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How Drug Prohibition Causes Brain Damage

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 1, 2025



The forte of all true philosophers is that they can draw surprising and hitherto unnoticed conclusions about the world around them from a series of generally accepted premises which, in themselves, surprise nobody at all.

That is what my site is all about here at AbolishTheDEA.com. Time and again, I have shown deductively, from accepted premises, that drug prohibition causes far more problems than it purports to solve. But one thing that I did not fully appreciate until now was the fact that drug prohibition naturally leads to brain damage, and that this conclusion, too, can be shown to logically follow from accepted premises.

Consider the following syllogism.

SYLLOGISM PROVING THAT DRUG PROHIBITION CAUSES BRAIN DAMAGE

1) Cortisol levels rise when we are mentally stressed. 1

2) High cortisol levels create anxiety and depression and can destroy brain cells. 2

3) Drug prohibition outlaws almost all drugs that can reduce stressful states of mind.

CONCLUSION:

Drug prohibition causes brain damage.

Why is this not obvious to everybody?

Answer: Because materialist science ignores both holism and psychological common sense, in fealty to the reductive focus of modern science. Why? Because the more common-sense factors that these materialists ignore, the more that they can make a case for the omniscience and omnipotence of reductive materialism 3. As Charles Fort 4 demonstrated in "Book of the Damned 5 ,6" materialist scientists simply ignore (or "damn") those facts that do not accord with their general "scientific" outlook on life, in this case, the facts of common-sense psychology, like the simple fact that happiness is happiness.

If I am focused and happy – yes, even with the help of a drug – that focus and happiness has knock-on biochemical effects. It helps me to breathe more powerfully; it helps me to experience my breath as the lifeforce known as prana; it helps me therefore to lower cortisol levels in my brain, thereby avoiding the cortisol-driven death of brain cells.

And yet such holistically-functioning and indirect benefits of drug use are always ignored by materialist medicine. Our highly specialized materialists pretend that the "merely" obvious benefits of drug use do not exist, the implication being that a person who claims to be "happy" while using a drug is somehow mistaken. What presumption! This is precisely like me telling a beer drinker that he or she is not "REALLY" receiving therapeutic relaxation from booze7 – as if an outsider like myself could opine authoritatively on what a given stranger is actually experiencing while "under the influence."

The fact is, however, that even many so-called "recreational" drug users are getting real physical and psychological benefits out of their drug use, even if they themselves are not consciously aware of this fact. The fact that such drug users are personally happier and less anxious has positive knock-on benefits, in this case because such use decreases the creation of brain-damaging cortisol. Whether such benefits are "worth it" in any particular case is beside the point. Looked at closely, however, we see that only the drug user is in a position to make that call, to decide whether any given drug use is "worth it," because only they know what makes them feel the way that they desire to feel based on their own goals and challenges in life and hence what tactics will reduce cortisol levels for them personally. They alone are aware of the mental state that ultimately results for them thanks to the impact of a vast array of interacting inputs: biochemical, psychosocial, genetic, etc.

This is the sin of materialists, by the way: they ignore the fact that human behavior is the result of the complex interaction of a huge range of inputs. Instead, they seek to limit all variables that they study to a minimum, chiefly by ignoring all common-sense psychology in preference to focusing on quantifiable data that they have gleaned from looking under a microscope. That is why prohibition is so outrageous to begin with, because it makes the childish, dogmatic and ahistorical assumption that drug use is somehow never "worth it," as if outsiders actually know all the endless variables involved in determining human behavior and motivation and could decide for us, "in the abstract," about the propriety of using any given drug by any given person for any given psychological purpose.

This reminds us, in turn, of a truth that I have repeatedly emphasized over the last three years: namely, that it was a category error to place materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. Such materialists are "experts" only because they have dogmatically simplified the subject matter that they study so as to ignore pesky details. They ignore, above all, the fact that human attitudes matter and that those attitudes are the outcome of the complex interaction of a dizzyingly wide range of factors. But the Drug Warrior has essentially tasked our scientists with the job of trashing drug use as wrong, and scientists are all too glad to advance that hateful agenda because it gives them an excuse to ignore otherwise recalcitrant and unpredictable data.

If the reader finds it surprising that mainstream science would embrace a public policy that leads to brain damage, they have only to consider the fact that the FDA sees no benefits to laughing gas 8 , a substance whose wise and timely use could clearly prevent suicides. This is the same FDA that champions the use of brain-damaging shock therapy. The FDA never considers any obvious benefits of drugs use, like avoiding suicide or brain damage. For in the determinist world of materialism, behaviorists are considered to be the experts on our mind and mood. Our role as patients is just to sit back and wait for them to come up with "miracle cures" created by modern science. Meanwhile, as far as the FDA is concerned, if it does not show up under a microscope, it doesn't count.

Of course, in reality, this materialist bias is used disingenuously to support drug prohibition on supposedly "scientific" grounds -- as if it is scientific to prefer suicide 9 and shock therapy to using godsend medicines!

Clear as mud, you say?

Unfortunately, drug prohibition is a meta injustice. It impacts my very ability to make a convincing argument on this topic. If there is one thing I need right now -- especially in light of the stressful events that are "going down" behind the scenes as I write this -- it is a drug that focuses my mind and improves my thought processes -- but this is precisely the kind of substance that our racist politicians have ensured that I can never access. So if I have failed to make this argument clearly enough in the essay above, let us place the blame for that deficiency where it truly belongs: that is, not just with myself, but also with the racist politicians who have outlawed all the endless ways that I could have used medicines to improve my mental focus -- rather than damaging my brain, either by shock therapy or by failing to strategically use drugs that could have lowered my cortisol levels.









Notes for essay entitled How Drug Prohibition Causes Brain Damage:

1: Assessing the Role of Cortisol in Anxiety, Major Depression, and Neuroticism: A Mendelian Randomization Study Using SERPINA6/SERPINA1 Variants Chan, Ieong, Biological psychiatry, 2024 (up)
2: “Are You Always Stressed? Your Brain Could Be Prematurely Shrinking.” 2022. Www.henryford.com. September 22, 2022. https://www.henryford.com/blog/2022/09/stress-can-cause-premature-brain-shrinkage. (up)
3: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
4: Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation DWP (up)
5: The Book of the Damned continued DWP (up)
6: Charles, Fort. 2025. “The Book of the Damned.” Gutenberg.Org. 2025. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22472/pg22472-images.html. (up)
7: Blast-off for Planet Hypocrisy! DWP (up)
8: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
9: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.

Americans love to hate heroin. But there is no rational reason why folks should not use heroin daily in a world in which we consider it their medical duty to use antidepressants daily.

People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.

The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.

Westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight.

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."

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

We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.

It is far better to "treat the symptoms" than to irreversibly modify brain chemistry in one particular way based on the theories of a financially-motivated biochemical determinist working for a pharmaceutical company.

The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?


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






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