How the Drug War Mindset Threatens to Weaponize Genomic Healthcare
some thoughts on the paper by Richard H Parrish II entitled 'Genomic Medicine and Individual Autonomy: Reflections on Knowledge Societies and Governmentality'
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 12, 2026
The following are some thoughts inspired by the paper of Richard Henry Parrish II entitled "Genomic Medicine and Individual Autonomy: Reflections on Knowledge Societies and Governmentality" 1. I am writing these thoughts from the point of view of someone who has been studying American drug attitudes for the last seven years. It is my belief that this study has helped me to see some important connections between those drug-related attitudes (as reflected in drug law and the unconscious biases of mainstream Americans) and the potential dangers that Richard highlights in his paper with regard to the improper use of genomic data. I will argue that these dangers, while worrisome in and of themselves, take on a still more sinister aspect when considered in light of drug-related biases, and especially in light of the philosophical viewpoint that those drug-related biases presuppose. I will be focusing on how the policy of drug prohibition has served to bias so-called behavioral health science in favor of biochemical determinism, thereby stoking valid fears about the potential "overinterpretation" of genomic results.
There will, of course, be instances in which a given medical case would seem to involve no component of behavioral health whatsoever, but I will not be addressing such instances, first, because they are the kinds of cases that are least likely to be negatively affected by the unspoken metaphysical assumptions of which I will be complaining in this essay, and secondly because my expertise, experientially speaking, is with the so-called field of mental health rather than with the field of physical medicine per se. With those two disclaimers out of the way, I need to add a caveat as well. We have yet to learn the extent to which mental power can be leveraged to promote healing and and to avoid illness in the first place. We, as westerners, have yet to set out methodically to study such things (although the experiments of Alexander Shulgin with phenethylamines and tryptamines in the early 1990s give some hint as to how such studies could proceed2). Meanwhile, however, the materialist paradigm downplays the powers of mind; this is no doubt why materialists can sleep at night after conniving with Drug War policy that keeps mind and mood medicine out of the hands of laypeople.
WHO DO YOU TRUST?
What first caught my eye in Richard's paper was the survey of hospitalized patients in Poland on the subject of data security and confidentiality. While I was happy to see that the respondents had a healthy distrust of corporations to use their data on an ethical basis, there was also a worrisome trust in science as an institution that I fear was naive. Any chemist who has worked for a pharmaceutical company must know that scientific interests can be made to dovetail with business interests when large sums of money are involved, especially in a world in which Biopharma pays 75% of the FDA's drug division budget.3
And yet there is an even greater problem with trusting science when it comes to treatments of mental and emotional "conditions." Science is not an objective arbiter of truth when it comes to so-called mental health care. Today's scientists come at questions of mind and mood from a position of faith: a faith in what philosophers might call the ontological veracity of reductive materialism4. That is the mindset that allows scientists to keep a straight face while telling us that substances like laughing gas have no proven uses for the depressed. A suicidal person may be seen to be laughing while using the substance, but that is not a "real" cure for sadness in the mind of the reductive materialist. (See the Forbes magazine article from 2021 in which a materialist scientist expresses doubts as to whether laughing gas could help the depressed.5) A "real" cure would be one that can be shown to cause molecules to move about in a way that jibes with the latest biochemical expectations regarding the origins of human emotional states. This is why doctors did not protest against the attempts of both Britain and America to treat N20 as just another drug. (I was the only philosopher to formally protest the FDA's attempt to outlaw laughing gas. I did so 1) on behalf of academic freedom; 2) on behalf of the legacy of William James; and 3) on behalf of the rights of the depressed.)
IT'S A FREE COUNTRY, ISN'T IT?
(Well, now that you ASK...)
Today's social critics are under tacit pressure to view the subject of drugs through this reductionist lens as well. This is because any common-sense analysis of drugs in the age of substance demonization would lead to unacceptable conclusions from the point of view of the powers-that-be. Take the subject of opium, for instance6. It is almost illegal these days to refer to any common-sense uses for opium, notwithstanding the fact that the drug had been considered a panacea since the time of Galen and only became completely taboo in the eyes of westerners in the early 20th century7. (Problematic opiate use on a widespread scale only came about after anti-Chinese sentiment had outlawed the peaceable smoking of opium at home.) Instead of protesting the outlawing of plant medicine as the government censorship of science, scientists responded with sour grapes. They became reductive materialists for the nonce so that they could add a veneer of science to their cowardice and say: "Oh, those drugs that you are outlawing have not been shown to have any positive uses anyway, so good riddance as far as we're concerned." And I mention opium as just one example. Thanks to the unprecedentedly thorough drug prohibition of America, nature's entire psychoactive pharmacy (one the west had scarcely begun to discover with the ethnobotanical research of Richard Schultes8 less than a century ago) is now essentially off-limits to scientists and doctors, to say nothing of laypeople.
