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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)




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Ten Tweets

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So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.

I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.

Philip Jenkins reports that Rophynol had positive uses for treating mental disorders until the media called it the "date rape drug." We thus punished those who were benefitting from the drug, tho' the biggest drug culprit in date rape is alcohol. Oprah spread the fear virally.

My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.

The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.

Alexander Shulgin is a typical westerner when he speaks about cocaine. He moralizes about the drug, telling us that it does not give him "real" power. But so what? Does coffee give him "real" power? Coke helps some, others not. Stop holding it to this weird metaphysical standard.

A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Performers can lose their livelihood if they become too self-conscious. We only call such use "recreational" because we are oblivious to the common-sense psychology.

The Shipiba have learned to heal human beings physically, psychologically and spiritually with what they call "onanyati," plant allies and guides, such as Bobinsana, which "envelops seekers in a cocoon of love." You know: what the DEA would call "junk."

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?

The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.


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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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