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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:

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

against the hateful war on US




Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy. It is based on the following crazy idea: that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.

It is evil to give the depressed drugs to help them die while barring them from using drugs that could make them wish to live.

Psychiatrists never acknowledge the biggest downside to modern antidepressants: the fact that they turn you into a patient for life. That's demoralizing, especially since the best drugs for depression are outlawed by the government.

If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol massacres. The problem is drug prohibition, not drugs.

Wade Davis wrote in Rolling Stone that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?! 178,000 people die from alcohol every year in America alone.

If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault.

The press once again hauls out the easy answer. Reiner's son was using drugs! Aha! Of course, that explains EVERYTHING! [sigh]

Alcohol makes me sleepy. But NOT coca wine. The wine gives you an upbeat feeling of controlled energy, without the jitters of coffee and without the fury of steroids. It increases rather than dulls mental focus.

"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann

In his treatise on laws, Cicero reported that the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries gave the participants "not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope."


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

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