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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

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




"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 Shulgin3)


Drug researchers are gaslighting us4 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.











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)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




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.

The press once again hauls out the easy answer. Reiner's son was using drugs! Aha! Of course, that explains EVERYTHING! [sigh]

All drugs have potential positive uses for somebody, at some dose, in some circumstance, alone or in combination. To decide in advance that a drug is completely useless is an offense to reason and to human liberty.

The International Observer says the "core issues" causing Mexican drug violence are: "corruption, inequality, and the demand for narcotics in the U.S." Wrong, wrong, wrong. The core issue is DRUG PROHIBITION.

The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.

Drug warriors think only about young people misusing drugs. They never think about the millions of the depressed whom they're condemning to a lifetime of totally unnecessary misery by outlawing drugs.

Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.

I personally hate beets and I could make a health argument against their legality. Beets can kill for those allergic to them. Sure, it's a rare condition, but since when has that stopped a prohibitionist from screaming bloody murder?

The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.

ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."


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






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