Brian sent the following message today to Roy Benaroch, M.D. Professor, Emory University, in regard to his course on Wondrium entitled: "The Skeptic's Guide to Health, Medicine, and the Media."
I know this is a touchy topic in America, but with all due respect, Dr. Benaroch, I do not understand how a course about medical skepticism can overlook the fact that America has outlawed almost all of Mother Nature's godsend psychoactive medicines. Meanwhile, Americans have been taught the unscientific proposition that if such drugs have a bad effect for anyone, then they must not be available for anyone, at any dose, for any reason, ever. It is for this reason that I have gone an entire lifetime now without godsend medicines, being shunted off instead onto Big Pharma meds that dull the mind rather than inspire it.
Skeptic's guide to health? Surely, no one's a REAL skeptic unless they realize that the Drug War has outlawed almost everything that WORKS, psychologically speaking.
This outlawing of medicine also impacts research, both scientific and philosophic. William James himself said that we must study the effects of "drugs" to better understand the nature of consciousness. The Drug War tells us that such research is a crime.
I tried to post the above thoughts on your Wondrium course page, but the moderators told me they were inappropriate. It seems that it is beyond the pale these days to disagree with the Christian Science ideology of the Drug War.
I know you mention marijuana in your course, but that is just one example of an enormous trend: namely, the unprecedented control of Mother Nature by government, in violation of the natural law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America.
Author's Follow-up: February 4, 2025
I tried to convey these sentiments on the Wondrium website, but the Wondrium censors deleted my post. It is truly considered bad manners these days to speak honestly about drugs. I responded, by the way, by canceling my longstanding Wondrium account. I had audited one too many courses of theirs in which the professors pretended that drug prohibition did not exist and that drug use had nothing to tell us about consciousness or human psychology or spiritual states, etc. etc.
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.
It's "convenient" for scientists that their "REAL" cures happen to be the ones that racist politicians will allow. Scientists thus normalize prohibition by pretending that outlawed substances have no therapeutic value. It's materialism collaborating with the drug war.
I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.
I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.
The Hindu religion was inspired by drug use.
Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing. They don't blame such deaths on horses and mountains; neither should they blame drug-related deaths on drugs.
News flash: certain mushrooms can help you improve your life! It's the biggest story in the history of mycology! And yet you wouldn't know it from visiting the websites of most mushroom clubs.
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
Philip Jenkins reports that Rophynol had positive uses for treating mental disorders until the media called it the "date rape drug." We thus punished those who were benefitting from the drug, tho' the biggest drug culprit in date rape is alcohol. Oprah spread the fear virally.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" are horrible because they encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.
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 Roy Benaroch MD published on July 31, 2023 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)
You have been reading an article entitled, Open Letter to Roy Benaroch MD published on July 31, 2023 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)
