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Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the war on drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 3, 2024



I was chatting with my sister last night about a distant family member who can scarcely leave her house because of agoraphobia. Had the discussion occurred five years ago, I would have simply put this condition down to bad luck and condoled with my sibling over the trials and tribulations of our distant relation. But having since then studied the potential powers of psychoactive drugs to inspire, elate and even educate, I see such instances in an entirely new light today, as a sign, that is, that America is living in a self-imposed dark ages. For such conditions as agoraphobia are not untreatable, as we both seemed to implicitly believe judging by our impotent head-shaking on the subject. There are, in fact, hundreds of psychoactive medicines that could be creatively used in various protocols to overcome even extreme agoraphobia, substances ranging from the shrooms currently being trialed by MAPS1 2 to the phenethylamines like MDMA 3 that have been synthesized by Alexander Shulgin4. So the big story here is not that my distant cousin has troubles: the big story is that America is willfully refusing to provide her with godsend relief.

If you doubt this claim, I invite you to read Alexander Shulgin's description (below) of his experiences on a phenethylamine that he created and called T-7. Keep in mind in doing so that phenethylamines are not some exotic psychoactive substance found in some rare endangered cactus in the Chilean desert, but rather, as Shulgin writes, they are 'a naturally occurring compound found in both the animal and plant kingdoms,' one which, in fact, is endogenous to the human brain5.



Account of Alexander Shulgin's experience on phenethylamine T-7

'Suddenly I am completely pierced, down to the core of my being, by what feels like the penetration of the Finger of God. It seems to be a female source that reaches me and touches. I am totally undone by this deep touching, and sob uncontrollably for several minutes, crying out all my pain and fears, and feeling sheer ecstasy. As I feel gratitude for the beauty, I am pierced again and again, and continue to sob.'6


Anyone with a little common sense will immediately see how such drugs could be leveraged into empathic protocols that could treat agoraphobia. Unfortunately, common sense is at a premium in the age of the Drug War, so I will spell it out as follows.

First, what is agoraphobia? It is surely a kind of knee-jerk mental correlation between crowds and personal discomfiture. It's a negative psychological association that triggers all kinds of flight mechanisms in the afflicted individual. How then do you fight such a condition? Surely by helping the sufferer to start associating crowds with a different feeling altogether: namely, a feeling of bliss, love and contentedness rather than of panic, confusion and existential angst. And this is precisely what an empathic counselor could do using substances like T-7. He or she could gently introduce the agoraphobic to a whole new way of thinking about crowds, not by scheduling a hundred expensive office visits in which the duo discuss tactics for reducing anxiety (words, words, words!), but rather by helping the client begin emotionally associating crowds with empathic feelings of love and trust. How? Simply by accompanying the drug-taking client on a series of trips into increasingly crowded environments so that their knee-jerk reaction of horror can be replaced over time with a knee-jerk reaction of overwhelming curiosity, compassion and love.

Of course, the ideal treatment protocol will vary with the individual, when it comes to which drug(s) are to be used for such a purpose and how the encounters with crowds are to be managed, etc., but the kinds of protocols hinted at above are merely psychological common sense - or at least they would be had modern psychology not fallen under the spell of materialism 7 which causes drug researchers to insist that all 'real' cures must be found in brain chemistry8. This is why materialist doctors actually cannot decide if laughing gas could help the depressed9 - because they do not care about what the depressed actually feel and believe; instead the materialist pretends that they know more about what makes a person happy than the person themselves. They essentially say to the depressed today: 'I'm the doctor: I'll tell you when you're REALLY happy, thank you very much.'

And this brings up a crucial problem that even Drug War opponents have yet to recognize: namely, that medical doctors are not qualified to perform research on psychoactive medicines, except perhaps to tell us what are likely toxicities at given doses. The determination of proper protocols for such drugs should be made by empathic 'psychonauts,'10 pharmacologically savvy 'shaman' who take time to learn the attitudes and aspirations of their client and who use best practices based on their own actual experience with the drugs in question. 'Clean and sober' medical doctors have no expertise in these areas, neither pharmacologically speaking nor psychologically speaking, as is clear given their dogmatic disdain for user accounts in the case of laughing gas. To a medical doctor, the user accounts are worthless because they are subjective, whereas the psychonaut realizes that subjectivity is the whole point of psychoactive therapy and that no such treatment can be effective if it ignores the feelings, desires and aspirations of the client.

