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Sartre and Speed

a review of essay number 4 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 26, 2025



The following remarks are part of a series of responses to the essays contained in the 2001 book "Hallucinogens: A Reader," edited by Charles Grob1. The comments below are in response to essay number 4: "Two Classic Trips: Jean-Paul Sartre and Adelle Davis" by Thomas Riedlinger


Riedlinger relates how Sartre "gobbled" massive quantities of amphetamines in order to write "at least three times my normal rhythm." This is the kind of enormous and obvious drug benefit that no one dares acknowledge in the age of drug prohibition. We do not hear about this ability of "speed" to improve mentation because drug law frightens all of those who use drugs in this way into complete silence about their use of this biochemical hack. As a result, we only hear about "speed" in connection with law enforcement and arrests and "meth labs." This is how the Drug Warrior keeps otherwise smart people like Ralph Metzner in a perpetual tizzy about drugs -- or at least about non-psychedelic drugs. They do this by shutting down all positive talk of drug use -- and the Metzners of the world then mistake the resulting silence on the topic as a sign that no positive uses exist for demonized medicines. The fact is, however, that most people actually use drugs wisely, as Carl Hart explains in Drug Use for Grown-Ups. It is just that members of this silent majority have no incentive to talk honestly about their drug use -- and plenty of reasons not to. The Drug War is all about the strategic branding of drug use as good or bad. Speed is good when we call it Ritalin and use it to increase the concentration level of grade schoolers. Speed is evil when we call it meth and use it to increase the concentration level of adults.

Unfortunately, it would seem that you can fool all of the people all of the time with Drug War propaganda -- or at least all of the non-indigenous peoples -- considering how many Drug War pundits are themselves bamboozled by various Drug War lies.











Notes for essay entitled Sartre and Speed: a review of essay number 4 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob:

1: Hallucinogens: a reader Grob, M.D., editor, Charles, Penguin Putnam, 2002 (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




AI is inherently plagiaristic technology. It tells us: "Hey, guys, look what I can do!" -- when it should really be saying, "Hey, guys, look how I stole all your data and repackaged it in such a way as to make it appear that I am the genius, not you!"

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.

If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.

Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.

When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!

It is evil to give the depressed drugs to help them die while barring them from using drugs that could make them wish to live.

When is the Holocaust Museum going to recognize that the Drug War has Nazified American life? Probably, on the same day that the Jefferson Foundation finally admits to having sold out Jefferson by inviting the DEA onto his estate in 1987 to confiscate his poppy plants.

The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.

I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.

This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.


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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.

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