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 12 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!"
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.
The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.
Health is not a quality, it's a balance. To decide drug legality based on 'health' grounds thus opens a Pandora's box of different points of view.
Someday, the First Lady or Man will tell kids to "just say no to prohibition." Kids who refuse will be required to watch hours' worth of films depicting gun violence, banned religions, civil wars, and adults committing suicide for want of medicine that grows at their very feet.
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.
Americans think that fighting drugs is more important than freedom. We have already given up on the fourth amendment. Nor is the right to religion honored for those who believe in indigenous medicines. Pols are now trying to end free speech about drugs as well.
The December Scientific American features a story called "The New Nuclear Age," about a trillion-dollar plan to add 100s of ICBM's to 5 states, which an SA editorial calls "kick me" signs. This Neanderthal plan comes from pols who think that compassion-boosting drugs are evil!
New article in Scientific American: "New hope for pain relief," that ignores the fact that we have outlawed the time-honored panacea. Scientists want a drug that won't run the risk of inspiring us.
All uplifting drugs are potential antidepressants. Science denies that fact by claiming that drug efficacy must be proven quantitatively. And so they ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense.
Until prohibition ends, rehab is all about enforcing a Christian Science attitude toward psychoactive medicines (with the occasional hypocritical exception of Big Pharma meds).
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