How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England

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How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England

an open letter to British Philosophers

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 3, 2023

I sent the following letter today to Professor Tom Stoneham at York University -- as well as ALL the members of the Oxford University Department of Philosophy (one by one, mind, not by bulk mail), with the exception of Senior Fellow Ian Rumfitt. (It seems Senior Fellows are not required to post their email addresses on the Oxford website. Well, that's frustrating. But then I suppose he's earned it... [sigh] Still, one would hope he'd be open to new ideas. But then who am I to dictate terms? It's just that... No, no, I am silent. I'm sure the honorable gentleman knows what he's about. It's just that... But mum's the word.)

Update: May 04, 2025

Dear Professor Stoneham:

I am writing to you on a matter of great concern to the field of philosophy, namely, the fact that England is preparing to outlaw the use of laughing gas . As you know, this is the substance whose use inspired the philosophy of William James. In regard to such experiences, James wrote: "No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."

And yet disregard them we must thanks to Drug War prohibition.

I believe that all philosophers, tenured or otherwise, should speak up against this outlawing of intellectual progress. As distasteful as it is, we must speak up against the Drug War. We must encourage government to start educating its citizens about safe use rather than continuing to pursue a policy of prohibition which outlaws human progress and criminalizes the very investigations that James would ask us to pursue. This change of course is all the more urgent when we consider the body count of the current policy, which even as we speak is killing thousands a day thanks to the corrupted and uncertain drug supply that prohibition guarantees.

Moreover, those who advocate the prohibition of substances like laughing gas never take into account all the stakeholders in such a decision. They are blind to the hundreds of millions of the depressed, for instance, who must go without a godsend substance thanks to our statistically lopsided focus on abuse and misuse. Besides, the hundreds of millions (in the US, billions) that we spend on arresting people could easily be spent on educating those people about safe use.

For these and endless other reasons, I believe, in fact, that the Drug War is the philosophical problem par excellence of our time and that philosophy as a field can no longer ignore it without becoming complicit in the way that it censors philosophy and the human sciences in general.

If these ideas strike the least chord with you, I urge you to speak up on behalf of intellectual freedom and ask your government to begin educating potential substance users rather than arresting them. We should be able to follow up on the philosophical leads of philosophers like William James without our governments ordering us to cease and desist.

editor note from abolishthedea.com

June 3, 2023 Brian was bothered by the inability to reach Senior Fellow Professor Rumfitt, at least in part, by the fact that most of the other members of the Oxford Philosophy Department looked like they were about ten years old. Not that this should disqualify them, of course. I fancy I was a bit of a clever clogs at that age myself. I'm just sayin'... Or rather Brian is just sayin'...

Nitrous Oxide: Possession of laughing gas to be criminal offence"

Author's Follow-up: June 26, 2023

follow-up on essay by the Drug War Philosopher

Typical. I have received not one single response from Oxford. It never ceases to amaze me how many academics worldwide have just said no to freedom of research.

Author's Follow-up: December 1, 2023

Westerners have no right to complain about high suicide rates. They have made it clear with their harebrained laws that they would rather folks commit suicide ¹ than to use most psychoactive substances. It's Mary Baker Eddy on steroids. It's Christian Science Sharia. As for Oxford, probably shouldn't single them out, since William James' alma mater, Harvard, is also silent about the ongoing attempt to classify laughing gas ² as a dirty evil rotten drug.

Author's Follow-up:

May 04, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

It has been almost two years since I importuned Tom Stoneham on the subject of nitrous oxide. He has not yet seen his way clear to respond to me, but hope springs eternal, at least on this side of the Atlantic.

His silence is remarkable, however, considering that he himself is a specialist on the philosophy of George Berkeley. Tom does not seem to realize that drug prohibition outlaws precisely those drugs whose strategic use could help us understand the issues with which Berkeley dealt: the investigation of the ontological nature of the concepts of mind and matter. These things can be directly investigated by philosophers with the informed use of psychoactive substances. Indeed, this is the kind of research that William James urged us to undertake (see "Varieties of Religious Experience ³ ⁴" and "The Will to Believe.⁵" He discusses the subject in connection with the so-called "anesthetic revelation ⁶ ⁷ " by philosopher B.P. Blood ⁸. But I fear folks like Tom assume that drug law is all about outlawing hedonism -- and therefore fail to see the obvious ways in which drug prohibition has outlawed philosophical investigation itself, to say nothing of human progress. I say this because it certainly could not be that British philosophers are AFRAID to speak up about drugs and on behalf of academic freedom?

Or could it?

In case Tom wishes to learn more about how the Drug War outlaws his freedom to philosophize, I invite him to read my recent essay on the topic entitled (naturally enough) How the Drug War Outlaws Philosophy.

Open Letters

Notes:

1: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
2: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
3: “The Varieties of Religious Experience : William James : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2021. Internet Archive. 2021. https://archive.org/details/the-varieties-of-religious-experience_202109. (up)
4: A Philosophical Review of "The Varieties of Religious Experience"-- How William James failed to connect the dots DWP (up)
5: Will to Believe James, William (up)
6: The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy DWP (up)
7: anesthetic revelation (up)
8: The anaesthetic revelation and the gist of philosophy Blood, Benjamin (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

America arrests people whose only crime is that they are trying to be all that they can be in life... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.

Drug warriors have harnessed the perfect storm. Prohibition caters to the interests of law enforcement, psychotherapy, Big Pharma, demagogues, puritans, and materialist scientists, who believe that consciousness is no big "whoop" and that spiritual states are just flukes.

Now the folks who helped Matthew get Ketamine must be sacrificed on the altar of the Drug War, lest people start thinking that the Drug War itself was at fault.y

Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.

All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.

Drug warriors have taught us that honesty about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.

Everyone's biggest concern is the economy? Is nobody concerned that Trump has promised to pardon insurrectionists and get revenge on critics? Is no one concerned that Trump taught Americans to doubt democracy by questioning our election fairness before one single vote was cast?

Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."

Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.

Had the FDA been around in the Indus Valley 3,500 years ago, there would be no Hindu religion today, because they would have found some potential problem with the use of soma.

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

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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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