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How the Drug War is a War on Creativity



by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher



April 23, 2022



ovecraft'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 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 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, used wisely, can deeply increase our ability to appreciate the natural world around us.




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 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 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 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.

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths






In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.

This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.

This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.

How do I know this?

Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.

More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?

This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."

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  • Addicted to Ignorance: problems with the 'no pain, no gain' school of de-tox therapy
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  • After the Drug War part 2
  • Another Cry in the Wilderness: open letter to US Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant: A critique of The Emperor’s New Drugs
  • Case Studies in Wise Drug Use
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal: an open letter to Austin of the Huachuma Project
  • Declaration of Independence from the War on Drugs
  • Drug Use as Self-Medication
  • Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy: an open letter to Joshua Falcon, author of Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness
  • Ego Transcendence Made Easy: or how Schopenhauer was reckoning without drugs before it was cool to do so
  • Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war: an open letter to Charley Wininger, author of 'Listening to Ecstasy'
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client: a new shamanic approach to drug use and mental healing
  • Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
  • Heroin versus Alcohol: an open letter to Professor Steven Gimbel of Gettysburg College
  • How Cocaine could have helped me
  • How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient: and what we should do about that
  • How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine
  • How the Drug War is a War on Creativity
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
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  • How the Drug War Punishes the Elderly
  • How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs: and leads to the preventable suicides of our loved ones
  • How to Unite Drug War Opponents of all Ethnicities: Open letter to Sean McAllister, drug policy reform lawyer
  • Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism: a warning to any remaining friends of freedom
  • In Praise of Doctor Feelgood: Why psychiatry must become pharmacologically informed shamanism
  • In Praise of Drug Dealers: replacing the modern barbaric treatment of so-called addicts with pharmacologically informed shamanism
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy: as opposed to just Psychedelic Therapy
  • Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion: it's just that we have outlawed them all
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart: author of 'Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear'
  • Open Letter to Erowid: about a misleading 2018 article by Karolina Zieba
  • Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser: author of 'The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous'
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling: whose documentary about Chicago violence does not even mention the Drug War!!!
  • Pihkal 2.0: Finding drugs that work for users rather than for pharmaceutical companies
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism: The post that got me banned for life from the Reddit Psychiatry group
  • Science is not free in the age of the drug war: an open letter to The American Council on Science and Health
  • Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms
  • Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the war on drugs
  • Thank God for Erowid: in response to a 2015 Vice article by Adam Rothstein
  • Thank God for Soul Quest: It's time to stop blaming others for the problems caused by drug prohibition
  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG: combatting drug war propaganda and lies, one post at a time
  • The Drug War and Armageddon: An open letter to Bryan Walsh, author of End Times
  • The Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
  • The Mother of all Western Biases: an open letter to Science News
  • The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War: How modern science helps normalize prohibition
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • The Origins of Modern Psychiatry: How to create a billion-dollar industry in three easy steps
  • The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression: on replacing psychiatry with pharmacologically savvy shamanism
  • What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs: a philosophical review of Pills-a-Go-Go
  • Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane: and how the work of Alexander Shulgin can inspire us to fix it
  • Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use: how the drug war blinds us to lifesaving medicine
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism: like almost every other would-be Drug War reformer on the planet
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs: an open letter to a reader





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    Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

    Even if the FDA approved MDMA today, it would only be available for folks specifically pronounced to have PTSD by materialist doctors, as if all other emotional issues are different problems and have to be studied separately. That's just ideological foot-dragging.
    Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."
    What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!
    The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.
    Materialist scientists are drug war collaborators. They are more than happy to have their fight against idealism rigged by drug law, which outlaws precisely those substances whose use serves to cast their materialism into question.
    Unfortunately, the prohibitionist motto is: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education." To the contrary, drug warriors are ideologically committed to withholding the truth about drugs from users.
    And where did politicians get the idea that irresponsible white American young people are the only stakeholders when it comes to the question of re-legalizing drugs??? There are hundreds of millions of other stakeholders: philosophers, pain patients, the depressed.
    "Is cocaine use good or bad?" The question does not even make sense. Cocaine use is a blessing for some, just a little fun for most, and a curse for a few. Just like any other risky activity.
    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 Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.
    More Tweets



    The latest hits from Drug War Records, featuring Freddie and the Fearmongers!


    1. Requiem for the Fourth Amendment



    2. There's No Place Like Home (until the DEA gets through with it)



    3. O Say Can You See (what the Drug War's done to you and me)






    front cover of Drug War Comic Book

    Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans



    You have been reading an article entitled, How the Drug War is a War on Creativity published on April 23, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)