Science is not free in the age of the drug war

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Science is not free in the age of the drug war

an open letter to The American Council on Science and Health

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

January 23, 2024

The American Council on Science and Health, ACSH, says it has been "promoting science and debunking junk since 1978." Here is a letter that I wrote to them after reading an article on their website by Josh Bloom, Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Science at the University of Virginia.

Dear Sir or Madam:

I would like to suggest to you that science is censored in the age of the Drug War and that we live in a kind of Dark Ages thanks to this fact.

Update: May 05, 2025

We are willfully forgoing all sorts of potential treatments for illnesses, mental and physical, because of our anti-scientific belief that psychoactive substances can be judged "good" or "bad" without regard for context. Meanwhile, the materialist paradigm helps researchers make a virtue out of prohibition by allowing them to ignore common sense in favor of what they see in a microscope. (Who needs drugs that "merely" make one feel good?) And so we see articles with naive headlines like the following in Forbes magazine by Dr. Robert Glatter asking: "Can laughing gas help those with treatment-resistant depression?"

What?! He has to ask? As a lifelong chronic depressive, I feel like shouting: "Let me use laughing gas while you continue to search for what will REALLY make me happy." And yet the US and UK are attempting to criminalize laughing gas even as we speak, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James, creating the kinds of mental states which he told us it was our duty as philosophers to study!

If we were not in the Dark Ages scientifically, then every suicidal person would have a laughing gas ¹ kit at their side, just as we give an epi pen to the allergic. If we were not in the Dark Ages, then we would be actively searching for ways to help Alzheimer's ² patients with the many psychoactive substances that stimulate new thoughts and even new neurons. But we have a "prior commitment" to substance demonization, which is the above-mentioned idea that a psychoactive drug must be judged by misuse and abuse only, without regard to context -- and with no concern for its benefits, nor for the violence that will be created by the prohibition of that drug.

For more evidence that we are in a Dark Ages scientifically, consider the following:

We STILL shock the brains of the depressed rather than allowing them to use drugs that could cheer them up on the double and even give them psychological insights in the process -- like the hundreds of non-addictive godsends created by Alexander Shulgin.

We allow the depressed and elderly to use drugs to kill themselves (we call it euthanasia), but we will not let them use drugs that might make them want to live.

The Drug War has upset all our priorities and censored science. That's why I've gone without godsend meds for my depression for 65 years. The government is all about spreading the word that psychoactive medicines are evil. That's why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse rather than a National Institute on Drug Use. That's why we judge psychoactive drugs by a safety standard that no one applies to anything else in the world.

Take Josh Bloom's article about licking hallucinogenic frogs. The article is tongue-in-cheek, and yet it represents the usual Drug War biases. Josh candidly tells us that the chances of being killed by such an activity are vanishingly rare, like those of being killed by a falling coconut. Yet in the same article, he says the licking of frogs is a "disturbing trend." What? WHY is it a disturbing trend if the dangers are so remote? Who's disturbed by it? Drug warriors, apparently -- the same Drug Warriors who will scream bloody murder if you even suggest that guns are dangerous.

If you want a writer on such topics, please let me know. Maybe I could write a sort of "dissenters" column... to balance out the scientific triumphalism that reckons without the Drug War.

Author's Follow-up: December 22, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

It's scarcely a year later yet I look back and laugh at my naivete. Did I really think that folks wanted someone to speak honestly about drugs? I am coming to believe that the penny is not going to drop for humankind for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years -- and sadly this may only happen after a global nuclear tragedy -- from which we may finally learn that drugs that facilitate trust and compassion are not the enemy -- indeed, they are a big part of the answer for an humanity whose innate fear of "the other" will have, by then, no doubt have destroyed the planet.

Author's Follow-up:

May 05, 2025

"Debunking junk"? Modern drug science is junk. Modern drug researchers tell us that drugs that produce the following results have no positive uses for humankind:

"This feels marvelous, and a whole new way to be much more relaxed, accepting, being in the moment. No more axes to grind. I can be free."

"Excellent feelings, tremendous opening of insight and understanding, a real awakening."

"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."

(quotes from Pihkal by chemist Alexander Shulgin ³)

Drug researchers are gaslighting us ⁴ when they implicitly tell us that experiences of these kinds have no benefits for the depressed -- or for anybody else for that matter.

This absurd self-censorship on their part is to be expected, however, because it has always been a category error to place materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine. Materialists are behaviorists when it comes to psychology, and this means that they are dogmatically obliged to ignore anecdote, history and common sense when it comes to the otherwise glaringly obvious benefits of drug use.

Consider this citation from the 19th-century short story entitled "What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien:

"Those hours of opium happiness which the Doctor and I spent together in secret were regulated with a scientific accuracy. We did not blindly smoke the drug of paradise, and leave our dreams to chance. While smoking, we carefully steered our conversation through the brightest and calmest channels of thought.⁵"

Just imagine: Our scientists are telling us (mostly by their inaction, rather than by their words) that this "drug of paradise" -- namely, opium ⁶ , a drug that was considered a panacea by Avicenna and Paracelsus -- has no benefits for humanity! This is the ultimate gaslighting ⁷ ! If this is not immediately clear to Americans -- and indeed to scientists themselves -- it can only be because Drug War propaganda and censorship has fried the American brain. Americans can no longer imagine any positive uses for the drugs that they have been taught to hate since their grade-school days.

The result? American science is completely censored in the age of the Drug War, and those who carry on as if nothing is wrong (like our friends at ACSH) are living in a world of make-believe, in defiance of human progress and common sense.

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes:

1: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
2: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
3: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
4: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
5: Great Ghost Stories O'Brien, Fitz-James , Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., 1918 (up)
6: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
7: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

I knew democracy was in trouble when most Americans in the '80s saw no problem with allowing drug testers to go on a fishing expedition in their bodily fluids for substances of which politicians disapprove.

Today's war against drug users is like Elizabeth I's war against Catholics. Both are religious crackdowns. For today's oppressors, the true faith (i.e., the moral way to live) is according to the drug-hating religion of Christian Science.

My approach to withdrawal: incrementally reduce daily doses over 6 months, or even a year, meanwhile using all the legal entheogens and psychedelics that you can find in a way likely to boost your endurance and "sense of purpose" to make withdrawal successful.

Some outlawed drugs grow new neurons in the brain. To refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!

Timothy Leary's wife wrote: "We went to Puerto Rico and all we did was take cocaine and read Faust to one another." And there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with that!!! The drug war is all about scaring us and making illegal drug use as dangerous as possible.

I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.

The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.

I'm on SNRIs. But SSRIs and SNRIs are both made with materialist presumptions in mind: that the best way to change people is with a surgical strike at one-size-fits-all chemistry. That's the opposite of the shamanic holism that I favor.

Health is not a quality, it's a balance. To decide drug legality based on 'health' grounds thus opens a Pandora's box of different points of view.

If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.

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

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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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