Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass
blog icon orange rss icon with stylized radio waves bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter substack icon


back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow


How Bernardo Kastrup reckons without the drug war

a philosophical review of 'Why Materialism is Baloney'

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 11, 2023



Here is my review of Bernado's book as published today on Everand.com.



Bernardo fails to mention the Drug War.

Update: June 02, 2025
Update: November 11, 2025

This will sound unrelated to most people, but reductive materialism 1 helps support drug-hating ideology by causing us to search for "real" cures, while ignoring common sense. Materialist Dr. Robert Glatter wrote an article in Forbes magazine claiming that he is uncertain whether laughing gas could help with treatment-resistant depression. Any depressed person would tell you that it could, and for obvious psychological reasons, and Reader's Digest has been claiming for a century that laughter is the best medicine.

But as a materialist, the doctor wants proof under a microscope. This is materialist myopia based on the assumption that human beings are biochemical machines, not living, breathing individuals. This materialist myopia ensures that drugs like MDMA and psychedelics will remain illegal forever. Why? Because the first step that the materialists take in evaluating them is to ignore all positive anecdote and historical use. And so they judge holistic medicine by "scientific standards," which is a kind of pharmacological colonialism.

I tried to explain this connection to Bernardo, this connection between the Drug War and materialism. And yet I could not reach him. I was told to join his philosophy group instead. I did so. But I was quickly told by the group's moderators that "drugs" had nothing to do with philosophy and that I should join some niche group on that topic.

And so the link between materialism and the Drug War remains unexposed.

And I imagine this review will be deleted as well, that's just how much the mainstream has been bamboozled by the full-court press of drug-war propaganda.



Author's Follow-up:

June 02, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




The Drug War outlaws precisely the kinds of substances whose use could cause us to question the materialist paradigm. This is why all philosophers -- but especially enemies of materialism -- should be crying out on behalf of academic freedom2 and for the end of the superstitious Drug War: for it represents an anti-scientific world view, one in which we pre-judge substances "up" or "down" based on our own perceptions about who is currently using psychoactive substances and why. This is the outlawing of human progress, when we decide in advance that a substance can have no positive and legitimate uses at any dose, for any person, when used for any reason, in any context.

When authors like Kastrup miss the connection between materialism and the Drug War, they are passing up the best argument that they could make in support of their own thesis. They have proof of the inadequacy of materialist philosophy ready to hand and yet they do not see it. The proof may be syllogistically deduced given the absurdity to which a materialist view of drugs has led us.

Premise 1: "The substantial reasons for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us" (quote from Whitehead from "The Concept of Nature").

Premise 2: The materialist approach to drugs leads to absurd outcomes.

Conclusion: It is a category error to place materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine.

In case the reader doubts the absurd nature of the modern world when it comes to drugs, consider the following absurd realities:

1) We live in a world in which we would rather that the depressed kill themselves than to use "drugs."

2) We live in a world in which we would rather that the depressed undergo brain-damaging shock therapy than to use "drugs."

3) We live in a world in which we ignore almost all positive reports of drug use.

4) We live in a world in which our FDA approves of Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself 3 , and yet the same FDA will not approve of laughing gas or phenethylamines like MDMA 4 -- or any other obvious treatment -- for the depressed.

5) We live in a world in which the nightly smoking of an opium 5 pipe is considered evil and yet the daily use of Big Pharma 6 7 meds is encouraged as a medical duty. Cui bono? Wake up, people!

How's that for hypocritical absurdity -- in this world wherein our privileged drug alcohol kills 178,000 Americans a year!

Materialists are, in fact, dogmatically blind to all obvious benefits of drug use thanks to their adherence to the passion-scorning tenets of reductionism and behaviorism. They are never happy with a drug that merely "works" -- they want to create drugs that "really" work -- that is, which work in accordance with the materialist concept of human beings as interchangeable biochemical widgets. Their interest is in vindicating materialism, not in helping suffering humanity. We live in a world in which scientists are gaslighting 8 the hoi polloi9, trying to make us believe that the glaringly obvious and time-honored benefits of drugs do not really exist -- that only in looking under a microscope can we determine if drugs have any benefits for humanity. What a joke. Had this philosophy been at work in the Punjab in 1500 BCE, there would be no Hindu religion today, insofar as Soma 10 would have been banned as a substance having no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, ever.

And yet I seem to be the only philosopher in the world who sees the connection between materialism and the Drug War. I was certainly the only philosopher to officially protest the FDA's plans to treat laughing gas 11 as a drug, despite my valiant snail mail campaign to awaken the philosophers at Harvard and Oxford to this slap in the face of academic freedom and the legacy of William James. Nitrous oxide was already shamefully unavailable, as a practical matter, to those who needed it most: like philosophers following in the footsteps of William James, or the severely depressed who could so obviously benefit from a gas whose informed use could give them a break from gloomy introspection.

And yet when one makes such arguments, they are told by brainwashed Americans that they should reserve their comments for a niche Reddit group about drug prohibition. This is the whole problem, the fact that nobody recognizes the endless counterproductive and anti-scientific ramifications of embracing drug-war orthodoxy, above all, the idea that we must ignore common sense in favor of microscopic evidence. The Drug War is not just a set of laws that affect hedonists only. It censors academia and keeps philosophers like Kastrup from noticing otherwise blazingly obvious evidence in support of their own theses: in this case, the fact that materialism is baloney, philosophically speaking. Kastrup seems unaware of the fact that we already have deductive proof of his thesis. The inadequacy of the materialist mindset, at least in the realm of mood and mentation, is clear given the absurd results to which that philosophy has led, the absurd results that outlaw academic freedom and bar the severely depressed from using any and all drugs whose strategic use could otherwise keep them from committing suicide.

