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Thanks for nothing, Bertrand Russell!

How scientific materialists took away my right to heal: an open letter to James Glattfelder, author of The Sapient Cosmos

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 11, 2026



Good afternoon, James.

I would like to share a few thoughts on your informative post about syncretic idealism1. To make my comments intelligible, however, I must first engage in a practice that I would ordinarily condemn as being "bad form," as the Brits might put it. I must share a little autobiographical information, namely, the fact that I am what people might call a chronic depressive. As such, I have been prevented from healing for a lifetime now by drug prohibition, which has outlawed almost all substances that inspire and elate, including laughing gas, opium, cocaine, phenethylamines, tryptamines, harmines, psychedelics, etc. Drug prohibition has shunted me off instead onto a Big Pharma "med" that is far harder to kick than heroin, thereby turning me into a ward of the healthcare state and a patient for life. The relevance of this backstory is this: that the materialist scientific establishment has helped normalize drug prohibition by maintaining (both implicitly and explicitly) that the inspiring substances of which I speak have no proven abilities to help the depressed and that endless well-funded studies still need to be done to establish such efficacy, a conclusion that they extend to laughing gas itself, as is clear from the FDA's attempts in 2023 to reclassify nitrous oxide as a "drug," thereby rendering it even less available to the suicidal than it already is as a practical matter2.

With this backstory in mind, I hope you can see why I would take exception to the belief of Bertrand Russell that idealism was a "romanticization of subjectivity that lacked logical rigor."3 I do so because I have encountered that mindset before. This is the mindset that keeps me from being able to use substances like laughing gas and phenethylamines and cocaine, substances that so obviously could help me. Materialists do not care that laughing gas makes a depressed person laugh -- that's just a subjective experience, after all; they want rigor. They want to be able to look under a microscope and see molecules behaving in a pattern that accords with the latest theories of the biochemical determinists. They want something quantifiable that they can place on PowerPoint presentations to impress would-be funders, not just testimony from users, as if laypeople could be expected to have any expertise whatsoever in these areas! Humph! "Depressed users can laugh as much as they want when using drugs," say the materialists, "but only WE can tell them if they are laughing advisedly, only WE can tell them if they are REALLY being helped by N20." If this sounds absurd, it is, and that's my point. As Whitehead tells us, "The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us."4 Hence, materialism fails. QED.

Actually, the world created by materialism is even more absurd than this. Materialists are so convinced that drugs have no "proven" benefits that they refuse to discuss the propriety of drug prohibition when discussing the propriety of assisted suicide for the depressed.5 6 7 8 Consider the case of depressed Canadian Claire Brosseau.9 10 She is asking for her "right" to have the state use drugs to kill her, the same state that refuses to let her use drugs that could make her wish to live. One of Claire's psychiatrists is even championing Claire's "right" to be killed by the state, but neither she nor anyone else is championing Claire's right to access the plants and fungi that grow at her very feet. No one is championing Claire's right to take care of her own health as she sees fit. What does she know? She is just a "patient," after all, full of subjective ideas. "Real scientists demand rigor," says the materialist, "just like Bertrand Russell." Of course, drug prohibition itself is playing a role here in shaping attitudes, but it is the philosophy of materialism that has given drug researchers an excuse for collaborating with Drug Warriors rather than standing up for the rights of people like Claire to heal, which would entail being brave and actually pushing back against drug prohibition, not only on behalf of Claire's rights but also on behalf of the freedom of academia.

For the downsides of the materialist weltanschauung are not only seen in the health field. The materialists' disdain for drug-induced epiphanies has brought about the censorship of William James' work with altered states in major universities. James's work of this kind is never mentioned in the lengthy entry on James in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy11, nor even in James's biography at the website of his alma mater, Harvard12, where he founded the very psychology department that is now distorting his legacy. Instead of reviling drug prohibition as entailing academic censorship, the Ivory Tower has chosen to censor itself to the point of rewriting history in a way that privileges materialist theories of consciousness. Materialists seem to believe that, if they cannot win an argument, they can at least leverage drug laws and drug attitudes in such a way as to silence the opposition.

I hope you find these insights useful. Thanks for the fascinating paper!

Brian

PS You mentioned Thomas Nagel's paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" I recently wrote a short essay about that paper entitled "What Is It Like to Be a Human Being?" 13 My goal in doing so was to make the same point that I have tried to make above: namely, that materialists have forgotten the answer to that latter question thanks to their dogmatic insistence on an analytic epistemology rather than an experiential one.









Notes for essay entitled Thanks for nothing, Bertrand Russell!: How scientific materialists took away my right to heal: an open letter to James Glattfelder, author of The Sapient Cosmos:

1: Glattfelder, James B. 2026. “What Is Syncretic Idealism?.” Medium. October 28, 2026. https://medium.com/@jnode/what-is-syncretic-idealism-8a56ad13f04e. (up)
2: Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine DWP (up)
3: Glattfelder, James B. 2026. “What Is Syncretic Idealism?.” Medium. October 28, 2026. https://medium.com/@jnode/what-is-syncretic-idealism-8a56ad13f04e. (up)
4: Alfred North, Whitehead. 1920. Review of The Concept of Nature. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg. 1920. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18835. (up)
5: Half-Off on State Assisted Suicide DWP (up)
6: A bunch of brainstorming notes that you'll only want to read if you hate medicalization and drug prohibition and think that an ethical discussion of assisted suicide for the depressed must include a discussion about drug prohibition DWP (up)
7: Why the Mad in America website is dead wrong about assisted suicide for the depressed DWP (up)
8: From the psychiatric pill mill to assisted suicide for the depressed DWP (up)
9: Nolen, Stephanie, and Chloë Ellingson. 2025. “Claire Brosseau Wants to Die. Will Canada Let Her?” The New York Times, December 29, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/health/assisted-death-mental-illness-canada.html. (up)
10: Open Letter to Claire Brosseau DWP (up)
11: Stanford University rewrites the life of William James to conform with America's drug biases DWP (up)
12: How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James DWP (up)
13: What Is It Like to Be a Human Being? DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




SWAT raids have increased by 15,000 percent from the late 1970s to today, resulting in 50,000 to 80,000 SWAT raids annually in the US alone. --War On Us

Drug War censorship is supported by our "science" magazines, which pretend that outlawed drugs do not exist, and so write what amount to lies about the supposed intransigence of things like depression and anxiety.

What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!

It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.

If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol slaughters. Drug prohibition is the real killer.

A pharmacologically savvy drug dealer would have no problem getting someone off one drug because they would use the common sense practice of fighting drugs with drugs. But materialist doctors would rather that the patient suffer than to use such psychologically obvious methods.

Mayo Clinic is peddling junk. They are still promoting Venlafaxine, a drug that is harder to kick than heroin.

When we place the FDA in charge of deciding whether a psychoactive drug should be re-legalized or not, we are asking them to decide on things like the relative importance of appreciating a sunset, a task for which the FDA has no expertise whatsoever.

I hope that scientists will eventually find the prohibition gene so that we can eradicate this superstitious way of thinking from humankind.

Philip Jenkins reports that Rophynol had positive uses for treating mental disorders until the media called it the "date rape drug." We thus punished those who were benefitting from the drug, tho' the biggest drug culprit in date rape is alcohol. Oprah spread the fear virally.


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