HG Wells and Drugs

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

HG Wells and Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 7, 2025

I always suspect science-fiction writers of being blind materialists, folks who, for all their creativity, have a naïve belief in the power of science to solve all problems. I fear that such literary geeks fail to realize that it is a category error for scientists to get involved in the fields of mind and mood. See my review of the movie Moonfall wherein I carp at the naïve psychology of such authors ¹. And this is a problem because that category error has consequences. It has turned today's scientists into co-conspirators in America's war against godsend medicines. Why? Because materialism ² amounts to behaviorism ³ when it comes to psychology, and that hateful doctrine holds that feelings do not matter, that human beings are biochemical widgets who can be studied under a microscope. If the 'patients' say that laughing gas works for them as an antidepressant - or opium ⁴ or coca - the scientists feel they can ignore such testimony because all that counts is biochemistry. This gives scientists the cover they need to sign off on the big lie of the Drug War, namely the idea that drugs have no positive uses. For that becomes true if we ignore all anecdote, all history and all psychological common sense in fealty to the inhumane tenets of JB Watson ⁵ ⁶. Yes, indeed! Surprise, surprise: If we dogmatically ignore all their obvious benefits, then indeed we can say nothing positive about drugs. Go figure.

But if HG Wells were alive today, I suspect that he would know better than to think that scientists had the key to mind and mood. I am persuaded of this after reading about Wells' views of eugenics as explained by GK Chesterton in 'Eugenics and Other Evils.'⁷ Wells realized that health is not a single thing, but rather a balance of a vast variety of forces: not just genetics and biochemistry but environment - and that some factors that are deadly for some people can be beneficial for others. It is the collection of forces that makes for health or ill health, not factors in isolation. It is therefore arbitrary and tyrannical to support eugenics by singling out specific factors and viewing them as decisive for character - for this is a subjective judgment sure to be influenced by the prejudices of the judge. This was clearly the case for the eugenicists of the early 20th century. As Chesterton noted, these eugenicists were never interested in cutting down on the number of headstrong nobles who cause problems for the world by their unreasonable egotism, not to mention their tendency to slap females when they were drunk. The eugenicists focused instead on the uneducated and the poor who lack opportunities and healthcare options. They made the rash an unfounded assumption that ignorance or ugliness or political dissension is hereditary, but only when it appears in the lower classes, of course.

This has everything to do with drug prohibition. The Drug Warrior insists that drugs are bad in and of themselves, which is a lie for the same reason as stated above. Health is a balance of a wide variety of forces. Things that might kill one person are highly beneficial to another person. This is why it was such a huge mistake to put the government in charge of a person's individual health. Suddenly demagogues could charge any substance they disliked with being bad, provided that they could cite just one instance of misuse, or even just suggest the mere fact that such misuse was possible - whereas no substance is bad in and of itself. Health, to repeat, must be judged holistically, as an outcome of a wide variety of forces.

But the Drug Warrior is determined that all drug use must lead to negative outcomes, so they write laws that are designed to make this happen. Indeed, the Drug War zany fanatic William Bennett ⁸ (you know, the loon who wanted to behead those who dealt in Mother Nature's plant medicines) absolutely hated folks who used drugs wisely. He actually hated wise use because it might set a trend. That's why I say the Drug War represents a perversion of values. Bennett wants death and destruction of those who use substances besides alcohol and tobacco. If he had his way, the Hindu religion would not exist today because everybody who supplied Soma to the residents of the Indus Valley in 1500 BC would have been beheaded. But he is determined to prevent any new religions from being founded today. Talk about religious persecution: Bennett goes right for the jugular. Compared to him, the Torquemadas of the past were mere tyros when it came to intolerance: they only outlawed competitive religions, whereas Bennett wants to outlaw the religious impulse itself. I am so glad that I am not an unreasonable guy, because otherwise I might refer to William Bennett as a hate-filled jerk... But my mom just didn't raise me like that, folks. That's just not me.

Mary Baker-Eddy would be astonished that her jaundiced view of drugs was so vehemently supported by the pols. She would no doubt be puzzled, however, why Bennett was not also calling for the guillotining of those who use aspirin and antibiotics and other 'physical medicine.' I can hear Mary now:

'Are not those sinners evincing an equal degree of scorn for the healing powers of their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ? What gives, Bill?' Mary would have been nonplussed by the half measures advocated by the old cigarette-puffing smokestack ⁹.

