Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion
it's just that we have outlawed them all
by 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." 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 Effexor, which my psychiatrist told me has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users who attempt to stop the drug, worse than heroin according to psychiatrist Julie Holland3. 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 Shulgin4, 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 reality5. 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 Pihkal6:
"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 us 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, 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 elated7 -- 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
"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 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.
Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths
In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.
This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.
How do I know this?
Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.
More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?
This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."
Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal in the United States. It took drug laws to accomplish that. By outlawing opium and refusing to teach safe use, the drug warrior has subjected users to contaminated product of uncertain dosage, thereby causing thousands of unnecessary overdoses.
Currently, I myself am chemically dependent on a Big Pharma drug for depression, that I have to take every day of my life. There is no rational reason why I should not be able to smoke opium daily instead. It is only drug-war fearmongering that has demonized that choice -- for obvious racist, economic and political reasons.
You have been lied to your entire life about opium. In fact, the drug war has done its best to excise the very word "opium" from the English vocabulary. That's why the Thomas Jefferson Foundation refuses to talk about the 1987 raid on Monticello in which Reagan's DEA confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. It's just plain impolite to bring up that subject these days.
It's hard to learn the truth about opium because the few books on the subject demonize it rather than discuss it dispassionately. Take the book by John Halpern: "Opium: How an ancient flower shaped and poisoned our world." It's a typical Drug Warrior title. A flower did not poison our world, John: our world was poisoned by bad laws: laws that were inspired first and foremost by racism, followed closely by commercial interests, politics, misinformation and lies.
To learn something approaching to "the truth about Opium," read the book of that name by William Brereton, written to defend the time-honored panacea from the uninformed and libelous attacks of Christian missionaries.
"After the Drug War" is a series of essays describing the philosophical principles of the world that will exist after prohibition -- one in which we seek to use all drugs for the benefit of humanity and in which the bad guys are ignorance and racism rather than drugs themselves. This is a world in which we finally admit what has been obvious since 1920s America, that prohibition is the PROBLEM, not drugs. This is a world in which we recognize that the Hindu religion itself was inspired by a drug -- a drug that inspired and elated -- from which it follows that it is the suppression of religious liberty to outlaw drugs that inspire and elate.
By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could disbelieve it.
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.
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."
Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" are horrible because they encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.
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?
Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.
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.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.
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, Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion: it's just that we have outlawed them all, published on April 24, 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion: it's just that we have outlawed them all, published on April 24, 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)
