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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

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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That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.

When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia: OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think. POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!

Everyone's biggest concern is the economy? Is nobody concerned that Trump has promised to pardon insurrectionists and get revenge on critics? Is no one concerned that Trump taught Americans to doubt democracy by questioning our election fairness before one single vote was cast?

A generally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear. --James B. Stockade.

"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley

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

Today's doctors are "quacks" because they fail to see any of the many obvious uses for psychoactive substances.

Wade Davis writes that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. What about the 49,000 that commit suicide every year because we have outlawed drugs that could cheer them up!!!

The Drug War has turned America into the world's first "Indignocracy," where our most basic rights can be vetoed by a misinformed public. That's how scheming racist politicians put an end to the 4th amendment to the US Constitution.

Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.


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