by privileging materialists with unearned victories
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 20, 2025
have been striving over the last few years to wrap my mind around the insights of Kant1, especially as filtered through the persnickety criticisms of the infamous pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer2. While I am not yet qualified to either gainsay or approve the specifics of their various approaches to epistemology, I believe that I can safely offer some constructive criticism about their attempts to speak ex-cathedra concerning what we can know and how we can know it as Homo sapiens. Let us take for starters the generalized premise upon which the duo seem to be in agreement: namely, that we are not fitted out as a species with the perceptual tools necessary to see Reality writ large. To the contrary, our perceptual equipment forces us to see the world in a specific way and so we are biased from the get-go when it comes to formulating ideas about such a suppositious ultimate reality. Schopenhauer lauds this as an earthshaking achievement, and in some ways it surely is so. And yet it bears mentioning that this is a fact that indigenous people have always "known" experientially, through the use of the kinds of godsend medicines that the west abhors: the fact that words and concepts created by "sober" human beings are not up to the task of describing ultimate realities, no, not even in theory.
Indigenous people have been strides ahead of us in this area. Indigenous people have always known , moreover, that there is no single way to experience the world. Each psychoactive "drug" (or drug combination) provides users with a different experience of the world, some of which come with their own feeling of fundamental and seemingly undeniable veracity, as if the drug users were trespassing during their "inebriation" on the tantalizing outskirts of a great universal truth and/or power and/or cause. (I say nothing here of the contextual changes -- the various sets and settings -- that can be consciously manipulated by an indigenous society to render the use of the self-same drug productive of a wide range of specific outcomes in its users. During my ayahuasca session last year, the Spanish-language vocals of curandero Taita Jhon put me in mind of the Andes jungle, but I assume that the use of another musical style might have centered the experience in a maritime or desert environment, etc.3)
Now, of course we could argue about the precise meaning of such substance-inspired experiences. In fact, that is what William James counseled us to do: to use substances like laughing gas and then to discuss what their use might tell us about the nature of reality and human consciousness. But the point here is that the Drug War forbids such investigations.
Do you see the problem here? The intoxiphobia of the west first causes our philosophers to privilege a supposed "sober perception" as the only type of perception available to human beings - and then the Drug War forbids us from even investigating alternative ways of perceiving the world. In other words, there is a bias at work here that neither Kant nor Schopenhauer noticed: the bias against perception as mediated through the use of psychoactive medicine. Their approach seems to be rather to assume in advance of all investigation that non-sober states are productive of nonsense feedback, as it were, via definition. And yet this is not a logical proof at all, but rather a sentiment based on the intoxiphobic predilections of the west. Certainly indigenous communities have never started from the assumption that drug-inspired visions were necessarily false and nonsensical. They rather believed that a variety of advisedly leveraged drug use could bring about a wide range of beneficial visions in a user - everything from insights about cosmic truth to the location of a lost set of car keys.
Even my own drug experiences have conformed with that understanding. During my "trip" on peyote some years ago, I "saw" (in my mind's eye, Horatio) a bright neon-green slideshow of Mesoamerican imagery, containing potentates and snakes and symbolic icons stylized in the manner of a Mayan codex. This was clearly not a nonsensical outcome of drug use. It was a series of highly significant visions, fraught with potential meaning about the nature of consciousness and the cultural archetypes of Joseph Campbell. Of course, a materialist might still try to dismiss the visions as meaningless, but that is the point: they would have to try to do so, there would have to be a discussion. Whereas, right now the materialist view of such visions is privileged by American drug law, which refuses to allow us to even have the sort of visions that violate behaviorist orthodoxy.
We see then that the Drug War outlaws research into the nature of perception and reality. And yet when I try to point these things out in various philosophy forums, I am told to go elsewhere. Why? Because philosophers are like everybody else in America: they think that the battle for re-legalizing drugs is a niche concern, of interest only to hedonists and Libertarians. They fail to see that the Drug War outlaws philosophical research. Or perhaps they just do not care. Most philosophers are materialists, after all, and so they are happy to live in a world wherein drug law privileges their naïve realism by effectively outlawing other ways of seeing the world.
We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
AI is inherently plagiaristic technology. It tells us: "Hey, guys, look what I can do!" -- when it should really be saying, "Hey, guys, look how I stole all your data and repackaged it in such a way as to make it appear that I am the genius, not you!"
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.
"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary
Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.
My local community store here in the sticks sells Trump "dollar bills" at the checkout counter. I don't know what's worse: a president encouraging insurrection or an electorate that does not see that as a problem.
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.
Here is a typical user report about a drug that the DEA tells us has no positive uses whatsoever:
"There is a profoundness of meaning inherent in anything that moves." (reported in "Pikhal" by Alexander Shulgin)
Our tolerance for freedom wanes in proportion as we consider "drugs" to be demonic. This is the dark side behind the new ostensibly comic genre about Cocaine Bears and such. It shows that Americans are superstitious about drugs in a way that Neanderthals would have understood.
"Can I use poppies, coca, laughing gas, MDMA?" "NO," says the materialist, "We must be SCIENTIFIC! We must fry your brain and give you a lobotomy and make you a patient for life with the psychiatric pill mill! That's true SCIENCE!"
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 Outlaws Philosophy: by privileging materialists with unearned victories, published on April 20, 2025 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)
have been striving over the last few years to wrap my mind around the insights of Kant1, especially as filtered through the persnickety criticisms of the infamous pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer2. While I am not yet qualified to either gainsay or approve the specifics of their various approaches to epistemology, I believe that I can safely offer some constructive criticism about their attempts to speak ex-cathedra concerning what we can know and how we can know it as Homo sapiens. Let us take for starters the generalized premise upon which the duo seem to be in agreement: namely, that we are not fitted out as a species with the perceptual tools necessary to see Reality writ large. To the contrary, our perceptual equipment forces us to see the world in a specific way and so we are biased from the get-go when it comes to formulating ideas about such a suppositious ultimate reality. Schopenhauer lauds this as an earthshaking achievement, and in some ways it surely is so. And yet it bears mentioning that this is a fact that indigenous people have always "known" experientially, through the use of the kinds of godsend medicines that the west abhors: the fact that words and concepts created by "sober" human beings are not up to the task of describing ultimate realities, no, not even in theory. 
You have been reading an article entitled, How the Drug War Outlaws Philosophy: by privileging materialists with unearned victories, published on April 20, 2025 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)
