Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass
blog icon orange rss icon with stylized radio waves bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter substack icon


back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow


Science Fiction and the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 17, 2022



On Seth MacFarlane's Orville, the Union Council has turned Earth into a world without hunger and violence while yet having continued to outlaw all psychoactive substances except for liquor. All problems have been solved and now the world is everbyody's oyster.

Well, we both know that that's never going to happen. No matter what the nerds say, neither peace nor peace of mind comes as a result of mere technological progress. If that were so, today's humans should be ecstatic compared to their condition just 50 years ago, and yet au contraire: today they're shooting up schoolyards and threatening to launch nuclear war 1 2 3 s.

That's why shows like The Orville are so irritating: they ignore the obvious solution to violence and hatred, i.e. psychoactive medicine, preferring instead to bring peace to the galaxy through the same old gunboat diplomacy of our forebears and by patching up shrewd treaties with hot-headed (and inevitably gnarly-looking) aliens.

So while the Orville crew may have peace on their home front, they're more than happy to blow a Kaylon ship out of the sky, without sparing one thought for the Kaylon kids who have thereby lost a father.

If Seth wants us to really credit his utopian depiction of Earth, he would show us a world full of pharmacologically savvy empaths, who help Earthlings to screw their heads on straight through the advised use of any psychoactive substances whatsoever, some of which have inspired entire religions in the past. Then, rather than blasting Kaylon fathers out of the sky, the Earthlings would spread the news around the galaxy about how all human-like species can profit from the godsend psychoactive substances which the barbarians of the past once tried to stupidly demonize with the politically created pejorative called "drugs." Otherwise, his utopia is based on the patently false idea that humans can perfect their species by surrounding themselves with ever cooler apps, until they reach a drug-free nirvana of maximum efficiency.

Author's Follow-up: July 20, 2022





Oh, and pardon me, but Claire Finn's infatuation with robots is absurd. She may as well fall in love with a mannequin. When a child thinks that a robot is real, we laugh; when a full-grown woman (a doctor, no less) thinks that a robot is real, we hold our hands up in despair -- unless, of course, we are acne-scarred programming nerds who are flattered by the idea that our coding is so advanced that it can precipitate the growth of human emotions and even sentience.

If Claire wants to love anyone, it should be the programmer who wrote the code for Isaac, not Isaac himself (or rather itself), who, after all, can be endlessly compiled into infinite variants of himself, each asserting its own list of rights, whereas the programmer has only one go-to face to present to the world and claims only those rights that appertain to one solitary board-certified human being.

And now analog curmudgeons like myself have to treat Isaac as a human being? At least nowadays, I can still yell at a phone-bot when it completely misunderstands my most basic sentence. If Seth MacFarlane has his way, my descendants will be arrested for harassing robots when they task the tin can tribe for their notorious lack of common sense.

That said, I'm a bit of a programmer myself. I'm always worried that one of my programs will spring to life of its own accord someday and demand recognition as a conscious entity. I wrote a rather complicated tic-tac-toe game a few years back -- who's to say that it won't spring into existence someday and demand its fair share of rights as a sentient being? Of course that will raise the question: can mere "software code" have rights, or does the code have to express itself through the medium of human-looking firmware that folks like us can plausibly associate with humanity?

I'd love to be the fly on the wall of the Supreme Court when they tackle that case. I bet the software code will win, too. After all, it does sound like a kind of "lookism" to limit our attribution of sentience merely to creatures that manifest themselves as solid objects. Surely, it's what's in your heart that counts -- or else what's in your hard drive!









Notes:

1: 8 Nuclear Close Calls that Nearly Spelled Disaster Davidson, Lucy, History Hit, 2022 (up)
2: Global Nuclear Warhead Stockpiles (1945-2024) Voronoi, 2023 (up)
3: Nuclear Near-Misses: The Close Calls That Almost Changed the World Atomic Toasters, 2024 (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.

What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.

Trump supports the drug war and Big Pharma: the two forces that have turned me into a patient for life with dependence-causing antidepressants. Big Pharma makes the pills, and the drug war outlaws all viable alternatives.

Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is launching a campaign to celebrate the 50th year of Richard Nixon's War on Drugs. We need to give credit where credit's due for the mass arrest of minorities, the inner city gun violence and the civil wars that it's generated overseas.

People talk about how dangerous Jamaica is -- but no one reminds us that it is all due to America's Drug War. Yes, cannabis and psilocybin are legal there, but plenty of drugs are not, and even if they were, their illegality elsewhere would lead to fierce dealer rivalry.

Guess who's in charge of protecting us from AI? Chuck Schumer! The same guy who protected us from drugs -- by turning America into a prison camp full of minorities and so handing two presidential elections to Donald Trump.

Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.

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.

The Drug War has turned America into the world's first "Indignocracy," where our most basic rights can be vetoed by a misinformed public. That's how scheming racist politicians put an end to the 4th amendment to the US Constitution.


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






back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow
Book Cover

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

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

Purchase Your Copy
Book Cover

Drama lovers: collect full-cast recordings of classic plays

In my spare time, when I am not shaming drug warriors for their heartless drug policies, I create full-cast recordings of classic plays using the latest in synthetic voices licensed by the Natural Reader company. Snag your copy of my production of Volpone, by Ben Jonson... and follow me on Payhip for more where that came from, including classics like The Post Office, The Double Dealer and The Inspector General. -- Yours in all-too-justified outrage, the Drug War Philosopher @ abolishthedea.com.

Purchase Your Copy



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.


Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP (up)