combatting drug war propaganda and lies, one post at a time
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 27, 2026
I always hate Drug Warriors a trifle more than usual on days like this when I am a trifle down. I ratchet up my contempt for these hypocritical Henny Pennies on such days because it is they who deny me all sorts of substances that could give me a break from this pointless "down" without yet addicting me. This reminds me of my main thesis about drugs, that the whole problem posed by psychoactive substances amounts to this: the threat that one will develop an unwanted dependency. That's it. The vast majority of actually used drugs do not fry the brain -- racist fearmongering to the contrary -- with the very possible exception of Big Pharma drugs which seem to muck about with brain chemistry such that some of them are harder to kick than heroin.
By the way, I'm reading Diary of a Drug Fiend, by Aleister Crowley. I'm actually doing more than reading it, I'm creating a full-cast audiobook out of it. I am a little concerned, however, because the fictional story concerns the misuse of drugs like cocaine and heroin, and that kind of content is dynamite in the hands of readers who have been told that there are no benefits to drug use. They will misread Crowley as testifying to the impossibility of safe use -- whereas most people already do just that, use drugs safely, this despite the fact that the government is doing everything it can to make safe use impossible. Such drug literature has its place -- and Crowley has some great philosophical insights that I will be highlighting in essays to come -- but what we really need are many more books about the WISE use of outlawed substances. We have at least one such book, thank God, and so thank God for Carl Hart and his groundbreaking "Drug Use for Grownups." [Unfortunately, Carl sees no benefits of drugs for those with depression -- we are told instead to see our doctor. And what doctor is that? The doctor who has turned us into wards of the healthcare state by shunting us off onto "meds" for which dependency is a feature, not a bug.]
The answer to the Drug Warrior's fearmongering is free choice and education. The home medicine cabinet should be one's own personal pharmacy and we should all be taught how to use it. Kids should be taught that drug-use decisions are for grown-ups and should be based on best-use practices in the real world. The basic principles for safe use are not rocket science. If you don't want to become dependent on a substance, then don't use it on a schedule that would create dependency. Instead, mix up your schedule with laughing gas, phenethylamines, alcohol, an opium pipe... or nothing at all. Seek out the advice of the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empath for answers to your safe- and wise-use questions, and for ideas about achieving the kinds of results that you desire based on best-use practices. This is basic stuff. Yet the government wants us to believe that we will always be children when it comes to psychoactive substances. Surely, if this were true, then the Bible would have been all about drug prohibition and would have assigned moral value to refraining from use of various substances in psychoactive nature. But the fact is that no one thought of the world in that way before. Your biochemistry was taken as a given in the past and you were judged for the way you behaved in the world. It wasn't until western prudery and racism came along that we started to judge people by the substances that they chose to ingest, rather than by their actual behavior in the world.
Reminder: The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths in America are completely unnecessary and brought about by drug prohibition, which refuses to regulate drugs as to quality, purity, identity and dosage.
April 26, 2026
I'm reading Diary of a Drug Fiend, by Aleister Crowley. The man is/was a philosopher. I will be bringing out a free audio version of the book with a full cast of virtual characters.
April 21, 2026
Henny Penny Is Back
And more unreasonable than ever!
I was actually having a nice day, "for a wonder." And then I saw a picture of Kevin Sabet bashing marijuana on X. Kevin represents everything I hate about drug prohibitionists. He is the poster child for judging a drug up or down based on the perceived values of those he sees using it. He just can't wait to outlaw the drug again and so keep it out of the hands of all demographics merely because he dislikes the lifestyles of some of them. He can't wait to arrest rather than to educate and provide true drug choice.
Speaking of choice, why is Kevin surprised that marijuana is popular today? Prohibitionists have managed to outlaw almost every other kind of drug in the world that has the potential to inspire and elate. What does he expect? It's just another example of how drug prohibition brings about all the outcomes that the prohibitionists claim to be fighting against!
He should be happy. Marijuana smoking cuts down on the use of alcohol, a drug that kills 178,000 every year in the US alone. But then such indirect drug benefits are invisible to the establishment, whose strategic motto is: "Just the downsides, ma'am, just the downsides."
