Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass
blog icon orange rss icon with stylized radio waves bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter substack icon


back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow


Mycologists as DEA Collaborators

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 29, 2019



In response to "Drugged, Castrated, Eager to Mate: the Lives of Fungi-Infected Cicadas", by JoAnna Klein, in the June 28, 2019, edition of The New York Times.

Your article about the cicadas was simultaneously fascinating and depressing. Am I the only one who finds it sad that the DEA has to be consulted by a scientist before he or she can even investigate certain kinds of mushrooms and their byproducts? The fungi in question are grown by Mother Nature after all, not by Pablo Escobar: and whence does the government draw its moral right to criminalize the freely offered bounty of Mother Nature?

The government's interference in mycology must steer a lot of scientists away from that field. What scientist would want the government looking over their back on every mushroom-hunting foray? I can't help but feel, therefore, that many of those who remain in the field are complacent about government interference in science and may actually take pride in being DEA collaborators first and mushroom hunters second.

Dr. Kasson himself seems to be in thrall to the Drug War based on his use of terminology. He twice refers to mushrooms as "narcotics," when from a scientific standpoint, this is false. Psilocybin is a psychedelic, not a soporific agent. But in our society, "narcotic" is a drug-war pejorative, and so Kasson's use of the term suggests an unconscious desire to libel those substances of which the DEA does not approve, thereby making a patriotic virtue out of a government-imposed necessity.

As strange as the cicada story sounds, Kasson would not be so flummoxed by it had he read the book by Giorgio Samorini entitled "Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness." That's a politically incorrect book par excellence, because it demonstrates that the desire to alter consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the animal kingdom, not some evil impulse limited to 20th-century hippies and 21st-century ravers. (As Samorini points out: moths get drunk on the nectar of the datura flower, caribou trip on fly-agaric mushrooms, and cows have such a penchant for locoweed that it caused an agricultural crisis in Kansas in 1883.)

English Biologist JBS Haldane once said (a la Werner Heisenberg's comments about the universe): "Nature is not only odder than we think, but odder than we CAN think." This is no doubt especially true for those who expect the animal kingdom to respect our modern drug-war sensibilities about psychoactive plants.


Author's Follow-up: September 5, 2022



Mycologists are not the only Drug War collaborators, of course. The government censorship of modern science continues unabated as magazines like Science and Science News continue to reckon without the Drug War. How do they reckon without the Drug War? By continuing to publish article after article on topics where both the author's assumptions and conclusions would have been very different indeed if we lived in a world where psychoactive medicines were legal. In the popular press as well, we continue to be bombarded with self-help books that promise all the results that psychoactive medicine could help us supply almost overnight -- but in which the author pretends that psychoactive medicines simply do not exist. If Americans were honest with themselves, all such articles and books would be prefaced with a disclaimer that America is a Drug War republic and that therefore the authors have refused to even contemplate the role that psychoactive medicines might have played in connection with the topics about which the authors write.

This is another reason for the Drug War's longevity: the fact that Americans pretend that such a war does not exist. They believe that they can live in a free country while pretending that Mother Nature's godsend plant medicines do not exist. But science cannot really continue as normal when scientists dogmatically ignore the facts of life, i.e., the natural baseline from which they write. They thus live in an imaginary world, one that skews all their scientific conclusions in favor of materialism 1 and Christian Science -- blissfully unaware that they are censored by their government every bit as much as Galileo was censored by the church in the 17th century.

The Links Police



Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, because the Drug War gives me carte blanche to be a noxious busybody. But, no, I actually stopped you this time to remind you of another essay or two related to the topic of the Drug War's censorship of science in so-called free America. (Oh, and while I'm at it: your left rear tail light is out as well.)





Author's Follow-up: October 10, 2022

Two of the best documentaries about fungi ("Fantastic Fungi" and "The Kingdom") do not even mention the War on Drugs, even though no job is more explicitly censored by drug law than the field of mycology, in that the mycologist is tacitly forbidden to investigate substances like psilocybin (as the above article demonstrates) -- to the contrary, they are expected to "report" those shrooms to drug authorities. But mycologists are in good company when ignoring the way that they are censored by the Drug War: the entire scientific world is ignoring this fact. And so we see nothing but pablum appearing in book form on topics like depression and treating Alzheimer's. Why? Because the authors of such books have censored their own work to ignore the thousands of psychoactive substances that might change our prognosis for such conditions for the better. And so Drug War censorship is far worse than the Church's censorship of Galileo, for at least Galileo realized that he was censored and why, whereas modern academics pretend that they are living in a free world and so they are researching modern problems from a natural baseline, whereas they are really starting their research with the Drug Warrior premise that psychoactive medicines are bad and most be ignored when it comes to scientific research.

Indeed, substance demonization has become so ingrained in American culture that many scientists will tell you that it's wrong even to write an objective book about drugs like coca and opium 2 for fear that it will cause drug abuse. This view is based on the idea that human beings are babies when it comes to psychoactive substances, that they couldn't be helped by knowledge and so must be taught to fear the politically defined substances called "drugs" -- rather than learning enough to begin asking inconvenient questions about them. To think that those academics actually believe that ignorance is a good thing! How low science has sunk under the War on Drugs. No wonder we have overdoses and drug misuse-- because the Drug War is all about keeping Americans ignorant about the objective facts about psychoactive substances. This ignorance becomes extra deadly when prohibition incentivizes profiteers to sell the most addictive substances possible to their least educated clientele. Rather than recognizing the nightmare that this drug-war ignorance is causing, Drug Warriors point to all these negative outcomes and tell us triumphantly that: "See? Drugs are just horrible, aren't they?" Wrong. It's like an arsonist coming back to the scene of a fire and shouting: "See? Isn't fire horrible?" even though he himself had started the conflagration!









Notes for essay entitled Mycologists as DEA Collaborators:

1: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
2: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




It wasn't until western prudery and racism came along that we started to judge people by the substances that they chose to ingest, rather than by their actual behavior in the world.

If opium and cocaine were legal again in America, the healthcare industry would suddenly have to undergo extensive downsizing, as Americans were once again put in charge of their own health.

The WHO says that depression will be the number-one cause of disability by 2030. What they don't say is that this is only because drug prohibition has outlawed all obvious treatments for depression.

We should start taking names. All politicians and government officials who work to keep godsends like psilocybin from the public should be held to account for crimes against humanity when the drug war finally ends.

SWAT raids have increased by 15,000 percent from the late 1970s to today, resulting in 50,000 to 80,000 SWAT raids annually in the US alone. --War On Us

We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for those who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.

Wanna show drug warriors the error of their ways? Legalize all less dangerous drugs than alcohol and then deny work to those who test positive for liquor and confiscate their property if beer cans are found on-site.

I hated the show "The Apprentice," because it taught a cynical and hate-filled lesson about the proper way to "get ahead" in the world. I saw Trump as a menace back then, long before he started declaring that American elections were corrupt before the very first vote was cast!

I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.

Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity. It is the outlawing of our right to take care of our own health.


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






back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow
Book Cover

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

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

Purchase Your Copy
Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

This is the only full-cast recording of Aleister Crowley's 1922 classic paeon to common sense. It is the first book -- and so far almost the only book -- to stake out a philosophy of drug use that is compatible with human freedom, one in which we learn to use drugs as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. This recording was produced by the Drug War Philosopher and your purchases help support his effort to push back against the tragically counterproductive policy of drug prohibition, in the name of human freedom and of humanity's right to heal.

Purchase Your Copy



No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).


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.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.


Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP (up)