Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser

author of 'The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous'

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 3, 2020

In response to the Atlantic entitled 'The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous. by Gabrielle Glaser.

2025 Update

Like almost every other writer on the topic of addiction, you write as if we are living in a free country as far as scientific research is concerned and that we can therefore draw adequate generalizations from the status quo. To the contrary, we live under a drug-war sharia that strictly outlaws almost all research of psychoactive drugs, many of which could work wonders with alcoholics and other addicts. Although you don't mention this, Bill Wilson himself had great initial success in treating alcoholics with LSD. It was not science that stopped such treatment, but rather politics, when Richard Nixon decided to launch a war on Timothy Leary ¹ ² ³ and hippies by outlawing their drugs of choice, namely psychedelics. And US-inspired drug law remains as anti-patient as ever, as therapist Gabor Mate was recently forced to stop his promising treatment of Canadian alcoholics with the entheogenic concoction known as ayahuasca.

So if AA is ineffective -- as I would definitely agree - it is as much the Drug War's fault as it is that of Bill Wilson and his theories.

Given the existence of the unscientifically motivated Drug War, it may well be true that Naltrexone is a relative godsend for alcoholics. That said, this is a huge 'given.' We should remember that we are choosing from a starkly limited pharmacopeia when we make that choice. There are thousands of potential psychoactive godsends out there that we are forbidden from studying, notwithstanding our pretensions at being a scientific country. By failing to acknowledge this outrage, we may be giving far more kudos to Naltrexone than it deserves. How good is it, you ask? How can we know until we compare it to the thousands of other potential therapies that we have chosen to ignore? It may well be the best thing currently 'going' for alcoholics, and for that I yield to the experts - while yet pointing out that there really are no experts on addiction treatment per se since the Drug War has essentially placed all the potentially valuable therapeutic substances off-limits, not merely to individuals but to addiction researchers as well. No surprise there. We'd have just as few aviation experts today if the only legally available planes were gliders.

Also there is a real irony in the use of Naltrexone to block the action of opiates, at least when used in a Drug Warrior country such as the USA. By waging drug-war colonialism, we have sent our military abroad to destroy opium crops that have been used in moderation in the east for millennia, forcing other countries to turn to the western drug called alcohol to achieve, in general, a far uglier form of self-transcendence and relaxation than that supplied by the judicious poppy user. Not content to destroy the poppy in the East (always against the will of the local people, who have no say in the matter), we now seek out a drug that will obviate the poppy's effects, thus ensuring the prosperity of American Big Liquor for centuries to come. This is fundamentally a racist and anti-scientific war on the poppy, one which dogmatically recognizes only evil in the plant, failing to acknowledge its role in providing human transcendence over the ages - a viewpoint that keeps Anheuser Busch heirs smiling on their way to the bank (just as they were no doubt smiling when the DEA stomped onto Monticello ⁴ in 1987 to steal Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants).

This brings me to the other problem with the Naltrexone approach, namely that is all stick and no carrot. Yes, the substance helps to destroy the addiction but it also gets rid of the transcendence which the addict was seeking in the first place. Psychedelics, on the other hand, work by actually providing the sought-after transcendent experience and it is that very transcendent experience from which the psychedelic user often emerges with new insights into their earthly condition and a new mental flexibility in dealing with their drinking problem.

One other bone to pick: I would ask you to question your apparently strong faith in science, at least as practiced in the States.

It is the alleged 'scientific' approach to psychiatry that has led to the great but unacknowledged addiction of the American people, in which 1 in 8 Americans are now chemically dependent on antidepressants ⁵, all under the discredited theory (promulgated by a full-court media press by academic talking heads under the pay of Big Pharma ) that these substances fix a chemical imbalance. As Robert Whitaker demonstrates, however (in 'Anatomy of an Epidemic'), this is pseudoscience, not science. These antidepressants (SSRIs and SNRIs) have been shown to CAUSE the imbalances that they purport to fix. They certainly don't work for me after decades of use, and I am now forced to take Effexor ⁶ the rest of my life against my will - Effexor, a drug that has a relapse rate just as high as heroin ⁷.