Does Kevin have any shame? Does he not know that marijuana arrests have sent so many minorities to jail as to easily account for the election of an insurrectionist felon as President of the United States, a president who now is blowing up boats (and all who sail therein) merely because they fit the profile of boats that have been used for transporting the Divine Plant of the Inca that our imperialist regime in Washington never had the right to outlaw in the first place?
Think I'm a liberal madman? Check out the words of conservative madman William F. Buckley:
Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
Kevin Sabet is a sort of kinder, gentler Harry Anslinger, an Anslinger Lite, if you will. Kevin has dropped the blatant racism from his own act but is carrying on the same Henny Penny oratory of his predecessor. You remember Harry. He was the U.S. Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, during which time he was wont to regale his white audience with such spirited adumbrations as:
I wish I could show you what a small marijuana cigarette can do to one of our degenerate Spanish speaking residents. That's why our problem is so great. The greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish speaking persons, most of who are low mentally because of social and racial conditions.
Do you love the man? Some people have the ability to go right to the heart of a complex social issue and tease apart the various strands of half-truths and lies, calmly adducing fact upon fact, until, before we even suspect something is going on, they've concocted an entire infrastructure of implicit propositions that lead us to a syllogistic conclusion that positively compels assent! Kevin certainly has his work cut out for him if he hopes to follow in the footsteps of THOSE flipflops.
To be fair to Kevin, however, he has removed any obvious racism from his own prohibitionist schtick. He seems to think that marijuana is an equal opportunity destroyer of all ethnicities, without regard to skin color or religious belief. And yet allow an old man a scruple here: isn't it just the tiniest bit problematic that Kevin champions a prohibitionist policy that has placed more Blacks in prison and on probation today than were slaves before the Civil War?
I'm only asking.
I guess the real difference between us is that Kevin hates drug dealers, while I reserve my own animus for those politicians who create drug dealers out of whole cloth with totally unprecedented anti-drug legislation, thereby turning America into a penal colony. Finally, for the record, I don't hate Kevin. I just feel sorry for him. I just feel like, well... I'm sorry, but he's so much better than this!
My heart bleeds, when you get right down to it: my heart bleeds.
April 15, 2026
I am the Benjamin Button of drug pundits. My site stats go down, not up, whenever I reveal a home truth that makes brainwashed Americans uncomfortable. And yet: :
I am the only one to point out that it is evil to give the depressed drugs to help them die while at the same time barring them from using drugs that could make them want to live.
"The depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds." --Arthur Crowley, on his first use of cocaine1
I am the only one to protest the demonization and the outlawing of laughing gas on the grounds of academic freedom and the legacy of William James -- not to mention the rights of the depressed.2
I am the only one to point out that the organizations against gun violence in inner cities are ignoring the fact that drug prohibition armed the hood in the first place and therefore should be their number-one enemy.3
I am the only one to point out that those who are fighting Alzheimer's Disease are ignoring the fact that drugs exist that greatly sharpen concentration, some of which even grow new neurons in the brain4.
I am the only one to point out that entheogens (drugs whose use inspires compassion) have obvious potential uses in keeping hotheads from shooting up schools5.
I am the only one to point out how non-fiction authors censor themselves on the subject of drugs, sometimes to the point that their main thesis only makes sense if we assume certain drug-war biases upon the part of the author6.
I am the only one to point out how science is blind as a bat these days because they willfully ignore the existence of almost all psychoactive drugs, thereby leading them to posit long-shot biochemical theories about resolving problems that in a drug-neutral world could be solved in a trice! Science mags speak of depression as a tough nut to crack, when depression would be a non-problem in an age where drugs were legal and we sought to use them wisely for human benefit.7
I am still trying to find someone among the movers and shakers who cares about the fact that the state is now offering to use drugs to kill the depressed while yet denying them the use of drugs that would make them wish to live -- and the fact that I am the only one pointing this out!
I did receive some good news from Robert Whitaker, the author-founder of Mad in America. He expressed interest in my insights and is apparently going to publish my blog/essay in an upcoming edition of their online zine. I cannot link to the essay in question as I have granted MIA exclusive rights. However, the title says it all: "From the psychiatric pill mill to assisted suicide for the depressed: How America's jaundiced view of drugs has deprived the psychiatric field of common sense."
And now back to our naively optimistic blog entry already in progress...