I fear that very few people indeed understand how hateful the Drug War is. It puts the government in charge of the most intimate aspect of one's life: how we can think and feel about the world - for by outlawing psychoactive drugs, they force us to see the world in one way, when as William James noted, there are a vast number of ways of seeing the world:

'Waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.¹⁰'

There is simply no greater tyranny than to outlaw our experiencing of these other worlds. There is no greater tyranny than that which tells us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in life. None.

But I digress. My point here, as I hope is slowly becoming clear, is to discuss what the work of HG Wells tells us about drugs and the Drug War. I have started with the positive news that HG Wells recognized the key fact that the Drug Warrior ignores: that health is a balance of factors and not a specific thing. It is therefore crazy to insist that a psychoactive drug is bad or good in and of itself, although strictly speaking this is a corollary that I myself have drawn from Wells' position and one which we can only hope that the author would have seconded had he lived in the age of the War on Drugs. But Wells did have his materialist biases, as is made clear from his disdain for 'The Book of the Damned ¹¹ ' by Charles Fort ¹² ¹³. Wells failed to accept (or perhaps even to notice) Fort's main point. He was not just collecting a bunch of odd facts; Fort was demonstrating that scientists do not really investigate anything: that they rather look for proof that their existing theories are correct.

And this is clearly true. If you don't believe it, try to get an article published that suggests there might be a major problem with Darwinian theory. The scientist's job is to show that Darwin was right, not to draw attention to just any topically relevant evidence whatsoever. (See Thomas Nagel's 'Mind and Cosmos' for more on this latter bias.¹⁴) This is why we have an Institute on Drug Abuse and not an Institute on Drug Use. The government's job is to show that drugs are bad. They are almost 100% blind to positive accounts of drug use, even if they are showing a belated and grudging interest in psychedelics - but only then for very specific conditions documented in the DSM. They have no interest in holistic medicines: and no wonder. Since they ignore all common sense and anecdote, they have to prove everything the hard way, via biochemistry. It's really comic. Just imagine me, a chronic depressive, using laughing gas in the lab, laughing hysterically by the scientists' side as they're looking in their microscope trying to figure out if laughing gas could help me. 'Your laughing is all well and good, Brian,' says the lab-coated expert, 'but I need to find out if laughing gas ¹⁵ can REALLY help you.'

Here's a quick nod to the hateful politics of our time: I am not in favor of firing such government scientists wholesale, as some of us seem to be. I just want to use them in jobs for which they are actually qualified. Now back to our regularly scheduled essay already in progress.

Would HG Wells have been a Drug War supporter if he were alive today? Would he have signed off on a science that was divorced from common sense? I would think not. But then almost every materialist scientist of our time plays along with this psychologically naïve understanding of the world, as if it actually makes sense.

As Alfred North Whitehead said,

'The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us.'¹⁶

Hopefully, Wells would have risen above drug-warrior propaganda to see the absurdity here and to draw the obvious conclusion therefrom: namely, that it is, indeed, a category error to put scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine.

I will end with a quick reference to two other drug-related factoids regarding HG Wells. First, his long short story entitled 'The New Accelerator' describes a way of speeding up one's life. What struck me in reading the story was that the behavior of the inventor when using the device seemed identical to that created by amphetamines or cocaine ¹⁷ ¹⁸ . This is so typical of western hypocrisy: we have no problem with taking risks to speed up our lives - as long as they do not use drugs. The fact is, drugs could be used for the purposes of speeding up our lives at specific times when such speed would be helpful - and this without leading to massive overuse and addiction. This is true unless we deny the power of human creativity and determination. This is true unless we take a defeatist attitude toward human progress. This is why I am turned off by much sci-fi: it seeks to accomplish utopia via technology, meanwhile blatantly ignoring the existence of a whole pharmacopoeia worth of drugs that could improve us where it counts: in the way we feel about the world around us. You could build a sky elevator to the moon but I may still be too depressed to use it. Get real, guys!

