Listening to Laughing Gas

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Listening to Laughing Gas

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 9, 2022

In response to "The Metaphysics of Laughing Gas: William James, Nitrous Oxide and Fatalism by Jonathan Bricklin" published September 7, 2022 on the IAI website"

Like almost every other scientist and philosopher today, Jonathan reckons without the Drug War. He discusses the effects of laughing gas but fails to even note by way of disclaimer that modern science is actually forbidden from investigating the potential insights that William James experienced under the influence of that gas. Sure, we can speculate on them at will from our "drug-free" universities, but even to repeat his modest experiment would risk bringing law enforcement down on our heads. As for undertaking his experiments using alternative mind enhancers, like psilocybin or MDMA ¹ , the DEA will put every roadblock that they can find in the way as they struggle to maintain their pernicious relevance in 21st-century America.

For the fact is that we live in a world in which scientists are censored every bit as much as Galileo when it comes to what lines of research they can follow, and authors should be pointing that out via disclaimer in every single paper that they write about a subject dealing with expanded or improved consciousness and the use of psychoactive substances. After all, the anti-scientific Drug War will never end if we never admit that it actually exists, that science today is not being performed from a natural baseline but that we are forbidden from even accessing substances whose use might cause us to challenge the assumptions upon which reductive materialism ² is based.

Of course, as a lifelong depressive, I applaud Jonathan for concluding that "we need not rush to criminalize" laughing gas , but for all intents and purposes, laughing gas is already criminalized, at least here in the States. I cannot legally obtain laughing gas to help with my depression and the only places it is available therapeutically are in very expensive clinics wherein the N20 sessions take place in a room filled with chart-holding clinical assistants. That emotionally sterile environment would be so off-putting to folks like myself that it would surely negate any benefit that the drug might supply.

Meanwhile, materialist doctors are still trying to wrap their heads around the once obvious fact that laughing can help the depressed. Take it from me, it would have to help, and not just the laughing itself but the mere looking forward to that laughter. It's called the power of anticipation, and it is (or at least it used to be) psychological common sense. And yet the eminent Dr. Robert Glatter asks (apparently with a straight face) in the June 9, 2021 edition of Forbes magazine: Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment-resistant Depression?

Are you kidding me? Of course it would help, by definition. Reader's Digest has known this for decades, hence their time-honored motto: "Laughter is the best medicine."

But Glatter is a materialist. He doesn't care how much I laugh when using laughing gas , he wants to know if it "REALLY" works: i.e., does it work in a reductive way that may be demonstrated quantitatively? This reminds one of Descartes, who wasn't convinced that animals felt pain, no matter how much they cried when they were being tortured. Descartes wanted to know if they "REALLY" experienced pain: i.e., do they experience it in a reductive way that may be demonstrated quantitatively? (His answer, alas, was no.)

It's ironic to think that it is materialists like Glatter, with their glacially proceeding search for "REAL" cures, who are keeping me from accessing substances whose use might help illuminate a non-materialist way of seeing the world. That sounds like ontological self-dealing to me.

But this illustrates a so-far unrecognized fact that materialism is a major beneficiary of the Drug War, because Drug Warriors demonize precisely those substances whose use might conduce to a non-materialistic way of seeing the world.

I'll close with just one example to demonstrate this point

About five years ago, I visited Arizona to take peyote legally (at least as far as that state's laws were concerned). Instead of gaining the sweeping ontological insights that William James reported with laughing gas , the drug experience provided me with a sharply focused neon-green slide show of what appeared to be pre-Columbian imagery of the type that may be seen today at the Mayan city of Yaxchilan or the Quetzacoatl of the Aztecs. This result raised fascinating philosophical questions for me, for pre-Columbian imagery was not in my mind when I traveled to Arizona, nor had I even consciously considered the subject since I took some related college courses a decade earlier.

It seemed to me like the peyote cactus was telling me something about how the world worked, that it was not a chaos of separate atoms but an integrally connected "web of being," so to speak, and that the whole was far greater than the sum of the parts. To put it poetically, I had what Wordsworth called "a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused."

And yet the Drug War prevents me from following up these hints about the true nature of reality by outlawing precisely those substances that provide such clues..

Surely this is the worst form of censorship imaginable, the kind that makes it illegal for us to pursue the Platonic goal of knowing ourselves and the world around us.

This is why I believe every author who writes on these subjects must remind their reader that we live in an age of a Drug War, for it is Drug War prohibition which tilts the philosophical playing field in favor of reductive materialism by outlawing mere research into other ways of "being in the world."

Related tweet: January 13, 2023

The use of laughing gas changed William James' ideas about the very nature of reality. To outlaw such substances is to outlaw human advancement.

Nitrous Oxide: Possession of laughing gas ³ to be criminal offence"

Laughing Gas

Notes for essay entitled Listening to Laughing Gas:

1: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
2: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
3: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)

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There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."

When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.

Morphine can provide a vivid appreciation of mother nature in properly disposed minds. That should be seen as a benefit. Instead, dogma tells us that we must hate morphine for any use.

If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.

Had the DEA been active in the Punjab and 1500 BCE, there would be no Hindu religion today.

I knew democracy was in trouble when most Americans in the '80s saw no problem with allowing drug testers to go on a fishing expedition in their bodily fluids for substances of which politicians disapprove.

The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.

Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!

There are endless creative ways to ward off addictions if all psychoactive medicines were at our disposal. The use of the drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin could combat the psychological downsides of withdrawal by providing strategic "as-needed" relief.

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.

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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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Listening to Laughing Gas

Related tweet: January 13, 2023

Laughing Gas

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend