Notes from a Groucho Marxist

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Notes from a Groucho Marxist

Four drug-related ideas in search of an essay

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher (Substack version)

August 20, 2026

Each day of my philosophical life, I attempt to focus on one specific aspect of how drug prohibition has denied me the right to control my very mind and mood. I risk otherwise firing off a bunch of imperfectly connected broadsides on my substack and website, thereby giving the professionals who are profiting from my disempowerment just the excuse they need to classify me as a disgruntled quack, someone whose drug-related views can be safely ignored. Take today, for instance. I am planning to write an essay to address a bizarre notion held by almost every single “expert" in the field of “behavioral health”: namely, that there is no evidence that outlawed substances could have any benefit whatsoever for human beings. That was to be my focus today, and so help me, it shall be, inshallah. And yet what does one do when one’s mind, indifferent to earthly timetables, promotes tangential topics to one’s field of awareness, saying in effect, like a harried supervisor in an understaffed newspaper office doling out written job assignments to a cub reporter: “I don’t know what you may be working on, Brian, but you’re going to have to fit these things in, someway or other, in your posts and articles for today; these things are just too important for you to ignore them in fealty to some ideal scheduling system or other. Sorry, but you’ve got to be flexible. You know what Emerson said: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’”

Well, I’ve got to admit, my mind does have a point. So here are a few somewhat unrelated topics that I feel called upon to at least mention today, even if I do not now have time to descant upon them at length. Any descanting worthy of the name shall be devoted to the essay topic mentioned above, at least as far as today is concerned. (To be specific, I will limit the points made below to one single paragraph, with no exceptions!)

Marxism.

I have been taken to task by a reader for failing to consider drug prohibition from a Marxist perspective. Let me first say that I am highly skeptical of a Marxian approach given Marx’s apparent belief in “science uber alles.” However, the criticism reminds me that there is a gap in my knowledge here. I really do not know the specifics of Marx’s ideas in this regard. I just have a general negative impression. I hereby resolve, therefore, before God and men, to read a variety of online sources during the coming week on the subject of “Marx, science and consciousness,” in order to see whether or not my worst fears are confirmed. If in reading, I find useful insights in a Marxian critique, I will be delighted and will immediately begin qualifying my essays accordingly. I’ll even commit to slogging through the English translation of the seemingly endless tract entitled “The German Ideology.” I do have sufficient familiarity with the work of Marx, however, to advisedly accuse him of one thing: he writes in the spirit of hatred. And I can well understand the temptation to do so. Like the young Marx, my ideas imply an across-the-board critique of modern society and, like the young Marx, my ideas are completely ignored by the status quo. But I prefer to fell Goliath with laughter rather than with stones. “Hey, Goliath, why don’t you go back to Gath, all six cubits of you! You call yourself a bully? My sister Zeruiah could bully me better than you! What kind of town name is Gath anyway? ‘Hello, everybody, I come from Gath!’ I bet you’re always hoping that nobody asks you where you come from! Goliath is like, ‘I come from the west.’ And we’re like, ‘Yes, Goliath, but WHERE in the west? What’s the name of the town, Goliath?’ Ha ha!” Like Abbie Hoffman, I already am a Marxist of sorts: a Groucho Marxist.

“Deining Drugs.”

I also hereby commit myself to the re-reading of Defining Drugs by Richard Parrish. This is the only book that I know of that tells us “how government became the arbiter of pharmaceutical fact.” If there are others, I am sure that they are written in one of two very misleading ways: 1) as a triumphalist story of the progress of science, or 2) as a mere chronological enumeration of facts, without any suggestion that the lifestyle that these facts ultimately imposed upon the American people, collectively speaking, was problematic in any way.

“Notes from Underground.”

It also occurred to me today that I am the Man from Dostoevsky’s underground. I have been rendered irrelevant and “ignorable” by a self-congratulatory scientism which seeks for quantitative answers to all human problems. Like the man in the story, I am also dangerous, however. I am the spoilsport who threatens to show up at any moment in an online group about mental health to refute the notion that scientists are — or ever can be — experts on how I think and feel in life.

Faith.

It occurred to me also that a writer in my position has to have faith. When looking at my site and substack visitor totals, there is no evidence whatsoever that my viewpoints resonate in any way with the American public. I have found one pocket of seemingly intense support in Eastern Europe, but I seem to be falling out of favor even there given my criticism of modern science (see topic number 1 above). I insist that science (at least as it is practiced today) is an “unindicted co-conspirator,” so to speak, in the ongoing effort of the biochemists and psychiatric organizations to ensure that I remain a ward of the healthcare state. If I am writing for anybody therefore, I must be writing for a future generation, for a time when the western world will have begun to question the very premises upon which they have been formulating their views about drugs and healthcare. The science boosters in particular must finally realize that saying things like “Drugs kill” is philosophically identical to saying “Fire bad,” that such statements would have us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible, and in as many ways as possible, for the benefit of humanity. They must recognize what all scientists used to know, that every substance has potential positive uses, when used at some dose, for some reason, alone or in combination, etc. Being of a philosophical turn of mind, however, I require what we philosophers call an ontology to support my faith in the long-term meaning of one’s personal effort in this world. I cannot, of course, justify that statement here, or even explain it for that matter, in one single paragraph. Suffice it to say that I’ll be consulting everybody from Socrates to Meister Eckhart to Alfred North Whitehead — yes, and even Karl Marx himself, should I find any help in that quarter — in an attempt to figure out why and on what basis I should, as it were, give a damn about what happens here below. In the meantime, however, I could clearly benefit from a little patience and grace in my life, which, by the way, turns out to be the very thing that a wide variety of drug use can give a person, which is yet another reason why drug prohibition is so fundamentally wrong to the point of being a crime against humanity. It has done nothing less than outlaw my right to heal, to say nothing of my right to assess the validity of a variety of religious and philosophical claims about the nature of ultimate reality.

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against the hateful war on US

When scientists discuss suicide without mentioning the fact that their government has outlawed drugs, it is like scientists discussing deaths from bacterial infection without mentioning the fact that their government has outlawed antibiotics.

And we should not insist it's a problem if someone decides to use opium, for instance, daily. We certainly don't blame "patients" for using antidepressants daily. And getting off opium is easier than getting off many antidepressants -- see Julia Holland.

Until prohibition ends, rehab is all about enforcing a Christian Science attitude toward psychoactive medicines (with the occasional hypocritical exception of Big Pharma meds).

Ketamine is like any other drug. It has good uses for certain people in certain situations. Nowadays, people insist that a drug be okay in every situation for everybody (especially American teens) before they will say that it's okay. That's crazy and anti-scientific.

If I should die of some unusual concatenation of circumstances, I want my survivors to pass "Brian's Law," a law stating that we will no longer pass laws based on hard cases and so needlessly fill our prisons by taking common-sense discretion out of the hands of judges.

Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.

National Geo published an article entitled "Coca: a Blessing and a Curse." Coca was never a curse. Most people used it wisely, just as most people drink wisely. Doctors demonized it because it really worked and it could put them out of business. https://abolishthedea.com/sigmund_freuds_real_breakthrough_was_not_psychoanalysis.php

Scientists hold holistically working drugs to reductionist standards, thereby practicing a sort of pharmacological colonialsm.

Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.

Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?

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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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Notes from a Groucho Marxist

Four drug-related ideas in search of an essay

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