I am arguing, therefore, that the various important issues that Richard raises in his paper must be considered in the context of drug prohibition, in the context of America's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive substances. For what is drug prohibition, after all, but the outlawing of holistic healing, meaning healing that is facilitated largely by willpower, belief, and the power of human consciousness (and some would even say of "transpersonal" consciousness), howsoever those mental assets might be acquired or strengthened. The modern faith in reductive materialism simply assumes that the arguments of William James with respect to accessing new forms of potentially healing consciousness are either false or unimportant9. Informed debate on this issue is impossible in an age where one can be arrested simply for attempting to attain the holistic state of mind of which I am writing.
I should say, in this connection, that I am not talking here about the politically correct "holism" that recommends yoga and the drinking of spinach smoothies for aging boomers. I mean the mindset that believes, with the chaos theorist, that there are no irrelevant inputs to a complicated system like the human mind, that the abilities and limits of our mental powers are yet completely unknown, at least in the west. We have yet to even attempt to to tap the power of mental states for beneficial purposes. There is no telling where a conscious effort to do so will lead us, at least in a world in which Mother Nature's bounty was actually legal. An unbiased reading of drug-related literature reveals that users have routinely accessed mental states whose very existence calls into question the universal applicability of Kant's Categories of the Understanding10, to say nothing of the doctrinaire fatalism of the biochemical determinists when it comes to emotional states. My own experience "on" peyote in Arizona in 2017 suggested the existence of a crucially interconnected world of the kind that Wordsworth wrote about, when I beheld a neon-green slideshow of imagery that appeared to have been copied from a Mesoamerican codex.
NO ESCAPING DESTINY?
Richard broaches this topic when he criticizes the idea of genetic immutability, the idea that genetics is destiny. Such a deterministic outlook does indeed have potential Orwellian ramifications when it comes to genomic medicine. It could be used to "write people off" as bad insurance risks, to deny them jobs in various sectors, to limit where they are allowed to travel. Indeed, the list of potential dangers is limited only by the analyst's ability to worry advisedly. And yet the deterministic viewpoint is only as good as the philosophy upon which it is based, and that philosophy does not survive the laugh test, at least when it comes to the subject of behavioral medicine. The idea of genetic determinism is getting a free ride for the time being thanks to drug prohibition which makes reductive materialism the only game in town. Absent this government-enforced monopoly on the truth, however, the pretensions of the determinist scientists could be easily unmasked. We would only have to ask these molecule-obsessed determinists what they would make of the following hypothetical example of "healing":
A man was depressed for a few decades. Then he took up smoking opium as follows. He smoked a few pipes twice a week, once prior to watching an opera and once prior to "chatting the night away" on the back porch with a close friend on a variety of philosophical topics11. The man of which I write uses no other substances. (Well, okay, in the interests of full disclosure, he is also addicted to drinking a cup of coffee every single morning, like every other American.) Now, despite his tendency to depression, this man no longer considers himself to be depressed. Why not? Has his drug use changed serotonin and dopamine levels for the better? Have his thyroid hormones positively influenced the synthesis and regulation of his neurotransmitters? Are the biological pathways of HPA and the gut-brain axes suddenly being optimized for some unknown reason?
Well, maybe. But the real point is that this guy is always looking forward to enjoyable experiences -- experiences from which he benefits and grows as a person. In other words, his drug use has created a virtuous circle! Sorry to disappoint the guys who spent $100,000 for a medical degree, but the guy in the above example is happy for reasons that a four-year-old child could understand! Unfortunately, this is the point where I have to say, like Groucho Marx in Duck Soup: "Run out and get me a four-year-old child," since the smartest kids in the room do not understand such simple health-producing algorithms.
THE SUICIDE CURE FOR DEPRESSION
This lack of common sense on the part of the modern medical field was starkly illustrated by a piece in the New York Times in December 2025 regarding the attempts of depressed Canadian Claire Brosseau to qualify for state-assisted suicide12. To my consternation (I might almost say horror), I found that none of the concerned parties in the case saw any connection between Claire's campaign and drug prohibition, even though drug prohibition had outlawed a theoretically unlimited number of psychoactive medicines (natural and nature-based) whose strategic use could inspire Claire to live -- or at very least to "buck up" and struggle through life grudgingly like the rest of us, like the vast majority of other westerners who are popularly supposed to be living lives of quiet despair.
I thought to myself, "Finally! This is the real-world 'absurdum' that logically proves the evil of drug prohibition, that it has so biased the minds of our healthcare professionals that they would rather Claire die than to openly acknowledge the fact that drug prohibition had outlawed any potentially useful medicines!" And yet my attempts to reach out to medical ethicists on this subject and expose this absurdity influenced no one, not even Robert Whitaker at Mad in America13. To this moment, I seem to be the only one who believes that the ethical discussion of the propriety of assisted suicide for the depressed must entail a discussion of the drug prohibition that renders that suicide necessary in the first place, at least in the minds of the depressed. How? By outlawing drugs that so clearly can inspire and elate.
This reminds me of a corollary concern: that medical ethicists talk about our rights as patients, but they never talk about our right not to be patients in the first place.
