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Open Letter to Diane O'Leary

author of 'Medicine's Bad Philosophy Threatens Your Health'

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 25, 2022



Good morning, Professor O'Leary.

I am a 63-year-old philosophy major who writes essays against America's Drug War. Today, I received an email from the IAI advising me of an article you had written entitled "Medicine's Bad Philosophy Threatens Your Health." This interested me greatly because I have been writing on this topic since I founded my Drug War Philosopher website over three years ago now.

As a lifelong depressive, my thesis has always been that materialist science (in collaboration with drug-war prohibition) has turned me into an eternal patient. It was the search for a reductive cure for depression that created the unacknowledged pharmacological dystopia in which we live today, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma "meds" for life -- this while we outlaw godsend antidepressant plant medicines and fungi that have inspired entire religions. In other words, we are living in a real-life version of "The Stepford Wives," with Big Pharma 1 2 attempting to spin-off sequels such as "Stepford Husbands" and "Stepford Children" (in the latter case by promoting the prophylactic use of their dependence-causing meds). The main long-term effect of these meds, based on my decades of experience with taking them, is foggy thinking and a mild tranquilization: precisely the kind of mental trouble that the Partnership for a Drug Free America 3 did its best to blame on Mother Nature's psychoactive bounty in its mendacious "frying pan" ad of the 1980s.

I do not wish to presume upon your time, so I will resist the temptation to develop my thesis further in this email. However, if you would be interested in the thoughts of a layperson who has been a lifelong victim of the materialist mindset that you yourself are denouncing, then I invite you to read some of the many essays that I've written on this topic, including...







Meanwhile, I will search for a way to read the entirety of your IAI article, since my current non-membership in IAI precludes me from doing so.

Thanks so much for your time!


August 25, 2022

Will Diane respond? Tune in for the next exciting episode of "Open Letter to Diane O'Leary"! Of course, one may say, "Of course she'll respond, Madam Editor" -- but then the penny has yet to drop for many academics viz. the Drug War's link to both materialism 4 and the psychiatric pill mill 5 .

Author's Follow-up: November 8, 2022



The good news is, Diane did get back to me. The bad news is, she left me with the link to the same paywall that had stopped me from accessing her article in the first place. Fair cop. You've got to pay to play, right? There is no free lunch. Still, I thought that she was going to talk to me at least a little bit about the price of tea in China, i.e., about the issues described above, not simply give me a 404 page redirect. Like most -- indeed all -- academicians, she won't let poor Rudolphs like myself join in any intellectual reindeer games. No, really, I understand: you pay thru the nose for your degree, you don't want some layperson pretending to know something too. At least she didn't upbraid me for the supposed prolixity of my missive. Rick Strassman, the author of "The DMT Molecule," dressed me down good and proper for the length of my query to him. I wouldn't have minded, except the prose in question was a rare outpouring of the heart. Consequently, when I was rebuffed, I felt like I had been weeping in a confessional and the priest had turned to me and shouted: "Get on with it already!"











Notes for essay entitled Open Letter to Diane O'Leary: author of 'Medicine's Bad Philosophy Threatens Your Health':

1: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
2: 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)
3: Horses Kill The Partnership for a Death Free America (up)
4: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
5: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The proof that psychedelics work has always been extant. We are hoodwinked by scientists who convince us that efficacy has not been "proven." This is materialist denial of the obvious.

NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition. We need a National Institute on Drug Use, not a National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Science knows nothing of the human spirit and of the hopes and dreams of humankind. Science cannot tell us whether a given drug risk is worthwhile given the human need for creativity and passion in their life. Science has no expertise in making such philosophical judgements.

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."

Psst! Drug use has benefits too. Pass it on!

Alcohol is a drug in liquid form. If drug warriors want to punish people who use drugs, they should start punishing themselves.

Why does no one talk about empathogens for preventing atrocities? Because they'd rather hate drugs than use them for the benefit of humanity. They don't want to solve problems, they prefer hatred.

No substance is bad in and of itself. Fentanyl has positive uses, at specific doses, for specific people, in specific situations. But the drug war votes substance up or down. That is hugely anti-scientific and it blocks human progress.

"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.

Two weeks ago, a guy told me that most psychiatrists believe ECT is great. I thought he was joking! I've since come to realize that he was telling the truth: that is just how screwed up the healthcare system is today thanks to drug war ideology and purblind materialism.


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






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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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