But I've yet to hear of one single addiction 'specialist' wringing their hands on my behalf, or on behalf of the tens of thousands of unacknowledged antidepressant addicts actively cursing modern psychiatry online even as I speak - cursing it for one's loss of empowerment, one's unsought-for life-time role as an 'eternal patient,' having to apply to a doctor for their monthly fixes. (Part of the professional silence is based on the convenient myth that there's a meaningful difference between addiction and chemical dependency. Tell that to an Effexor addict after he or she has gone cold turkey for three days.)

Since psychiatry has no problem with thus addicting users like myself -- and to ineffective medicines at that - they have no leg to stand on in warning me that I might become chemically dependent upon, say, opium ⁸ , should I be given the same legal access to that drug that I would have had in 1913, and they have even less standing in remonstrating against my use of totally non-addictive psychedelics. If such drugs are not even considered for treating alcoholism it is thus merely for political reasons, not scientific ones. So let's not write so as to imply that these therapies have somehow been tried and found wanting, when in reality such therapies remain unthinkable to Western researchers under the thrall of Drug War propaganda.

CONCLUSION: I believe we have no right to opine on the relative insolubility of addiction problems until we have re-legalized Mother Nature's medicines. Until then, any conclusions we reach on this topic should be followed by a huge footnote, both for the patient's benefit and by way of protest, stating that the addiction problem, for aught we know, could turn out to be far more soluble than we currently suppose, once the United States finally renounces its anti-patient Drug War, along with its efforts to enforce that war worldwide by way of the financial blackmail of its friends and foes alike.

Author's Follow-up: March 12, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

I wrote the above letter almost five years ago to the day, and I am happy to say that I still agree with every word that I wrote. I need hardly add that Gabrielle Glaser has not seen fit to respond. But this is not surprising. Why not? Because I have yet to find any pundit, researcher, academic or psychiatrist who will answer objections such as mine. They all know that their job status and reputation would be placed in jeopardy if they pushed back against the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. They know, moreover, that they cannot acknowledge the category error involved by putting materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine, because this would place them at odds with materialists in general, those who believe that science can conquer all. If scientists can devise hadron colliders and moon rockets, then surely they can solve the problems of mind and mood, right? That is the modern assumption. And to maintain otherwise is to become a heretic in the modern medical establishment.

And so our scientists continue to look under a microscope to see what they can do for the poor addict - steadfastly ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of outlawed drugs that could elate and inspire and which could be used with common sense protocols to get alcoholics back on their feet and keep them there. They will, of course, claim that there is no proof for that statement, to which I respond: 'Yes, but why is that so?' That is so because no one has ever sat down before the entire psychoactive pharmacopoeia available to humankind (both in nature and in the laboratory) and asked the question: How can we use these drugs, singly or in combination, as part of a psychologically common-sense protocol to keep the 'addicts' mind off an unwanted substance and to help them think outside the box of their ingrained thought patterns? Actually, this has been done before to certain extents and succeeded. It is just that all proof is hidden due to the fact that it involved illicit drug use about which no one is going to be publishing results. Besides, the Drug War's key propaganda strategy is to censor all positive reports of drug use - so such wise use would never be published even if it were to occur.

There is another reason why no proof of my thesis will be forthcoming, and that is because materialists are behaviorists when it comes to mood medicine. They assume a priori (i.e., in advance) that the only 'real' cures are those that can be quantified, from which it follows dogmatically that there can be no cures that 'simply work.' You may say that laughing gas ⁹ cheers you up and that its use gives you something to look forward to, thereby dramatically improving your overall life. But the materialist will respond: 'That's what you think, but you cannot be REALLY cured unless we can change something in your biochemistry quantifiably speaking.' This latter attitude, of course, is a metaphysical conclusion on the part of materialists, not a logical one. It is an assumption of modern materialism ¹⁰, not a proof of that doctrine. It is nothing but the inhumane assumption of behaviorism, which discounts everything that the 'patient' says and forces them to wait for 'cures' that work according to materialist science - which is to say the kind of Big Pharma 'cures' that make them dependent for life and thus turn them into wards of the healthcare state.

Again, no one has ever responded to these objections of mine over the course of the six years now in which I have been broaching them. One can only conclude that modern psychology is a fake science - though for reasons far different from the ones that would be cited by Donald Trump and the gullible conspiracy theorists of our time. It is a pretend science, designed not to solve real-world problems but rather to flatter materialism. This is what happens when a science about subjective phenomena tries to rebrand itself as a 'hard science,' one based on objective facts alone. It adopts the inhumane principles of behaviorism, according to which doctors are the experts when it comes to matters of mind and mood. The only job of our psychological suffering humanity is to sit back and wait for 'cures' from the Dr. Spock's of the world, from those doctors who dogmatically ignore all common sense, such as the obvious power of laughter and anticipation to improve our lives. They search instead for one-size-fits-all biochemical fixes for the enormously variegated problem of human sorrow. This is a lucrative undertaking if there ever was one, for the materialist approach conduces to non-stop disease-mongering. Since the parts matter instead of the whole, the materialist doctor reifies conditions such as 'postpartum depression' and 'seasonal affective disorders,' claiming that each must respond to a unique biochemical intervention. This anti-holistic approach slows human progress to a glacial pace as we place all obvious godsends aside and wait instead for pharma-funded scientists to find discrete 'cures' for everything that ails us.

The result is an absurd world in which we actually prefer suicide ¹¹ to the use of 'drugs' - a world in which we actually prefer brain-damaging shock therapy to the use of 'drugs.' And so your loved one goes to an emergency room because of severe depression. Do they give her a drug that will quickly elate and inspire her? Of course not! That would not be scientific! They start her on a course of drugs that will tranquilize her and turn her into a ward of the healthcare state. If she kills herself before those Big Pharma ¹² ¹³ drugs kick in, too bad! We must be scientific, after all!

The materialist will object that there are known biochemical and/or genetic correlates to given psychological conditions -- to which I say, of course there are! But the question is whether these correlations are both necessary and sufficient in causing the pathologies in question. The fact that these correlates can exist in the absence of pathology says otherwise. This is the whole problem with the drug-war mentality: it sees health and illness as something caused by a few specific things, rather than being the result of a balance of a vast variety of forces, which include an individual's upbringing, their genetics, their personality, ad infinitum. When we simplify the human being for the purposes of the materialist conception of life, we leave out so many things that matter -- not least of all that individual's attitude toward life. Only by thus blinding ourselves to common sense can we ignore the obvious power of drugs to cheer us up overall AND THEREFORE improve our ability to fight the many overlapping human conditions that the materialist dices up into discrete pathologies. Disease-mongering of this kind may be of benefit to insurance companies, but it is a disservice to the human beings whose emotional lives we thereby cheapen in the course of our self-congratulatory and hubristic prognoses.

The whole problem is caused by a category error: the crazy idea that materialists should have anything to do with mind and mood medicine in the first place. Who should? Someone whom I describe as a pharmacologically savvy empath. To learn more, please read the following.

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes for essay entitled Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser: author of 'The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous':

1: “Full Text of ‘the Politics of Ecstasy.’” 2026. Archive.org. 2026. https://archive.org/stream/ecstaspoliticsof00learrich/ecstaspoliticsof00learrich_djvu.txt. (up)
2: The One Thing that Timothy Leary Got Wrong: a philosophical review of The Politics of Ecstasy DWP (up)
3: Timothy Leary was Right DWP (up)
4: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
5: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
6: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
7: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
8: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
9: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
10: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
11: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
12: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
13: 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)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

A generally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear. --James B. Stockade.

If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol slaughters. Drug prohibition is the real killer.

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.

Properly speaking, MDMA has killed no one at all. Prohibitionists were delighted when Leah Betts died because they were sure it was BECAUSE of MDMA/Ecstasy. Whereas it was because of the fact that prohibitionists refuse to teach safe use.

Healthline posted an article in 2021 about the benefits of getting off of antidepressants. They did not even mention the biggest benefit: NO LONGER BEING AN ETERNAL PATIENT -- no longer being a child in the eyes of an all-knowing healthcare system.

I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.

The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.

Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.

Drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.

Now the US is bashing the Honduran president for working with "drug cartels." Why don't we just be honest and say why we're REALLY upset with the guy? Drugs is just the excuse, as always, now what's the real reason? Stop using the drug war to disguise American foreign policy.

Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us

No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).

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.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

(up)

Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser

author of 'The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous'

Author's Follow-up: March 12, 2025

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend