'Shut up and take your meds!' How academics ignore the insights of actual substance users when writing about drugs
an open letter to Iolanda Ganea, peer review assistant for the Academia Journal on Mental Health and Well-Being
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 28, 2025
ear Iolanda:
I received a request to review "Psilocybin in Psychiatric Therapeutics" for the Academia Journal of Mental Health and Well-Being1. I would love to help, but I am afraid I do not qualify to be a reviewer according to your own criteria because I have no PhD.
I would add, however, that in a sane world, I WOULD be allowed to review such a paper given my personal history with both psilocybin and psychiatry and the fact that I have written hundreds of essays on this topic over the years. Unfortunately, there is a bias in the whole peer review process that ignores philosophical angles to such papers and that shows no interest in the views of the hoi polloi who are merely on the receiving end of psychiatric nostrums.
Again, I would love to provide a review, but it does not seem that academia today is open to the views of folks on the receiving end of psychiatric therapies.
They bar me from the discussion in the name of professionalism, failing to realize that by doing so, they are "reckoning without their host."
So I must leave the field to allow our credentialed scientists to carry on their private discussions amongst themselves, without input from those whom their policy decisions will ultimately affect. My only role, as my psychiatrist would tell me, is to "shut up and take my meds!"
AFTERWORD
My email to Iolanda was a trifle more diplomatic. I have fleshed out my grievances in the online version of my letter above in order to stress the problematic nature of the incestuous academic status quo, thanks to which our credentialed experts feel free to ignore all highly relevant insights unless those insights come from within the Ivory Tower itself.
Discussion Topics
June 02, 2025
Attention Teachers and Professors: Brian is not writing these essays for his health. (Well, in a way he is, actually, but that's not important now.) His goal is to get the world thinking about the anti-democratic and anti-scientific idiocy of the War on Drugs. You can stimulate your students' brainwashed grey matter on this topic by having them read the above essay and then discuss the following questions as a group!
Behaviorism and professionalism silence the voices of the 'patient.' Explain.
List the many reasons why Iolanda might be disinclined to respond to the above email.
Why does it sometimes seem like the patient's only role is to "shut up and take their meds"?
When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia:
OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!
All the problems that folks associate with drugs are caused by prohibition. Thousands were not dying on the streets when opioids were legal in America. It took prohibition to bring that about.
In fact, we throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The words as used today are extremely judgmental. The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.
In fact, that's what we need when we finally return to legalization: educational documentaries showing how folks manage to safely incorporate today's hated substances into their life and lifestyle.
Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."
Drug warriors have taught us that honest about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.
Critics tell me that drugs have nothing to offer us. What? Not only are they being psychologically naive and completely ahistorical, but they are forgetting that the term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they connote.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
Drug warriors do not seem to see any irony in the fact that their outlawing of opium eventually resulted in an "opioid crisis." The message is clear: people want transcendence. If we don't let them find it safely, they will find it dangerously.
Drug warriors have harnessed the perfect storm. Prohibition caters to the interests of law enforcement, psychotherapy, Big Pharma, demagogues, puritans, and materialist scientists, who believe that consciousness is no big "whoop" and that spiritual states are just flukes.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, 'Shut up and take your meds!' How academics ignore the insights of actual substance users when writing about drugs: an open letter to Iolanda Ganea, peer review assistant for the Academia Journal on Mental Health and Well-Being, published on May 28, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
ear Iolanda:
You have been reading an article entitled, 'Shut up and take your meds!' How academics ignore the insights of actual substance users when writing about drugs: an open letter to Iolanda Ganea, peer review assistant for the Academia Journal on Mental Health and Well-Being, published on May 28, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