OUR RIGHT TO A BILL OF RIGHTS
A quick word about the subject of "constitutional-level responses" to the issue of genomic privacy. I agree that this would be the ideal approach to creating safeguards. But this will not be enough now that politicians and judges have decided that the Bill of Rights does not even apply to cases that the people can be taught to feel particularly angry about. The Bill of Rights no longer applies to drug-related cases, as is made clear from the litany of outrageous legal abuses documented in books like "Drug Warriors and Their Prey" by Richard Miller14 and "War On Us" by Colleen Cowles15. So before we create another constitutional amendment that racist politicians and right-wing judges can ignore at will, we need to reaffirm our belief in the Bill of Rights and demand that it not be ignored. If Americans feel an amendment does not apply, it should be repealed, not ignored -- though heaven forbid that I should put ideas in the heads of Drug Warriors with too much time on their hands. Perhaps the next constitutional amendment should explicitly state what was meant to be obvious in the first place: that constitutional amendments cannot be ignored on the grounds of expediency. It's as if we had a law against lynching, but claimed that it did not apply if anger against a suspected criminal reached a certain level of omnipresent vehemence.
CERTIFIED MEDICATORS
Finally, a few thoughts on Richard's warning about genomic regulatory frameworks that could divide people into 'incompetent self-medicators' and 'certified self-medicators.' This is certainly not a future compatible with freedom and common sense. And yet modern drug policy is already so anti-patient, that this particular dystopia would actually be an improvement over the current status quo, at least for demographics like my own, insofar as it involves the recognition that at least some human beings can eventually learn to use at least some drugs safely. It must be explicitly stated at this point that I am writing from the point of view of a 67-year-old chronic depressive who, like all of the med-dependent depressed in America, has been (and will be) considered incompetent to self-medicate for his entire life.
I could live to over 100, and I would still have to see a doctor one-third my age every three months of my life in order to qualify for the right to purchase another expensive and underperforming "med" that is harder to kick than heroin. I base that latter claim on personal experience, the studies of Lee Robins16, online statistics about recidivism, and the comments of a former psychiatrist of mine, one whom I fear was fired for his candor on the subject. (He disappeared from the clinic without explanation after sharing a government study with me that stressed the difficulty faced by long-term users in attempting to get off the "med" that I had been on for over 30 years at that point.)
WEAPONIZING GENOMICS
The point here is that the bifurcated classification of patients in terms of their perceived relative abilities to self-medicate is made possible in the first place by drug prohibition. In a free world, a layperson would never travel downtown in order to ask the government if he or she were capable of using a drug wisely. It is only drug prohibition that puts the government in that presumptuous position for us. The role of drug prohibition is therefore important to state publicly, lest by remaining silent we give that demonstrably deadly policy a huge Mulligan for bringing about absurd consequences that are incompatible with human freedom and dignity. Indeed, I would argue that this is true of all the potential downsides of genomic health: they would not represent such clear-and-present dangers to human freedom and dignity except for the existence of America's totally unprecedented drug prohibition. It is drug prohibition that will eventually be responsible for weaponizing genomics by giving tyrannical power to medical bureaucrats, unless modern pundits finally decide to hold that policy accountable for its endless downsides.
To put this another way: the real answer to our genomics fears would be the re-legalization of Mother Nature, aka the re-legalization of drugs. Of course, the hardcore reductive materialists will still be around after we take such a long-overdue step. Even in a free world, the "medicalizers" could still send out siren calls from slick TV advertisements to encourage suffering human beings to voluntarily take on the role of "patient" in order to be "healed" according to "science." And yet folks in my position, no longer shamed for "treating the symptoms" by doctors who wish to turn us into patients for life, would warily reply to all such appeals as follows: "No, that's all right, thanks, I'm good!"
If we're not even "in" the system, there will be less chance of being abused by it.
There are neither "drugs" nor "meds" as those terms are used today. All substances have potential good uses and bad uses. The terms as used today carry value judgements, as in meds good, drugs bad.
Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.
Doc to Franklin: "I'm sorry, Ben, but I see no benefits of opium use under my microscope. The idea that you are living a fulfilled life is clearly a mistake on your part. If you want to be scientific, stop using opium and be scientifically depressed like the rest of us."
Scientists are making entire livings from trying to figure out what's best for ME as a chronic depressive. They owe their jobs to drug prohibition.
This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.
Jim Hogshire described sleep cures that make physical withdrawal from opium close to pain-free. As for "psychological addiction," there are hundreds of elating drugs that could be used to keep the ex-user's mind from morbidly focusing on a drug whose use has become problematic for them.
The Hindu religion was inspired by drug use.
Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.
Peyote advocates should be drug legalization advocates. Otherwise, they're involved in special pleading which is bound to result in absurd laws, such as "Plant A can be used in a religion but not plant B," or "Person A can belong to such a religion but person B cannot."
It's funny to hear fans of sacred plants indignantly insisting that their meds are not "drugs." They're right in a way, but actually NO substances are "drugs." Calling substances "drugs" is like referring to striking workers as "scabs." It's biased terminology.
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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