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.
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.
Imagine if we held sports to the same safety standard as drugs. There would be no sports at all. And yet even free climbing is legal. Why? Because with sports, we recognize the benefits and not just the downsides.
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.
Critics tell me that drugs have nothing to offer us. What? Not only are they being psychologically naive and completely ahistorical, but they are forgetting that the term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they connote.
There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.
They still don't seem to get it. The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.
If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.
That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.
LA Police Chief Daryl Gates said drug users should be summarily executed. William Bennett said drug dealers should be beheaded. These are the attitudes that the drug war inculcates. This racist and brutal ideology must be wiped out.
Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.
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)
