Erowid is (per its own description) 'a member-supported organization providing access to reliable, non-judgmental information about psychoactive plants, chemicals, and related issues.' I sent its editors the following email today to alert them to the philosophically shallow reasoning in a 2018 article entitled 'In case you choose not to say no to drugs, kids,' published in The Student Newspaper.
This is not exactly a correction, but I could not find an email address that precisely covered my reason for writing you today.
I'm writing in reference to The Student Newspaper article that you cite, apparently because it contains a favorable mention of Erowid. The article is entitled 'In Case You Choose Not to Say No to Drugs, Kids.'
Although we might praise the author of that post for 'having her heart in the right place,' her article demonstrates clearly that she is under the influence of Drug War propaganda, which she has apparently accepted uncritically.
Why, for instance, should we be telling kids to say no to 'drugs' in the first place, when drugs are essentially Mother Nature's plant medicines? Why do we not also want them to say no to 'Big Pharma 12 meds' to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted?
These are just two philosophical issues that loom unnoticed in Karolina Zieba's article. I critique the article in more detail in two essays on my site at abolishthedea.com (see links below). I invite you to read them. I've devoted two essays to this one article because I think that the staying power of drug-war prohibition has been due in large part to the philosophical shallowness of many of its would-be opponents, folks who write half-heartedly on the topic, taking the anemic and misinformed line that 'Illegal drug use is unnecessary, but it's going to happen anyway, so we might as well allow it.'
I fear that, like Karolina, many Erowid readers (perhaps editors, too, for all I know) may 'have their heart in the right place' when it comes to these topics and yet fail to comprehend the full evil of the Drug War, because they have been bamboozled by Drug War lies, propaganda, and the drug-war revision of history thanks to which Americans never hear of the positive use of currently illegal substances. Perhaps they've also been bamboozled by well-meaning authors like Karolina herself who fail to grasp the many injustices that are perpetrated daily in the name of the Drug War: from stifled research on drugs to fight Alzheimer's 3 to the use of electroshock therapy that could have been avoided had medical godsend plants been available to treat depression.
I also write because, by prominently listing Karolina's article, Erowid seems to be (at least to some degree) endorsing its content, and I therefore feel compelled to write you to explain why I believe that such an endorsement is misplaced.
July 18, 2022
Brian shot, Brian scored. Yes, writers like Karolina seem to share the Libertarian view of 'drugs' -- they agree with the Drug Warrior that this politically defined category of substances is indeed horrible -- but since such horrible substances exist and people seem to want to use them (sigh...), well, doggone it, we shouldn't go overboard in trying to punish them!
With friends like that in the drug-law-reform business, who needs enemies?
The fact is that there are no such things as 'drugs.' Why not? Because there are no substances that are bad in and of themselves, without regard to how, why, when and where they are used and by whom. Even the highly toxic Botox can be used in safe doses and in safe ways.
Besides, the kinds of substances that we demonize today have inspired entire religions (including the Vedic-Hindu religion and the mushroom and coca cults of Latin America) and been used wisely for good reasons by such western luminaries as Marcus Aurelius, Benjamin Franklin, HG Wells, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Richard Feynman, Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft -- along with a who's who of philosophical greats including Plato, who got his ideas about the afterlife from his psychedelic-fueled experience at the Eleusinian Mysteries4.
Finally, never mind what happened in the past: once we stop demonizing substances, we'll see that (Drug Warrior lies not withstanding) psychoactive drugs can be strategically used for all sorts of mind-building purposes. morphine 5 could be used intermittently to improve our appreciation of Mother Nature. Opium could be used intermittently to improve our knack for creative visualization. And coca (as HG Wells and Jules Verne well knew) can be used wisely to increase our mental focus for tasks like writing books.
But America's Office of National Drug Control Policy is committed to ignoring any possible beneficial uses for these 'drugs.' In fact, the organization's ground rules actually require them to ignore any potential benefits of vilified psychoactive substances, meaning, of course, that the organization in question should be referred to as the Office of National Drug Control Propaganda.
With this backstory in mind, we can see how would-be drug-law reformers (like the Liberal Media and Libertarians) are actually damning drugs with their faint praise of them. I fear that they have all received one too many teddy bears from the State Police in their formative years in return for having 'just said no' to the psychoactive bounty of Mother Nature.
Author's Follow-up: March 8, 2025
Many drug-law reformers are cowed into silence about obvious drug benefits by the mainstream party line that doctors are the experts about drugs -- and so only THEY can talk about drugs advisedly.