Meanwhile, Reason magazine and the Talking Drugs website are both ghosting me after I made similar attempts to bring their editors up-to-date on the totally unrecognized evil of assisted suicide for the depressed in the age of drug prohibition. I fear these organizations have fallen for one or more of the many Drug War lies, no doubt thinking that depressed folks like myself should turn to doctors to set us straight rather than medicines of Mother Nature, the same doctors who turned us into wards of the healthcare state in the first place by starting us on antidepressants that are far harder to kick than heroin.
When I typed the Talking Drugs address into my gmail, it already existed. That's bad news because it suggests that I already contacted these guys several years ago and that they never quite saw fit to vouchsafe me a response, in which case, why would they bother now? Nor am I the least bit hopeful now of Reason deciding to so much as acknowledge my existence. The closest fit to my philosophy was the MIA website -- and I now see that even they are bamboozled by a number of major Drug War lies. They play the medicalization game as well as anybody, by effectively agreeing that drugs do not "really" work until a guy says so who is looking under a microscope. Robert, for his part, seems to feel that Christian Science is the answer to the psychiatric pill mill. This is the mainstream that I am up against. Time for me to get it through my thickest of all possible skulls that the best I can do in my lifetime is to leave a legacy of words behind as a kind of baton for some sane activist of the future to pick up and run with -- someone who sees that drug prohibition is the problem, not drugs.
This is, indeed, what so few people seem to understand: that substance prohibition -- and crucially the mindset behind it -- are the real problems. We must drive a stake through the heart of the drug prohibition ideology; otherwise, we'll have to deal on a retail basis with every Chicken Little in the country who is looking for easy answers to social problems and does not mind imprisoning hundreds of thousands and killing millions for that purpose, as long as the victims are not members of his or her own friends or family.
March 29, 2026
You've got to hand it to me: I carry on with this website despite the fact that site analytics are clearly telling me to "Give up, fool." Speaking of which, I sometimes think that Google Analytics is just an advertising tool for Google. They want people to use Analytics so that they can see how entirely hidden their websites are if they are not buying Google ads. Of course, it could be that I am just a madman and that I actually have nothing to offer. But every time I start to think that way, I reflect on the fact that I am the only philosopher in the world who has protested to the FDA (in the name of academic freedom and the legacy of William James) against their harebrained scheme to treat laughing gas as a drug 8910. I realize as well that I am the only philosopher in the world who has pointed out that the propriety of assisted suicide cannot be discussed meaningfully in America without discussing the propriety of drug prohibition, which outlaws all drugs that could help certain people to live successfully with certain conditions11.
I hold, in fact, that assisted suicide should never be an option for the depressed. Why not? Because anyone who is actually educated about drugs (rather than merely brainwashed by drug-war censorship, half-truths and lies) knows that there are a wide variety of substances that can cheer people up in a trice. In a trice. It is therefore manifestly clear that the depressed persons who are demanding that the state should kill themselves should by rights be demanding instead that the state allow them to use drugs that could make them want to live! In other words, depressed activists like Claire Brosseau should not be demanding her right to assisted suicide; she should rather be demanding her right to take care of her own health, to use the substances that could help make her want to live. In still other words, Claire should be demanding an end to drug prohibition rather than setting a horrible precedent for depressed people everywhere by insisting on her right to die. Of course, drug relegalization would mean that she could die peaceably without the help of the state; but it also means that she would have access to drugs that would make her wish to live.
But there is a problem. America's brainwashed attitudes and draconian laws have ensured that few people exist today who could give Claire informed guidance as to which particular substances, synthesized or "natural," would be best for her specific needs. It is simply illegal to do the kinds of studies that could provide this information to any American on a legal basis. This is why I am forever saying that a post-prohibition world will require the creation of a new expert for which America does not even have a name yet, so brainwashed has it become on these topics. For my part, I refer to this as-yet non-existent profession as that of a "pharmacologically savvy empath,12" someone who can make drug-use recommendations based on common sense and actual successful usage patterns in the past, both anecdotal and historical. The recommendations provided by this compassionate and outgoing individual would not be based on lab studies but rather on real-world experiences demonstrating the positive uses of drugs, the kind of experiences that the myopic drug researchers of our time are both ideologically and dogmatically committed to ignoring entirely13. I am referring to the kind of safe and productive drug use that our media will never show us and which our law enforcement is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to render impossible.
