your car and then told you that car ownership was overrated.

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)

Finally, a drug war opponent who checks all my boxes

an open letter to Julian Buchanan

Open Letters

People

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