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)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

It is actually illegal to be a Ben Franklin in 21st century America. To put this another way: we outlaw far more than drugs when we outlaw mind and mood medicine.

The Drug War treats doctors like potential criminals and it treats the rest of us like children. Prohibition does not end drug risks: it just outsources them to minorities and other vulnerable populations.

The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.

I'm looking for a United Healthcare doctor now that I'm 66 years old. When I searched my zip code and typed "alternative medicine," I got one single solitary return... for a chiropractor, no less. Some choice. Guess everyone else wants me to "keep taking my meds."

America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own depression by making opium and cocaine illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.

Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!

Heroin versus Antidepressants https://abolishthedea.com/heroin_versus_antidepressants.php

We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.

Let's pass a constitutional amendment to remove Kansas from the Union, and any other state where the racist politicians leverage the drug war to crack down on minorities.

Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.

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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