In a related topic, there are some writers who present the drug prohibition issue as follows: Drugs are a problem, but the DEA and drug prohibition have only made matters worse. I disagree entirely. Drug prohibition did not make a bad situation worse, it created that bad situation in the first place. There was no opiate crisis when opiates were legal in America. Prior to 1914, opium lovers enjoyed opium at home after a long day's work just as beer drinkers enjoyed throwing back a beer. It was drug prohibition that turned this into a problem by criminalizing opium and its use, thereby leading to the black-marketing of far more powerful opiates than opium itself14.
Of course, the prohibitionist will respond by cherry-picking and publicizing biographies of those who could not use opium in a sane and rational manner; but of course for every one of the heartbreaking incidents that they can provide of opium misuse, I could provide a long list of broken homes and wife beatings occasioned by alcohol abuse. The prohibitionist is thus an enormous hypocrite. Americans hold opium use to standards that they do not apply to any other risky activity on earth, not to mountain climbing, not to horseback riding, and certainly not to beer drinking or car driving. And so when alcohol kills 178,000 a year, it does not even make the newspaper, but if opium is involved in any way in one single death, it is front-page news for our hysterical and mob-driven Americans15.
So, what does one make of the fact that this site of mine is currently buried in search engine listings -- even though I have brought the unique adumbrations mentioned above to the attention of the movers-and-shakers in all of the relevant fields? Take the New York Times, for instance. I recently wrote a long (and admittedly charming) letter to their healthcare reporter, one Stephanie Nolen, diplomatically upbraiding her for her failure to even mention drug prohibition in her article about Claire Brosseau1718. Nay, I wrote a letter to Claire Brosseau herself urging her to give up her campaign to obtain assisted suicide with the help of the state in favor of campaigning for her right to the use of godsend medicines that could help her to heal!19 Nay nay, I even wrote separate letters to Claire's two (count them, two) psychiatrists on this topic, one of whom, I'm sorry to say, is actually championing her patient's right to kill herself. What next? An ad campaign with the words: "Depressed? Ask your doctor if assisted suicide is right for you."
So either I am completely mad and when I think I'm writing words like "cat" I am actually writing words like "dog"... -- or else Abraham Lincoln was wrong: you CAN fool all of the people all of the time, at least when it comes to the subject of drugs in the western world, and racist Drug Warriors are using every branch of the media and the government to take full advantage of that fact. And in this sense drug prohibition is clearly working: it is working to imprison hundreds of thousands of minorities and so hand otherwise close elections to demagogue politicians, meanwhile destroying time-honored American rights and freedoms and militarizing police forces20, while outlawing our most fundamental of human rights: the right to the ownership of our own bodies and our right to take care of our own health as we see fit.
March 22, 2026
Hola. I know what you're thinking. These essays against the hateful Drug War are all well and good, Brian, but when are you going to provide a way in which I can learn Spanish and hate on drug prohibition at the same time?
I would also be remiss if I failed to share the following heartfelt animadversions that I vouchsafed to a Discord forum not 30 minutes ago. I especially call your attention to my proposal for a new non-profit Internet in which advertisements are not allowed and sites are no longer buried alive because the webmasters refuse to pay protection money (or rather projection money) to trillionaire companies like Googol. But soft, you shall read!
DISCORD COMMENTS:
This is the whole problem with the western attitude toward psychoactive medicine. Everyone is ready to judge drugs based on one specific experience of them. That is just like judging cortisol or penicillin based on one's own specific experience of them. Who cares what anyone thinks about such drugs based on their own experience? I don't care what Joe Blow thinks about heroin any more than I care what Joe Blow thinks about aspirin or Pepto-Bismol. A decision to use or not to use for any given person for any given drug is (or should be) based on a wide range of considerations specific to the individual and the context in which they live. We should provide only drug choice and education about safe use. Right now, we have the opposite of education. Big Pharma pays for most studies about drugs, so the scientists that we admire are almost always talking about the downsides of drug use -- and they never discuss upsides. And so every time we hear one "scientific downside" about a specific drug, we should remember how many downsides that we're NOT hearing about when it comes to drugs like alcohol and antidepressants. All drugs have downsides -- but only outlawed drugs are punished for that fact.