The overarching point here is that agoraphobia - and indeed most so-called 'mental health problems' - are NOT intractable - or at very least we have absolutely no right to say so in a country that has outlawed almost all the medicines that could help combat such conditions. That would be like outlawing antiviral medicine and then claiming that the flu was intractable. Nor are the drugs of Alexander Shulgin the only psychoactive substances that could conceivably help with agoraphobia. I speak from personal experience in saying that coca wine11 (at least the time-honored brand created by Angelo Mariani)12 can buoy mood and outlook, in such a way that its advised use could potentially help the sufferer to, as it were, gradually 'wean themselves' off the feelings of mistrust and fear with which they associate crowds. Then, of course, there are the seemingly endless plants and fungi of Mother Nature, about which we know shamefully little so far, but whose vast untapped potential can be readily guessed at by anyone who peruses such books as 'The Plants of the Gods' by Albert Hofmann13 or 'The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants,' a book also partially edited by Albert Hofmann14, again reminding us of how few individuals have been able to violate drug-war taboos with relative impunity in order to provide facts instead of fear about the modern scapegoat called 'drugs.'

But the entire world is clueless thanks to its knee-jerk adoption of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. A quick Google search on 'agoraphobia' brings up seemingly exhaustive analyses of the condition on the Mayo Clinic website, the website for the NHS, WebMD and the National Institute of Mental Health, etc. They all present the condition as largely intractable, while offering shreds of hope based on various materialist protocols... and yet they all miss the point. They all ignore the many common sense drug-aided protocols that could be used to alter the agoraphobic's boiler-plate reaction to crowds. In fact, the failure of these websites to even mention drugs like the inspiring T-7 would strike readers as a glaring omission, were the readers themselves not living in a world wherein we have been taught from childhood to pretend that such substances do not even exist. For in the terminology of Charles Fort 15 , such otherwise obvious treatments have been 'damned' by both science and the world at large.16.

In light of this sad state of affairs, I no longer think of that distant relative of mine as a victim of agoraphobia, but rather as a victim of the War on Drugs, that Christian Science ideology that prioritizes ignorance over human happiness.

Author's Follow-up: February 3, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

Most of the drugs that could be used to fight agoraphobia are non-addictive; however, even occasional opium smoking could work to allay agoraphobic responses, even though we have all been programmed to think of this as unthinkable. Nor is this a medical question: it is rather a question of priorities in life and what constitutes the good life. The question is: Is it better to live a sober life away from all crowds or an active life among people with the help of a potentially habit-forming drug like opium 17 ? Again, this is not a medical question, it is a question of what we value in life. It can be answered by no one but the agoraphobic themselves.











Notes for essay entitled Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the war on drugs:

1: MAPS: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (up)
2: Three Problems With Rick Doblin's MAPS DWP (up)
3: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
4: Alexander Shulgin: American Hero DWP (up)
5: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
6: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
7: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
8: Lord Save us from 'Real' Cures DWP (up)
9: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
10: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism DWP (up)
11: Rossen, Jake. 2021. “Vin Mariani: The Cocaine-Infused Wine Beloved by Popes and Presidents.” Mental Floss. March 26, 2021. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/644226/vin-mariani-cocaine-wine-history. (up)
12: Coca Wine DWP (up)
13: Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers Schultes, Richard, 1979 (up)
14: The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications Hoffman, Albert, Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, 2005 (up)
15: Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation DWP (up)
16: Charles, Fort. 2025. “The Book of the Damned.” Gutenberg.Org. 2025. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22472/pg22472-images.html. (up)
17: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.

People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.

Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.

Health is not a quality, it's a balance. To decide drug legality based on 'health' grounds thus opens a Pandora's box of different points of view.

Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.

Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.

Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing.

Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.

In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.

It's no wonder that folks blame drugs. Carl Hart is the first American scientist to openly say in a published book that even the so-called "hard" drugs can be used wisely. That's info that the drug warriors have always tried to keep from us.


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