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In Praise of Drug Dealers

replacing the modern barbaric treatment of so-called addicts with pharmacologically informed shamanism

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 15, 2020



Imagine a drug dealer: not just any drug dealer, but a drug dealer with a big heart, a thorough knowledge of all psychoactive plants and fungi, and free and unhindered access to every such substance in the world.

How do you think he (or she) would deal with my desire to get off of alcohol, or heroin 1 2 - or worse yet, one of the modern brand-name anti-depressants, which, as Julie Holland points out, are often more difficult to quit than heroin.

Do you think this drug dealer would send me to a high-rent flophouse and plop me on a couch for three days of cold-turkey hell (in the case of heroin) or of three months of cold-turkey hell (in the case of antidepressants 3)?

Of course not. He or she would shun this barbaric pseudoscientific protocol and fight fire with fire. How? By prescribing drugs that shout 'YOU ARE OK!' just as loudly (or louder) than my withdrawal symptoms will be shouting 'YOU ARE DYING.' I'm talking about substances which, in the proper setting which our hypothetical dealer will naturally provide, will give me a new appreciation of the world of nature that surrounds me, will give me new insights into my place in the cosmos, and will help me adopt mindsets hitherto unimaginable for me by dint of which I can buck up against the down sides of withdrawal and march on in spite of them.

This dealer might even do the scientifically unthinkable and creatively use his vast natural pharmacopeia to give me an occasional 'high' for no reason at all - or rather for the exact same reason that most people drink alcohol these days: namely, to get a break from full-on 'reality' and thus a health-inducing vacation from stress in general.

One thing you can be sure of: My 'drug withdrawal' would not necessitate the continual retching and puking that our modern puritanical therapists consider to be the addict's due. Nor would it require my self-abasement in front of a crowd of fellow 'addicts,' where I'm encouraged to speculate-at-will on the hidden forces and motivations behind my fall from grace.

{^The best thing that a modern therapist can tell an addict is that there's light at the end of a tunnel, but our drug dealer knows better: he (or she) knows how to light up the tunnel itself and make one's journey through it both bearable and therapeutic.}{

It's not surprising then that the government has such antipathy toward drug dealers, to the point where Donald Trump even wants to execute them. The drug dealers are the ones who threaten to break modern science's puritanical stranglehold on mental health therapy by revealing that the emperor is wearing no clothes, that the bare-bones ministrations that pass as addiction therapy these days are at once barbaric and ineffective compared to what a pharmacologically savvy empath 4 could provide. That's why the Drug Warrior feels compelled to keep psychoactive substances illegal, not for the benefit of addicts, but rather to ensure that the government and Big Pharma maintain their highly lucrative monopoly when it comes to 'treating' them.

Author's Follow-up: August 3, 2022




I knew a 'drug dealer' once (almost 40 years ago now) -- and he was a nice guy. At the time, I was already an addict, but I had been addicted, not by a 'dealer,' but by psychiatry. I was a Valium addict, you see. All perfectly legal, I assure you. I was new to the drug at the time and I figured that, the more Valium, the merrier. And do you know what this dirty evil 'drug dealer' told me? He said that he didn't deal in such drugs and would not recommend them. You see, the drugs HE dealt with could be used non-addictively and they could help you 'live large.' Whereas, Valium, as he well knew, brings neither self-transcendence nor self-insight and it is addictive into the bargain.

What irony! The common sense view of 'drugs' was provided for me, not by psychiatry, but by a dirty evil rotten drug dealer!

That's just how ass-backwards America is when it comes to drugs. For the Drug Warriors do not want to keep you off drugs, they want to keep you ON the right drugs, namely those which benefit the healthcare industry. They're interested in their own bottom line, not in the self-actualization of their 'patients.' Moreover, when I met with that 'drug dealer,' I was not a patient, I was an actual human being, meeting with him on an equal footing -- unlike my meetings with my 'shrink,' who sat behind a huge desk covered with vaguely Indian-looking paraphernalia and towered over me as I sat in a chair seemingly designed for grade-schoolers.

Author's Follow-up: August 12, 2022





I sent drug-reform pioneers DJ Nutt and Rick Doblin a copy of my first book a couple of years ago -- in which I describe how Big Pharma had turned me into an eternal patient -- and I never heard back. I wondered why at first, until I realized that both of these otherwise smart individuals (much smarter than myself, I am sure, in everything except philosophy) believe in the lie that psychiatry has found a cure for depression with SSRIs, a fact that I have learned the hard way is absolutely false, through 40-years of addiction to 'meds' that turned out to be harder to kick than heroin. This is another of the seemingly endless reasons why the Drug War is so hard to abolish, by the way, because even those who combat it have been sold on the idea that Big Pharma is doing a good job in treating depression.

