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


Self-help nonsense in the age of the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 7, 2021



Posted in response to How to Create a Sense of Purpose According to Science, by Cortland Dahl in Medium, April 2021.


It's really a hoot to have scientists tell us how to achieve a sense of purpose in the age of the Drug War. The scientist is in the position of a doctor who is permitted to recommend anything whatsoever for a headache except an aspirin. Mother Nature's psychoactive medicines are custom-made to give us a sense of purpose when used advisedly. The natural substance Soma produced such powerful insights of this kind that it spawned the entire Vedic religion. Opium increased Benjamin Franklin's sense of purpose and coca wine inspired the stories of such authors as HG Wells, Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas. Plato, Aristotle and Cicero were philosophically inspired by the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries1. Yet America, a supposedly scientific country (and one based on Natural Law at that) chose to start demonizing psychoactive plant medicines in 1914 and essentially forced the rest of the world to follow suit through economic blackmail. We even claimed the right to rush overseas and burn the plants of which racist stateside politicians disapproved, without, of course, bothering to ask the mere citizens of those countries how they felt about the matter.

Author's follow-up for September 19, 2025

The result: when our authors write about personal improvement, they ignore the therapeutic 64,000-pound gorilla in the room: viz plant medicine, leaving us with sterile theoretical adjurations from the world of science to eat these foods, sleep at these hours, consume these sorts of vegetables, and think all kinds of warm and fuzzy thoughts, under the demonstrably false assumption that we can think our way to psychological health, let alone to full-on self-actualization in life. But until we stop demonizing plant medicines and start figuring out how to use them wisely to achieve our psychological goals, I for one do not want to listen to science's latest theoretical advice about finding purpose in life. I've read countless articles of that kind before, and I'm still depressed as ever at age 62. The only difference is I'm not only depressed now, but I'm hooked on Big Pharma 2 3 's tranquilizing antidepressants 4 and will have to take them for the rest of my life, despite the fact that, unlike plant medicine, they were never created with my self-actualization in mind. Meanwhile, if Americans seek a purpose in life, let them start fighting the long-overdue battle to end America's disgracefully anti-scientific Drug War, which is also anti-minority, anti-patient, and the establishment of a religion: namely that of Christian Science, which tells us that we have some moral duty to say no to the life-enhancing plant medicines that grow at our very feet.

Author's Follow-up: December 2, 2022



Obama launched a BRAIN initiative while continuing to support the outlawing of almost all psychoactive substances that provide insight into the nature of consciousness and how the brain actually works5. Learn more in my essay entitled The Brainless Initiative.



Author's Follow-up:

September 19, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




You create a sense of purpose by succeeding in life. For many of us, this means transcending negative upbringings and that low-grade perpetual trauma that we call neurosis. This in turn can be accomplished with the help of drugs that focus the mind and permit one to transcend. Such drug use can create a virtuous circle. This is simple psychology which the behaviorists in academia ignore, thereby helping the materialist medical establishment to maintain its enormously profitable monopoly on mind and mood medicine. In their reductive focus, they connive with the Drug War in the BIG LIE that near panaceas like opium 6 and coca have no positive uses whatsoever.

This is a world of make-believe that we live in today -- a world where Freud is known for psychoanalysis -- when, in a sane world, he would be known for his common-sense realization that drugs like cocaine 7 8 can, for the majority of grown-ups, make the whole field of psychiatry COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT!









Notes:

1: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
4: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
5: The Brainless Initiative DWP (up)
6: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
7: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
8: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote: "The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."

The reasons that people use drugs are psychologically obvious. Academics gaslight us on this topic and invent new diseases to explain away our desire to live large.

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.

Drug Warriors should be legally banned from watching or reading Sherlock Holmes stories, since in their world, it is a crime for such people as Sherlock Holmes to exist, i.e., people who use medicines to improve their mind and mood.

The U.S. government created violence out of whole cloth in America's inner cities with drug prohibition -- and now it is using that violence as an excuse to kick the people that they themselves have knocked down.

We've all been taught since grade school that human beings cannot use psychoactive medicines wisely. That is a defeatest lie. It's criminal to keep substances illegal that can awaken the mind and remind us of our full potential in life.

All of our problems with opioids and opiates could have been avoided had the busybody Chicken Littles in America left well enough alone and let folks continue to smoke regulated opium peaceably in their own homes.

There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.

I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!

The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.


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

Diary of a Drug Fiend

This is the only full-cast recording of Aleister Crowley's 1922 classic paeon to common sense. It is the first book -- and so far almost the only book -- to stake out a philosophy of drug use that is compatible with human freedom, one in which we learn to use drugs as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. This recording was produced by the Drug War Philosopher and your purchases help support his effort to push back against the tragically counterproductive policy of drug prohibition, in the name of human freedom and of humanity's right to heal.

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)