I think one answer going forward would be to develop a non-profit web, sort of like an Internet version of the American Public Broadcasting System. No ads would be allowed except maybe on one's own web page. And it would have a search engine that highlights new and unpopular ideas. The current system buries anything that is new and controversial -- except when one pays to play.
Of course there are drugs that are bad for most people -- and even some that seem to be bad for all people -- but we should never blame the drug, since that drug, at some dose in some combination may eventually prove to have positive uses of which we are so far unaware. We should not veto human progress by deciding for our posterity what substances they can research and try in new ways.
FOLLOW-UP
It is said that platforms of which I speak already exist, platforms that bring controversial ideas to the fore. And I'm sure they do. But I am equally sure that they are not doing their job. The proof of that assertion is to be found in the fact that this site remains all but invisible to the Great Unwashed, at least if the depressing stats on Google Analytics have anything to say about it.
"As the Christian West once confronted the problem of witchcraft, so now the Scientific World confronts the problem of drugcraft. The one had been as much the product of its own creation as is now the other. " --Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers22
I just posted my open letter to Claire Brosseau on Claire's BlueSky feed. (See Open Letter to Claire Brosseau.) Claire Brosseau is the depressed Canadian who demands that the state help her to commit suicide -- the same state that refuses to let her use substances that could make her want to live. I am the only one who has pointed out this deadly irony. I am the only one who has pointed out to all parties concerned (including the New York Times health reporter, Stephanie Nolen, who continues to ghost me) that assisted suicide -- especially for the depressed -- cannot be discussed meaningfully without also discussing the drug prohibition which renders it necessary in the first place -- at least in the eyes of the Claire Brosseaus of the world.
--
I watched a clip on Sky News last night in which the wide-eyed tech pundit told us that the AI behemoth known as Anthropic had its own philosopher on staff. Its own philosopher! This was supposed to shock the viewer. A company the size of Coca-Cola has its own philosopher on staff! But what shocked me was the fact that Anthropic did not have DOZENS of philosophers on staff -- or that it did not subject the implicit philosophical point of view of its algorithms to multiple critiques from the general public. If such companies are going to leverage Big Data to give us the apparent final word on everything, then it is hugely important upon which philosophies their answers are based, and that philosophy should not be invented by one single company-appointed philosopher. Sure, 2 + 2 is always going to be equal to 4 in abstract mathematics regardless of unspoken assumptions about the world, but the AI answers to questions about the propriety of drug use are going to depend entirely on the philosophies assumed, knowingly or not, by the AI algorithms.
Suppose that the algorithms are written under the assumption that all the "real" answers about things like drug use will come from science. Then the AI answers that the algorithms provide about drugs will serve to demonize drugs and emphasize their negative uses, since this is what science is paid to do these days in the west: to demonize psychoactive medicines by focusing only on misuse and worst-case scenarios, meanwhile never mentioning positive use, both extant and possible with the use of a little psychological common sense. Indeed, the bylaws of the aptly named National Institute on Drug Abuse forbids the organization's employees from advocating for the legalization of any outlawed substance. Their real jobs are thus political in nature, not scientific. Unless AI "understands" these largely unspoken facts and takes them into account, its answers about drugs will always serve to support the many modern prejudices which are based on this government demonization campaign.
A fair algorithm would consider the fact that westerners have been shielded by media censorship from all positive talk about drug use since their childhood. Even should algorithms glean that fact from its use of inherently conservative Big Data, the weight that the algorithms assign to that fact will be based on assumptions, explicit or implicit, in those algorithms.
In other words, the question about the propriety of drug use raises a host of questions about which most people never consciously think. And we can be sure that AI will manifest the prejudices of the majority. And this, of course, is the nightmare of AI in general. It is innocent enough in telling us the scientific name of the leopard, but when it purports to give us final answers on subjects of human mind and mood, we can only expect blather in the age of the War on Drugs.
Garbage in, garbage out.
February 26, 2026
Here is another manuscript in a bottle for future philosophers.
