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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




Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!

Before anyone receives shock therapy -- or the right to assisted suicide -- they should have the option to start using opium or cocaine daily -- in fact, any drug that makes them feel that life is worth living again.

There was no opioid crisis when Americans were free to smoke opium nightly in their homes. Now scientists around the country are making money hand over fist by "solving" the problem in a politically correct way, without even mentioning the drug prohibition that caused it.

The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.

@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?

I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.

Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.

High suicide rates? What a poser! Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the US has outlawed all substances that elate and inspire???

The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.

Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.


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