One final factoid. In the 1933 movie version of 'The Invisible Man,' a doctor denounces the exotic drug which was apparently used to create invisibility. He declares that it should never be used and indeed that its very existence should be hushed up. He talks about it like it was a real person, a real criminal, in fact. That is so 'Drug War' of him. The doctor has the crazy idea that a drug that has one bad use for one reason cannot have a good use at any dose, at any time, for any reason. That is pure Drug War nonsense. Let me add, however, that I have only seen the film. I have not yet read the Wells story upon which it was based - something which I hereby promise to do within a week of publishing this essay. I will publish below any pertinent discoveries that I should make while reading it. An initial search of the text, however, has failed to turn up this anti-scientific bias in the original story. Here's hoping that the dialogue in question was added by a producer and is not to be found in the original story. Surely, Wells would have seen the absurdity about denouncing a drug simply because it has bad potential uses. Under that theory, all drugs could be hushed up and banned, since all drugs can be fatal at some dose and in some context.

Author's Follow-up: March 8, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

I can now confirm that there is no drug bashing in Wells' original story, unless you count the landlady's superstitious denunciation of Griffin's bottled potations. After the invisible man wrecks her parlor, she complains as follows:

'He's put the sperits into the furniture.... My good old furniture! 'Twas in that very chair my poor dear mother used to sit when I was a little girl. To think it should rise up against me now!'

These lines are innocent enough from the philosopher's point of view... although it must be remembered that idiocy like hers is fertile ground for demagogues to cultivate for their own purposes. This is why we need a specific law outlawing the prohibition of psychoactive substances as being both unscientific and productive of glaringly obvious downsides -- as, for instance, the creation of drug gangs and cartels out of whole cloth and the destruction of the Bill of Rights, with the exception, of course, of the Second Amendment, which the Drug Warriors hypocritically insist is a REAL amendment, one superior to the whims of the government.

The fact is, of course, that all amendments were supposed to be superior to the whims of the government -- that is why they were expressed in amendments, lest the fundamental principles contained therein were considered to be in doubt. America needs a reboot -- this time as a country that recognizes first principles ¹⁹ and refuses to have them subject to the mob rule inspired by scheming racist demagogues.

Notes:

1: Moonfall DWP (up)
2: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
3: Behaviorism and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
4: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
5: JB Watson Britannica (up)
6: The purblind coldness of the Behaviorist doctrine is made clear in the following words of its founder, JB Watson, as quoted in the 2015 book "Paradox" by Margaret Cuonzo: "Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic." (Surely, Watson was proactively channeling Dr. Spock of the original Star Trek series.) (up)
7: Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument against the Scientifically Organized State Chesterton, GK (up)
8: Beheading of Convicted Drug Dealers Discussed by Bennett LA Times - Reuters, 1989 (up)
9: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition DWP (up)
10: The Varieties of Religious Experience James, William, Goodreads, New York, 1902 (up)
11: The Book of the Damned continued DWP (up)
12: Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation DWP (up)
13: Charles, Fort. 2025. “The Book of the Damned.” Gutenberg.Org. 2025. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22472/pg22472-images.html. (up)
14: Mind and Cosmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false Nagel, Thomas, Oxford University press, New York, 2012 (up)
15: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
16: Alfred North, Whitehead. 1920. Review of The Concept of Nature. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg. 1920. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18835. (up)
17: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
18: “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)
19: A Principle-Driven Approach to Ending Drug Prohibition DWP (up)

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To oppose the Drug War philosophically, one has to highlight its connections to both materialism and the psychiatric pill mill. And that's a problem, because almost everyone is either a Drug Warrior or a materialist these days and has a vested interest in the continuation of the psychiatric pill mill.

It's disgusting that folks like Paul Stamets need a DEA license to work with mushrooms.

In fact, there are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???

When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia: OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think. POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!

Drug prohibition began as a racist attempt to prevent so-called "miscegenation." The racist's fear was not that a white woman would use opium or marijuana or cocaine, but that she might actually fall in love with a Chinese, Hispanic or Black person respectively.

The Drug Warriors say: "Don't tread on me! (That said, please continue to tell me what plants I can use, how much pain relief I can get, and whether my religion is true or not.)"

Prohibitionists will me that we're all children when it comes to drugs, and can never -- but never -- use them wisely. That's like saying that we could never ride horses wisely. Or mountain climb. Or skateboard.

Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.

I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."

Imagine a world in which we were told about both the potential benefits AND the potential harms of drugs like cocaine and opium.

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HG Wells and Drugs

Author's Follow-up: March 8, 2025

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