I continue to notice the similarities between my position in life and that of Immanuel Kant: both of us were old timers without any particular axe to grind about eternal verities, but both of us had something very important to say about epistemology. In Kant's case, he warned us that we cannot accept the testimony of the mind about ultimate reality without first considering how that mind works and the subsequent limits that this specific functionality places upon our understanding. In my case, I am warning the world that we cannot evaluate the claims of Kant without studying the nature of human consciousness and that this study can only take place in a world wherein the government does not limit our right to obtain so-called "altered states," those states of consciousness that William James insisted that we must study to understand reality itself.
Unfortunately, philosophers today have something in common with Claire Brosseau. Just as the depressed Claire Brosseau wrongly believes that drug prohibition has no effect on her life -- even though it is the very cause of her depression because it denies her the godsend medicines that could cheer her up in a trice -- so philosophers believe that drug prohibition has no effect on philosophy -- even though it outlaws the experiential evaluation of Kant's implicit claims about the nature of human consciousness. In both cases, the parties whitewash the pernicious effects of drug prohibition by pretending that drug prohibition simply does not exist and that the substances it outlaws could have no relevant uses whatsoever.
Neither Kant nor myself were predicting what we might find were we to undertake a fair investigation of the facts about the world -- our business, rather, was to define how a fair investigation must take place in the first place. Kant warned that we must consider how mentation works according to his categories of the understanding; I for my part warn that the veracity of Kant's implicit claims about the existence of a one-size-fits-all consciousness for human beings can only be evaluated by a study of human consciousness under a variety of conditions, which is, of course, a study that drug prohibition rules out a priori and which should therefore render that policy anathema to any country that believes in the freedom of academia and of science itself.
--
I cannot understand how any psychiatrist can advocate on behalf of their patient's right to commit suicide, least of all in a world in which that patient is denied godsend medicines and the psychiatrist is not complaining about that fact loudly and clearly. This is nothing less than sacrificing the patient on the altar of drug prohibition. Claire Brosseau must die so that drug prohibition can continue to get away with murder. This is a sickness -- a result of taking drug propaganda seriously and hence attempting to normalize it, to the point that patients must die rather than highlight the inhumanity of the policy. Drug prohibition first caused psychiatrists to rationalize electroshock therapy as normal, and now psychiatrists are taking the next step in this madness by rationalizing suicide as normal for the depressed -- all because Americans have two prime imperatives in the age of the Drug War: 1, to say nothing evil about drug prohibition, and 2, to say nothing good about drugs.
February 25, 2026
"First, do no good."
Let me remind the reader why I keep harping on depression. It is because the very "illness" is a creation of Drug War prohibition, which specifically outlaws all drugs that could cheer one up in a trice. And so when we consider depression in light of drug prohibition, it illustrates everything that is wrong with that social policy. This is more true than ever now that the depressed are demanding their right to die -- while yet not demanding their right to use the sorts of drugs that could make them want to live. This is Drug War brainwashing carried to its illogical conclusion: a world in which we prefer to die rather than to use drugs. I could write about the similar injustices experienced by patients who fail to receive necessary pain relief thanks to Drug War policies, but they say that we should write about what we know and I have thus far been spared any hands-on knowledge of that latter injustice.
But then that is not entirely true. Three years ago, I was experiencing excruciating pain from an exposed root canal and I was unable to sleep. I called my dentist and asked for a strong prescription, and what did she prescribe for me? She prescribed a medicine that I could buy over the counter without her help. And why did she not give me something more powerful? The answer is obvious: her job and reputation meant more to her than my right to pain relief. She was not going to do anything to put her job in jeopardy by raising any eyebrows among the second-guessing DEA bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. This is how Drug War attitudes are negatively affecting healthcare around the world, by frightening doctors into underprescribing pain medicine. And so in the age of the Drug War, the new Hippocratic Oath is: "First, do no good."
February 24, 2026
We entered the Darien Province after a mud-filled three hour ride on Route 1 in Panama yesterday. The first sign welcomed us politely to the little town of Agua Fria, and there was not so much as one single police officer in sight. I started thinking that the trip to Yaviza might not be as depressing as I had figured. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the Darien Gap wasn't ground zero in America's war on the Divine Plant of the Inca after all. Unfortunately, there turned out to be a checkpoint less than a kilometer beyond this deceptive hospitality where the cops were doing the customary Gestapo shtick, grumpily eyeing travelers and professing not to understand a word of English, the better to ruffle the feathers of the anglophone drug trafficker.