But I have a lifetime of experience which screams 'WRONG!' And if a lifetime of experience counts for nothing (and I'm afraid it does, since, for instance, online psychiatric groups are for psychiatrists only, not for trouble-making 'patients' whom they 'treat'), then there are the books on this subject by Julie Holland, Irving Kirsch and Richard Whitaker, which tell how antidepressants actually cause the chemical imbalances that they purport to fix. (This incidentally is why they're so hard to 'kick,' because once one's neuro-chemical baseline is altered, it does not seem to snap back easily to its pre-anti-depressant status quo. This is presumably why the NIMH found that 95% of long-term Effexor5 users were back on the drug within three years after giving it up.)

It always irritates me when folks like Doblin, in particular, talk about how psychedelic drugs can help people who are 'treatment resistant,' since the use of this phrasal adjective implies that Big Pharma antidepressants are working just fine, thank you very much, except that some people are resistant to them, in the same way that some lactose-intolerant people cannot handle milk. If I personally created a drink that sickened 30% of Americans, I would be arrested. When the dairy industry does this, the problem is blamed on the drinkers, and their quirky digestive systems -- in the same way that the failure of antidepressants is blamed on the finicky pill popper, not on Big Pharma drugs.

Why am I irritated? Because folks like Doblin ignore the fact that antidepressant use has turned America into the most chemically dependent country of all time, and that Big Pharma (in collaboration with psychiatry) has been empowered to do this by the Drug War (because it gives Big Pharma a monopoly on providing mood medicines). In other words, perhaps the greatest downside of the Drug War is something that they are dogmatically obliged to ignore, under the naive assumption that antidepressants actually 'cure' depression. Never mind the arguments made by Holland and company against this false thesis, this notion does not pass muster philosophically. For if you tell me that you have a cure for my depression, I must ask you, 'How do you define cure?' If the idea is to keep me from killing myself, then perhaps you have a pill that will keep me satisfied with an unfulfilled existence... but this is YOUR idea of a cure for depression, not mine. My ideal cure is one that will make me live as fully as possible, like the live-wires of whom Jack Kerouac wrote: 'The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.'

The Effexor I take daily reminds me more of a lobotomy on the installment plan than a roman candle. At any rate, the last kind of cure that I would want for my depression -- had anyone bothered to ask me -- is one that turns me into an eternal patient and a ward of the healthcare state, which is a downside of the modern pill mill that no one but myself seems to have even noticed so far in America, thanks to the fact that Big Pharma money and propaganda has convinced folks who should know better to toe the party line by using Wall Street-friendly phrasal adjectives like 'treatment-resistant.'

So when it comes to arguing against the Drug War, Doblin and Nutt are hamstrung by their own credulity about Big Pharma meds. Being so, they are powerless to attack the Drug War in its most vulnerable point: namely, the fact that it has been responsible for the establishment of the greatest mass chemical dependency of all time -- a dystopia that has turned the plot of The Stepford Wives into an American reality, proving that the Drug War is not about getting Americans off drugs, but rather it's about getting America on the right drugs, namely those whose use benefits psychiatry and Big Pharma 6 7 .

Author's Follow-up: February 4, 2023

Drug dealers would also provide adequate pain relief according to how the patient feels -- rather than holding back based on the anti-scientific lie of the drug-warrior that tells us that drugs are bad without regard for how or why they are used.

Author's Follow-up: March 7, 2023


The Drug Dealer would give the necessary pain medicine -- while the legal doctor would give less than necessary, for the selfish reason that the doctor does not want his prescriptions to be 'flagged' by the DEA. For the DEA is in charge of deciding how much pain relief we are allowed to have in this life.











Notes for essay entitled In Praise of Drug Dealers: replacing the modern barbaric treatment of so-called addicts with pharmacologically informed shamanism:

1: Heroin versus Antidepressants DWP (up)
2: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
3: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
4: 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)
5: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
6: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
7: 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)




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The Drug War is the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.

Typical materialist protocol. Take all the "wonder" out of the drug and sell it as a one-size-fits all "reductionist" cure for anxiety. Notice that they refer to hallucinations and euphoria as "adverse effects." What next? Communion wine with the religion taken out of it?

We give kids drugs to improve their concentration -- but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.

The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.

What attracts me about "drug dealers" is that they are NOT interested in prying into my private life. What a relief! With psychiatry, you are probed for pathological behavior on every office visit. You are a child. To the "drug dealer," I am an adult at least.

Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!

This is why I call the drug war 'fanatical Christian Science.' People would rather have grandpa die than to let him use laughing gas or coca or opium or MDMA, etc. etc.

The DEA stomped onto Thomas Jefferson's estate in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And the TJ Foundation helped them! They sold out Jefferson.

The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.

Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!


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