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How the Drug War is a War on Creativity

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 23, 2022



Lovecraft's stories are full of opiate imagery. In Celaphais, for instance, his beleaguered and homeless protagonist wanders through 'the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams.' Hear that, Drug Warriors? Many-coloured dreams? This is why your War on Drugs is a war on creativity, because it outlaws the natural plant medicines that can bring many-coloured dreams, the influence of which can inspire great literature, at least in the minds of talented authors who are prepared to profit from such visions.


Just as opium 1 use clearly inspired Lovecraft, Lewis Carroll must have known a thing or two about the effects of psychoactive mushroom consumption when he wrote 'Alice in Wonderland.' And both HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their best stories after taking generous swigs from a bottle of 'coca wine.' And don't even get me started on Edgar Allan Poe. Suffice it to say that he showed how even the hated morphine 2 can bring wonderful, almost surreal visions to an ardent naturalist (see 'Tale of the Ragged Mountains') -- tho' America seems at least a century away from being able to admit this inconvenient truth to its drug-hating self, namely that the ideologically despised morphine 3 , used wisely, can deeply increase our ability to appreciate the natural world around us.

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The fact that the latter drugs can be dangerous is no excuse to outlaw them, least of all in a country in which 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent on Big Pharma 4 5 meds for a lifetime. Besides, the inspirational 'drugs' that we're talking about here derive from plants, which cannot be justifiably criminalized in the first place, at least if America is to maintain its legacy of natural law upon which the citizen's most basic rights are founded, like the right to what John Locke himself called 'the use of the land and all that lies therein.' (Just ask Jefferson, who was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 6 in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants, in violation of everything that he stood for as a Founding Father.)


August 1, 2022



It never seems to have occurred to westerners that potentially addictive drugs can be used non-addictively. Through a properly scheduled dose therapy, folks can find pharmacologically aided self-transcendence without becoming addicted. Of course, Americans have been browbeaten from birth to believe that this is impossible, thanks to propaganda in the form of teddy bears from DART and hypocritically defined 'drug-free zones' -- and the fact that they never, but never, hear anything about POSITIVE drug use, for the simple reason that the Office of National Drug Control Policy has dictated that no positive uses of 'drugs' can ever be considered.

In a world where substances are legal again and where knowledge, not fear, is encouraged, folks would know how to avoid addictions -- and where to go whenever they begin developing a habit that they dislike. For in such a free world, a pharmacologically savvy empath 7 would be able to steer him or her towards a substance use with which they can live. But the Drug War State does not want rational use. They want to ensure, through public policy, that drugs end up being just as dangerous as propaganda says they should be. And how do they accomplish this? By demonizing drugs rather than teaching about them.











Notes for essay entitled How the Drug War is a War on Creativity:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
2: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
3: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School 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)
6: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
7: pharmacologically-savvy empath: this is an empathic individual with an ethnobotanical knowledge of safe and beneficial drug use worldwide, someone who recognizes psychological common sense and can advise on protocols that meet user needs while avoiding unwanted dependency. (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.

The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.

Science knows nothing of the human spirit and of the hopes and dreams of humankind. Science cannot tell us whether a given drug risk is worthwhile given the human need for creativity and passion in their life. Science has no expertise in making such philosophical judgements.

The scheduling system is a huge lie designed to give an aura of "science" to America's colonialist disdain for indigenous medicines, from opium, to coca, to shrooms.

I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.

Outlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.

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.

In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed. Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.

Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.

Trump supports the drug war and Big Pharma: the two forces that have turned me into a patient for life with dependence-causing antidepressants. Big Pharma makes the pills, and the drug war outlaws all viable alternatives.


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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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