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Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion

it's just that we have outlawed them all

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 24, 2025



The following is an open letter to Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta, senior scientist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.1

Dear Dr. Dasgupta,

I have just received your email from the DPA2 containing the subject line "I've Studied Overdose Deaths for 20 Years."

Discussion Questions

As someone who has written hundreds of philosophical essays about the Drug War, I would like to offer a comment or two on that email, specifically the link that reads

"What are medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD)? What are barriers to people getting them?"


I would like to suggest to you that medications for getting off of opioids are legion -- but that they are almost all outlawed. Mainstream medicine is blind to this fact because of the behaviorist-materialist approach to mind and mood medicine, which looks for answers to emotional problems under a microscope rather than recognizing psychological common sense. According to this philosophy, laughter and happiness do not count: only quantifiable data -- and so even if a person withdrawing from a drug is laughing their heart out, the materialist will tell him or her a la Dr. Spock of Star Trek that they are not "really" treating their addiction. But this is just a metaphysical claim, presupposing the correctness of the non-holistic western approach to medicine.

Take me, for instance. I have had enormous trouble getting off of Effexor3, which my psychiatrist told me has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users who attempt to stop the drug 4, worse than heroin 5 according to psychiatrist Julie Holland6. And yet what is recidivism but the result of a few hours of high-anxiety existential angst, often experienced in the wee hours of the morning? And those few hours could clearly be "gotten through" with the help of drugs that inspire and elate -- as, for instance, the use of the phenethylamines synthesized by chemist Alexander Shulgin7, or even the as-needed use of opium and coca or laughing gas . That latter substance inspires ecstasies and heavenly visions, as reported by William James, who conjured philosophers to use the substance to investigate the nature of perception and reality8. It is just psychological common sense that as-needed use of such substances could help one refrain from back-sliding in their attempt to get off an unwanted substance. They do not need materialist drugs that are custom-made for that purpose based on the reification of an opiate-related problem as a discrete "illness."

It is absolutely clear to me that I could get through the downsides of withdrawal -- easily -- with the strategic as-needed help of such substances as laughing gas and phenethylamines.

Consider these phenethylamine user reports from Pihkal9:


"I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world."

"Excellent feelings, tremendous opening of insight and understanding, a real awakening."

"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."

Surely, materialists are gaslighting 10 us11 when they say that such medicines are of no use in fighting unwanted opioid dependence. And they are doing so, in my view, because they have "reified" opioid problems as a sort of "thing apart" in the disease-mongering DSM, as a discrete monolithic biochemical pathology that has nothing to do with everyday human life -- as if those attempting to withdraw from the drug were aliens from Mars and not amenable to the common-sense psychological incentives of "normal" human beings.

To answer your questions then:


Question: What are medications for opioid use disorder?
Answer: Almost all the psychoactive medicines that America has outlawed.
Question: What are the barriers to people getting them?
Answer: Drug prohibition.


Drug prohibition, which is based on the following anti-scientific idea:

that a substance that could cause problems for white young people when used at one dose for one reason, must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.

prohibition is the problem 12 , not drugs, but America will not see this fact as long as materialists connive in the Drug War lie that inspirational medicines have no positive uses, even when anecdote, history and common sense say otherwise.


Sincerely Yours


PS I feel strongly about this topic because Drug War ideology and materialist orthodoxy has deprived me for a lifetime now of godsend medicines that have glaringly obvious abilities to inspire and elate. Indeed, the Hindu religion itself was inspired by a drug that inspired and elated13 -- from which one fact alone it follows the drug prohibition is the outlawing of the religious impulse, to say nothing of our right to take care of our own psychological health as we see fit, without seeking help from a materialist medical establishment that profits from our distress.



Author's Follow-up:

April 24, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




"Opioid Use Disorder" is a victim-blaming epithet. The real disorder is Prohibition Disorder. It is prohibitionists who cause overdoses by refusing to educate, by refusing to ensure safe product, and by denying access to godsend alternatives that could keep an individual from obsessing over the use of one drug in particular and thus developing unwanted dependency.

