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How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War

a letter to the Atlantic editors

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

October 14, 2020



Regarding: "The Diet that Might Cure Depression," "The DASH Diet Helps Depression Symptoms," "Depression Isn't Contagious"... and everything else that the Atlantic publishes on the topic of depression.

Your articles on depression are censored, no doubt unconsciously, to avoid mentioning the 64,000-pound gorilla in the room: that is the fact that thousands of psychoactive plant medicines are dutifully ignored by depression researchers in obedience to America's anti-scientific Drug War. That's why, as a lifelong depression sufferer, I sigh any time I see a new article on the subject, especially when it comes in the form of one of the millions of dietary suggestions to which Americans are exposed with much fanfare during their lifetimes. Even if a diet did show promise, depression strikes at the very ability to keep a diet going, because it saps motivation on the front end. That's why we need the psychoactive plants of Mother Nature which, under empathic supervision, can provide motivation, follow-through, and a new sense of purpose in life.

Sigmund Freud considered cocaine to be a godsend for his own depression, and he got "off" cocaine 1 2 when he no longer needed it, without feeling the need to write some self-congratulatory book about the difficulties he encountered in so doing. There are reams of anecdotal evidence dating back millennia that speak to the power of psychedelics to bring about a new sense of purpose in life, most recently in the thousands of detailed guided "trip" accounts provided by researchers such as James Fadiman and Stanislav Grof. Promising research is underway at this very moment to mainstream psilocybin and "ecstasy" for depression treatment - though this research has had to move forward glacially thanks to America's unwillingness to fund research that violates our Drug War sensibilities.

By failing to mention this "gorilla," the Atlantic is supporting Drug War propaganda, possibly because your editors have fallen for the Drug War lie that substances fry the brain3 the moment that they are demonized by politicians. But the facts are just the opposite. Cocaine sharpened Freud's focus. Opium facilitated Benjamin Franklin's creativity. Psychedelics helped Francis Crick envision the DNA helix. And "speed" is so far from frying the brain that the Air Force has required its pilots to take the drug in advance of critical missions. If any drugs fry the brain, they are Big Pharma 4 5 anti-anxiety and antidepressant drugs, to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted (source: Julie Holland), but that's another fact that gets censored from your articles about depression, in dutiful conformance with Drug War propaganda.

The fact is that there is no such thing as free research on depression under the Drug War, and the Atlantic should be pointing this out in every article that it writes on the subject, rather than pretending that researchers are approaching the topic from some sort of reasonable baseline.











Notes for essay entitled How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War: a letter to the Atlantic editors:

1: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
2: “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)
3: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)
4: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
5: 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)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.

Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.

Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.

71% of the depressed have relapses after getting off their meds. Doctors blame this on depression, but increasing evidence suggests that these people are having withdrawal problems.

"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.

This is the mentality for today's materialist researcher when it comes to "laughing gas." He does not care that it merely cheers folks up. He wants to see what is REALLY going on with the substance, using electrodes and brain scans.

Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.

We should start taking names. All politicians and government officials who work to keep godsends like psilocybin from the public should be held to account for crimes against humanity when the drug war finally ends.

Even prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. We should not drugs "up or down" any more than we should judge penicillin or aspirin in that way.

Drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.


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






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