How the Archive.org Website Censors Free Speech About Drugs
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 26, 2025
This was going to be an essay about my new plan to protest the Drug War by reviewing government-supplied propaganda on Archive.org. I was going to engage in a frenzy of reviewing because most of the site's drug-related content had yet to receive reviews, and so my own reviews would have pride of place as being first in line. But then something happened that changed my priorities completely. I had just finished my critique of a NIDA1 article entitled QQ1006. I had pointed out how NIDA was a propaganda arm of the U.S. government, and that it would always be so until it began to recognize both the glaringly obvious benefits of drug use and the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition. This was going to be the opening salvo in my campaign of posting reviews against the hateful War on Drugs. The form was filled out and ready to go...
And then I clicked "submit."
Instead of receiving a confirmation message or a thank-you, I received instead the following chilling announcement:
"It looks like your review triggered our spam detector."
Yes, and it looked like their site had triggered my BS detector.
Suddenly, the big story of the day was not my decision to review articles on Archive.org: the big story was the fact that minority opinions about drugs are not welcome in the age of the Drug War and so are censored at will. They are subject to Kafkaesque veto thanks to code written by anonymous techies who have been brainwashed in grade-school about the evil of godsend medicines. Suddenly, the big story was censorship, the fact that the Drug War mindset had effectively outlawed free speech2. I had encountered such censorship before, back in 2020, when I had posted a drug-related question for Professor Patrick Grim and it was automatically deleted by algorithms used by the Wondrium company during a virtual discussion forum. (See my essay entitled I asked 100 American philosophers what they thought about the Drug War for more on that 2020 censorship.) I knew, moreover, that self-censorship was rampant in the age of the Drug War (see my essay entitled Self-Censorship in the Age of the Drug War, also written in 2020). But I had not been so suddenly censored in five years, and I was not prepared for it. It was like a smart slap in the face.
The censorship had at least one positive outcome, however. It reminded me how there are life-and-death issues at stake when it comes to the War on Drugs and that the topic represents more than just an opportunity for the philosophically minded to expose the puerile assumptions on which such a policy is based. The Drug War is having hateful anti-democratic consequences right here and now in the real world. I had a similar feeling last night in watching an old episode of Night Gallery set in a state penitentiary. As the camera panned by the barbed wire and tall cement walls, it reminded me that there are real victims of Drug War policy, hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caged as we speak for having used and/or dealt with substances that the government had no right to outlaw in the first place, least of all in a country founded on natural law, a doctrine which tells us, according to John Locke himself, that "the earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being3."
Review of
QQ1006, an article by NIDA
Archive.org refused to publish this review thanks to algorithms written by anonymous coders who value drug-war orthodoxy over free speech.
The government study of drugs is HUGELY biased. Their researchers ignore all the benefits of drugs as well as all the downsides of prohibition. Their only job is to demonize drug use by holding it to a safety standard that we apply to no other activity on planet Earth: not to free climbing, not to drag-racing, and certainly not to gun shooting or drinking alcohol. Speaking of alcohol, it kills 178,000 a year according to the CDC, and yet the government invites us to fear drugs like Ecstasy, which have killed no one. The only deaths related to Ecstasy are those caused by the Drug War, which refuses to educate about safe use and to regulate product.
Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace, love and understanding to the dance floors of Britain in the 1990s, but Drug Warriors do not like peace, love and understanding. And so Drug Warriors cracked down on the use of Ecstasy, after which violence SKYROCKETED at rave concerts as dancers switched to the anger-facilitating drug called alcohol, and concert organizers had to bring in special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces!
NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition, thanks to which America's inner cities have been turned into shooting galleries and the rule of law is now a joke in much of Latin America. 60,000 Mexicans have been "disappeared" thanks to the Drug War over the last 20 years4, and yet NIDA 5 wants to outlaw a drug whose only crime is that it brought about unprecedented peace, love and understanding.
We don't need a National Institute on Drug Abuse. We need a National Institute on Drug USE -- an agency that recognizes the benefits of drugs and the downsides of prohibition.
There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.
It is folly to put bureaucrats in charge of second-guessing drug prescriptions: what such bureaucrats are really doing is second-guessing the various philosophies of life which are presupposed by the way we use psychoactive drugs.
The Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. It is therefore a crime against religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate.
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.
I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.
If there were no other problem with antidepressants, they would be wrong for the simple reason that they make a user dependent for life -- not as a bug (as in drugs like opium) but rather as a feature: that's how they "work," by being administered daily for a lifetime.
The Drug War is the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.
Opium and cocaine have a vast host of potential rational uses -- yet we all have to pretend otherwise in the age of the Drug War.
Who would have thought back in 1776 that Americans would eventually have to petition their government for the right to even possess a damn mushroom. The Drug War has destroyed America.
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
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.
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