And how odd it is that we would seek to end dependence on opiates by going to a mental health establishment that thrives on dependency, as seen from the fact that 1 in 4 American women take a Big Pharma drug every day of their life!!!

This is why progress has been so glacial in re-legalizing godsends and ending the War on Drugs. Even the good guys, the guys promoted by the Drug Policy Alliance, are bamboozled in their own way, namely, by materialist and behaviorist dogma. This will not change until Americans realize that it was always a category error to place scientists in charge of mind and mood matters in the first place. That move was predicated on an anti-indigenous and anti-holistic mindset that is patently inappropriate as seen by the fact that it leads to absurd results: namely, a world in which scientists pretend that drugs that inspire and elate have no obvious uses for the depressed, a world in which we behave as if suicide 14 and shock therapy were better than drug use. Hell, drugs that inspire and elate have inspired the creation of the Hindu religion. How can you sit there and tell me with a straight face that we have to do endless clinical studies -- for one "illness" at a time -- before we can tell if such substances can be of help? Clearly, such substances not only CAN be of help, but it is actually the outlawing of religion to keep them from anyone on the absurd grounds that scientists have not yet been able to quantify the effects for the purposes of creating a PowerPoint presentation for the FDA and Big Pharma 15 16 .



Discussion Topics

May 23, 2025

cartoon figures conversing

Attention Teachers and Professors: Brian is not writing these essays for his health. (Well, in a way he is, actually, but that's not important now.) His goal is to get the world thinking about the anti-democratic and anti-scientific idiocy of the War on Drugs. You can stimulate your students' brainwashed grey matter on this topic by having them read the above essay and then discuss the following questions as a group!


  1. Why is mainstream medicine blind to obvious treatments for so-called 'Opioid Use Disorder'?

  2. Explain how laughing gas 17 could help with withdrawal symptoms, albeit in a way that materialist science cannot seem to appreciate.


  3. Why does Brian say he feels 'strongly' about this topic?

  4. Why does the Philosopher say that the mental healthcare industry relies on dependency?

  5. Brian states that 'Opioid Use Disorder' is a victim-blaming epithet. Explain.

  6. What should 'Opioid Use Disorder' actually be called?

  7. How do prohibitionists cause overdoses?

  8. How are 'even the good guys' bamboozled, according to Brian?












Notes for essay entitled Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion: it's just that we have outlawed them all:

1: Nabarun Dasgupta, PhD, MPH UNC Injury Prevention Research Center (up)
2: Drug Policy Alliance (up)
3: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
4: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)
5: 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)
6: Richard Louis Miller. 2017. Psychedelic Medicine : The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press. (up)
7: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
8: James, William. 2016. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820.The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience. (up)
9: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
10: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
11: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
12: Drug Prohibition is the Problem, not Drugs: what the movers and shakers get wrong in the drug re-legalization debate DWP (up)
13: How the Drug War Outlaws Religion DWP (up)
14: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
15: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
16: 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)
17: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

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We know that anticipation and mental focus and relaxation have positive benefits -- but if these traits ae facilitated by "drugs," then we pretend that these same benefits somehow are no longer "real." This is a metaphysical bias, not a logical deduction.

Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.

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!

I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.

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.

There was no opioid crisis when Americans were free to smoke opium nightly in their homes. Now scientists around the country are making money hand over fist by "solving" the problem in a politically correct way, without even mentioning the drug prohibition that caused it.

"The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.

The Drug War is the most important evil to protest, precisely because almost everybody is afraid to do so. That's a clear sign that it is a cancer on the body politic.

Materialist puritans do not want to create any drug that elates. So they go on a fool's errand to find reductionist cures for "depression itself," as if the vast array of human sadness could (or should) be treated with a one-size-fits-all readjustment of brain chemicals.

Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote: "The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."


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






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