But this is the entire problem: our materialist doctors are not -- and cannot -- be the experts when it comes to psychoactive medicine for the simple reason that they are blinded to all obvious drug benefits by their implicit belief in the behaviorist principles of JB Watson 6 , the belief that all that matters is what can be quantified7. This is why today's doctors cannot figure out whether laughing gas 8 , or MDMA 9 , or coca, or opium 10 , or psilocybin can help the depressed. All of these have OBVIOUS benefits for the depressed -- at some dose, at some time, for certain people. THIS IS PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMON SENSE. But today's doctors are dogmatically incapable of using common sense. They do not care about positive reports of drug use. They do not care about anecdote, they do not care about history. Opium and coca have inspired entire religious movements and been considered panaceas by various cultures in the past. So when materialist doctors tell us that these drugs have no known uses, they are not being scientific: they are being political. It's just that the inhumane assumptions of behaviorism give their prejudice a veneer of 'science.'
Author's Follow-up:
May 08, 2025
The attentive reader (should there be such) will have noticed that I have yet to fulfill my recent promise to philosophically evaluate the Erowid website.
This is because I have realized upon digging further into the site that I am not yet qualified to perform such a review. Some of the qualms that I originally thought I had about the resource are probably the result of my failure to investigate it thoroughly. So stay tuned.
See? I'm not such a bad guy. I try to be fair.
I am looking forward to reading the drug summary pages in particular.
What was my concern in the first place?
My concern was that the site might tend to place potential godsend meds in a harsh light by failing to put the downsides of use in context. If Erowid covered shark encounters, for instance, there would be plenty of reports about shark attacks. My question then would be: how successfully does the website put those attack reports in context, so that the casual site visitor does not come away with the idea that sharks are a clear and present danger for anyone who so much as dips a toe in the ocean?
Ideally, any horror story about a statistically super-safe drug should have a disclaimer reminding the reader that the gnarly outcomes being documented are extremely unlikely to occur. What's more, this disclaimer should appear on the same page as the horror story. The mere fact that the drug's relative safety might be documented elsewhere on Erowid is not enough. A casual site visitor who sees the horror story out of context is likely to come to a negative conclusion about the drug in question without bothering to perform any further research on Erowid. To the contrary, their next Google search could very well include the drug name plus the words "horror stories," since they are now associating the drug with negative outcomes only.
These are not yet criticisms of Erowid, just a foretaste of what I fear I might find upon a closer investigation. I will be delving further to see if Erowid is actually guilty as charged -- or as initially feared.
I also hope to find that the "main page" for each drug makes it clear, to the extent possible, how risky the use of the drug is compared to the use of other drugs -- and to the performance of other life activities. If I am more likely to win the lottery than to experience a given drug downside, then tell me. Give me at least some idea of what is foreground and what is background when it comes to potential dangers, do not just overwhelm me with acontextual data.
Again, I am not (yet) charging Erowid with any shortcomings, merely enumerating my existing qualms prior to truly investigating the site.
This is the shortcoming of the Erowid approach, by the way. It is fine to have a bunch of raw data in the form of user reports, but we need to establish a field of pharmacologically savvy experts who can parse and summarize such usage reports into an actionable format for folks in a variety of life situations. Unfortunately, it will be impossible to have recognized experts in this line without first re-legalizing drugs. Right now, we are told that materialist doctors are the experts about drugs, but that is an obvious lie. These doctors are blind to all the obvious benefits of drug use because they are wearing the twin blinders of behaviorism and the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. The real experts will eventually be actual drug users: empathic individuals who know the upsides and downsides of a wide variety of drugs and can tell us which make sense given our own particular goals of usage. They will be able to tell us how the chosen substances have been used effectively and the ways in which use has backfired. Moreover, they will be there at the first sign of things going wrong so that they can get us back on course, by fighting drugs with other drugs when necessary and appropriate.
Today, we urge folks to report certain minor physical problems to a doctor in order to be sure that these problems do not betoken something more serious, such as cancer. In the future, responsible Drug Warriors will go to experts to report usage problems so that timely drug-aided interventions can be undertaken to keep the user from unwanted addictions and dependencies.
In other words, a future world will use common sense when it comes to drugs. Imagine that!
The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war.
"Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?
When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.
To treat opioid use disorder, we should re-normalize the peaceable smoking of opium at home as an alternative to drinking alcohol.
Jim Hogshire described sleep cures that make physical withdrawal from opium close to pain-free. As for "psychological addiction," there are hundreds of elating drugs that could be used to keep the ex-user's mind from morbidly focusing on a drug whose use has become problematic for them.
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.
The MindMed company (makers of LSD Lite) tell us that euphoria and visions are "adverse effects": that's not science, that's an arid materialist philosophy that does not believe in spiritual transcendence.
In response to a tweet that "some drugs cannot be used wisely for recreational purposes": The problem is, most people draw such conclusions based on general impressions inspired by a media that demonizes drugs. In reality, it's hard to imagine a drug that cannot theoretically be used wisely for recreation at some dose, in some context.
The Drug War is the ultimate example of strategic fearmongering by self-interested politicians.
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