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Scientific Collaboration in the War on Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

October 1, 2024



Today I posted the following tweet on X:

Scientists are responsible for endless incarceration 1 s in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.


I then got some apparent pushback, stating that scientists have been trying for years to get the DEA to acknowledge drug benefits and that conservatives are the real problem.

This is true in a way, but not without major important qualifications, and so I responded to this thoughtful individual with a small barrage of qualifying tweets, which I hope elucidated rather than miffed.

I reproduce my responses here in the hopes of illuminating the subtleties involved in this important topic viz. scientists and their guilt (or lack thereof) in promoting the War on Drugs -- and its hateful incarceration 2 s of people who are, after all, merely trying to improve their own damn minds!


1) Yeah, there are definitely good guys out there. Unfortunately, they are either limited by their materialist orthodoxy into adducing only specific and limited microscopic evidence or they abandon materialism 3 for the nonce and talk the common psychological sense that we all understand implicitly and for which we need neither degrees nor lab coats.

2) In other words, scientists qua scientists (i.e., as materialists) are very limited in what they can demonstrate positively about drugs. This is because it is a category error to consider them specialists about human emotions and psychology in the first place.

3) Folks like Ben Franklin enjoyed opium 4 and used it wisely and to good effect, as did Marcus Aurelius. But to PROVE that this helped them is asking a lot. Indeed, it's asking too much. Materialist science is not qualified to do that: the user's own successful life itself IS the evidence of efficacy! (When we look elsewhere for proof of efficacy, we are like OJ Simpson launching a search for a killer -- anyone at all, other than himself.)

4) And so when scientists and/or the d e a claim a lack of established benefits, they are making a philosophical statement peculiar to westerners, that efficacy must be judged under a microscope.

5) Conservatives set the pernicious trend in the Drug War and are happy to have materialist scientists in charge of determining drug efficacy. they know that such progress will be glacial. the fda STILL can't wrap its materialist head around the obvious, that mdma 'works,' in every meaningful sense of that word.

And so while it's fine to say that scientists have tried to be helpful, that statement can only be properly understood in the light of a number of important qualifications that could never be compressed into a single tweet (except perhaps by the linguistically thrifty William Shakespeare himself) hence the foregoing mini essay.











Notes for essay entitled Scientific Collaboration in the War on Drugs:

1: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
2: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
3: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
4: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.

Anyone who has read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin knows that the drug warriors have it exactly backwards. Drugs are our friends. We need to find safe ways to use them to improve ourselves psychologically, spiritually and mentally.

In an article about Mazatec mushroom use, the author says: "Mushrooms should not be considered a drug." True. But then NOTHING should be considered a drug: every substance has potential good uses.

Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that drug prohibition is wrong.

If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.

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.

In a free future, newspapers will have philosophers on their staffs to ensure that said papers are not inciting consequence-riddled hysteria through a biased coverage of drug-related mishaps.

We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.

The "scheduling" system is completely anti-scientific and anti-patient. It tells us we can make a one-size-fits-all decision about psychoactive substances without regard for dosage, context of use, reason for use, etc. That's superstitious tyranny.

If MAPS wants to make progress with MDMA they should start "calling out" the FDA for judging holistic medicines by materialist standards, which means ignoring all glaringly obvious benefits.


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






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