rowid 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 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 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 Mysteries.
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 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, the belief that all that matters is what can be quantified1. This is why today's doctors cannot figure out whether laughing gas, or MDMA, or coca, or opium, 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!
Open Letters
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
1 The purblind coldness of the Behaviorist doctrine is made clear in the following words of its founder, JB Watson, as quoted in the 2015 book "Paradox" by Margaret Cuonzo: "Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic." (Surely, Watson was proactively channeling Dr. Spock of the original Star Trek series.) (up)
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.
"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley
Drug Warriors rail against drugs as if they were one specific thing. They may as well rail against penicillin because cyanide can kill.
Meanwhile, no imaginable downside could persuade westerners that guns and alcohol were too dangerous. Yet the DEA lies about almost all psychoactive drugs, saying there are no good uses. That's a lie! Then they pass laws that keep us from disproving their puritanical conclusion.
My approach to withdrawal: incrementally reduce daily doses over 6 months, or even a year, meanwhile using all the legal entheogens and psychedelics that you can find in a way likely to boost your endurance and "sense of purpose" to make withdrawal successful.
The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.
The UN of today is in an odd position regarding drugs: they want to praise indigenous societies while yet outlawing the drugs that helped create them.
NOW is the time for entheogens -- not (as Strassman and Pollan seem to think) at some future date when materialists have finally wrapped their minds around the potential usefulness of drugs that experientially teach compassion.
There are neither "drugs" nor "meds" as those terms are used today. All substances have potential good uses and bad uses. The terms as used today carry value judgements, as in meds good, drugs bad.
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Open Letter to Erowid: about a misleading 2018 article by Karolina Zieba, published on August 22, 2020 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
rowid 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. 
You have been reading an article entitled, Open Letter to Erowid: about a misleading 2018 article by Karolina Zieba, published on August 22, 2020 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