Surely, Kastrup recognizes such absurdities. He fails to mention them because the Drug War has outlawed his academic freedom -- and that is a topic to be discussed in a philosophy forum, not in some niche subreddit about drug prohibition! By "philosophy," I refer to what Schopenhauer called "the real seriously understood philosophy which is concerned with the truth, and nothing else; and by no means the jest of philosophy taught in the universities.12" For I consider most academic and scientific studies to be jests these days insofar as they ignore the existence of psychoactive medicine and what its use might tell us about the nature of human emotions, mentation and human consciousness. If science were free today, we would be studying the mind-body problem with the help of psychoactive substances -- instead of persisting in our cherished fiction that we can acquire a God's-eye-view of the truth by ignoring everything subjective, everything that is merely obvious to common-sense psychology.

These are not just philosophical considerations. People commit suicide 13 every day because we have outlawed all the substances that could have cheered them up. In an humane world, we would teach safe and wise use of all substances and put an end to our childish and superstitious drug demonization campaigns. For it cannot be said enough: saying things like "Fentanyl 14 kills!" and "Crack kills!" is philosophically identical to shouting "Fire bad!" All such statements would have us fear and demonize dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.



Author's Follow-up:

November 11, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




Let me make it as clear as possible why philosophers like Kastrup should be protesting drug prohibition, especially if their focus is on the metaphysical positions of Kant and Schopenhauer 15. Those latter philosophers studied only one privileged kind of consciousness, what they called rational consciousness, whereas William James has subsequently reminded us that "our normal 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.16" One does not have to be an expert in the minutiae of Kantian argumentation to realize that philosophers need to connect the dots between the insights of these two philosophers -- and that their failure to do so is a dereliction of duty. It is therefore a bad sign that I was the only philosopher in the world to formally protest the FDA's plans to treat laughing gas as a "drug," thereby making it less likely than ever that the gas will be used by philosophers to study the nature of human perception, of consciousness, and of reality itself 17 18. This was what William James urged his colleagues to do -- and this is the task from which modern philosophers have recoiled in tacit fealty to the drug-demonizing ideology of the War on Drugs.

Of course, I get it. Any philosopher who takes up the gauntlet that James threw down viz. altered states is likely to pay a high price for doing so, but the least that we can ask of our philosophers is that they admit that there is a problem here. They should be protesting drug prohibition as entailing the censorship of academia, rather than naively claiming that our drugs policy has no effect on free inquiry and debate. One useful way to do this would be for them to end all of their papers on related topics with a disclaimer pointing out that drug law has barred them from pursuing certain topics, such as the potential hints that unique states of consciousness might provide us concerning the nature of perception, of the self, and of the noumenal world. In this way they could be honest without necessarily jeopardizing their careers. In the absence of such a disclaimer, our philosophers are tacitly accepting drug prohibition as a natural baseline for study -- in which case they are using drug laws to shield themselves from all potential non-materialist objections to their findings. They are, in effect, using modern drug prejudices as an excuse to ignore the insights of William James concerning human consciousness.

Someone needs to start fighting for academic freedom in the face of drug prohibition, and what better professionals to lead the charge than those who claim to be lovers of wisdom? Who better to protest a policy that prioritizes fear over knowledge?



RELATED ESSAYS














Notes:

1: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
2: Coverup on Campus DWP (up)
3: RINVOQ RX List (up)
4: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
5: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
6: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
7: 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)
8: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
9: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
10: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
11: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
12: The World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer, Arthur (up)
13: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
14: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
15: Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics: The key to understanding how it solves the hard problem of consciousness and the paradoxes of quantum mechancs Kastrup, Bernardo, 2021 (up)
16: “The Varieties of Religious Experience : William James : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2021. Internet Archive. 2021. https://archive.org/details/the-varieties-of-religious-experience_202109. (up)
17: Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine DWP (up)
18: Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




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

We give kids drugs to improve their concentration -- but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.

The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses.

And so, by ignoring all "up" sides to drugs, the DEA points to potential addiction as a knock-down argument for their prohibition. This is the logic of children (and uneducated children at that). It is a cost-benefit analysis that ignores all benefits.

It is actually illegal to be a Ben Franklin in 21st century America. To put this another way: we outlaw far more than drugs when we outlaw mind and mood medicine.

The worst form of government is not communism, socialism or even unbridled capitalism. The worst form of government is a Christian Science Theocracy, in which the government controls how much you are allowed to think and feel in life.

The addiction gene should be called the prohibition gene: it renders one vulnerable to prohibition lies and limitations: like the lack of safe supply, the lack of choices, and the lack of information. We should pathologize the prohibitionists, not their victims.

If we encourage folks to use antidepressants daily, there is nothing wrong with them using heroin daily. A founder of Johns Hopkins used morphine daily and he not only survived, but he thrived.

If drug warriors were serious about saving lives, they'd outlaw guns, cars, and all pleasure trips to Mars.

That's why I created the satirical Partnership for a Death Free America. It demonstrates clearly that drug warriors aren't worried about our health, otherwise they'd outlaw shopping carts, etc. The question then becomes: what are they REALLY afraid of? Answer: Free thinkers.


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






back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow
Book Cover

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

Purchase Your Copy
Book Cover

Drama lovers: collect full-cast recordings of classic plays

In my spare time, when I am not shaming drug warriors for their heartless drug policies, I create full-cast recordings of classic plays using the latest in synthetic voices licensed by the Natural Reader company. Snag your copy of my production of Volpone, by Ben Jonson... and follow me on Payhip for more where that came from, including classics like The Post Office, The Double Dealer and The Inspector General. -- Yours in all-too-justified outrage, the Drug War Philosopher @ abolishthedea.com.

Purchase Your Copy



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.


Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP (up)