Welcome sign entering Agua Fria, first town in Darien Province when heading east on Route 1. The real welcome is a kilometer ahead when the Gestapo -- er, Panama police -- sniff about your car for the Divine Plant of the Inca.
I resisted the strong temptation to give them a Nazi salute.
Francisco Pizarro would be so proud of them for following his example in running roughshod over the Andean people and their traditions, to the point that Americans have convinced the UN that it has a duty to eradicate the Inca's divine coca plant from the face of the earth.
This is the world we live in: politicians jet off to the Virgin Islands to enjoy themselves unhindered by US laws -- meanwhile, the hoi polloi are given the Nazi treatment in order to keep their minds off of social injustice and the endless downsides of oligarchy. We mustn't give the hoi polloi time to think of things like income inequality and the growing power of monopoly to subvert the democratic process. Of course, the biggest social injustice of all is drug prohibition itself, which denies citizens the right to heal. Unfortunately, drug propaganda and censorship have convinced Americans that they should sacrifice that most basic right to a new prime imperative of "fighting drugs."
The apotheosis of this warped disposition is found in the Claire Brosseau case, in which the depressed Canadian comedian believes so strongly in Drug War lies that she actually feels that drugs have nothing to offer her at all and therefore insists on her right to die.
There seems to be no end toward which people will go to safeguard drug prohibition from all criticism. Now they will even die to help normalize that demonstrably deadly policy.
Even the Cato Institute has got ahold of the wrong end of the stick. They are arguing for the right of the suicidal to kill themselves -- while saying nothing about the fact that drug prohibition has outlawed all the drugs that might make the depressed want to live. This confirms me in my long-held belief that libertarians do not grasp the full evil of drug prohibition: sure, they want to end that policy, but chiefly because they believe that citizens should have the right to 'go to the devil in their own way.' To be fair, Jeffrey Singer does make the connection between drug prohibition and the outlawing of our right to heal in "Your Body, Your Health Care2324," but he fails to see the obvious connection to Claire's case, possibly because he is not aware of the obvious psychological benefits of drug use -- to say nothing of the fact that drug use has inspired entire religions and so has obvious potential benefits for saving folks like Claire from their own self-absorbed depression. But then he must be aware that Freud thought cocaine was a godsend for the depressed and that the religion of the Vedic people was inspired by drug use.
But then everybody knows that cocaine improves mood and sharpens the mind, and yet no one dares recommend its use for either confused seniors or the depressed. This is because no one thinks of the elderly and the depressed as stakeholders in the game of drug demonization. This is why I believe we need a nonprofit organization called something like "Chronic Depressives against Drug Prohibition." The mere existence of such a group would put drug-demonizing muckrakers like the New York Times on notice that the outlawing of recreational drugs is also the outlawing of therapeutic drugs.
February 23, 2026
I repair here to my humble blog every time I get tired of posting essays that nobody reads. Speaking of which, I posted an open letter yesterday which I also sent as an email to Claire Brosseau herself25. Claire is the mental health "activist" who is attempting to acquire the right to assisted suicide for the depressed. I am literally the only one in the world who has pointed out to Claire -- and to her "friends" -- that the depressed (and everybody else) deserve the right to use medicines that would make them want to live! And until that fundamental right of healthcare freedom is restored to the depressed, it is a morally dubious enterprise indeed to promote suicide for the depressed. It is like telling miners in a collapsed mine that they should kill themselves rather than trying to dig their way out of their predicament. The depressed should be fighting for an end to the drug prohibition that keeps them from healing, not demanding the right to give up and die.
But it truly seems that there are no extremes to which North Americans will not go to pretend, A, that prohibition has no downsides, and B, that drug use has no upsides. No end at all.
Here is an immigration checkpoint in Panama in the town of Guabala -- where trunks and luggage are ransacked by the state to catch Christian Science heretics.
This should not come as a surprise, I suppose, because psychiatrists have enthusiastically been using brain-damaging shock therapy on patients for over 80 years now, while refusing to give the depressed drugs that could make shock therapy unnecessary. It will be argued, of course, that these alternatives were suppressed by law and regulation, but that does not absolve the psychiatric field for their failure to speak up on behalf of their patients' rights to heal -- without thereby incurring brain damage! So we see the ethical blindness is built in to the healthcare field as it strives to normalize drug prohibition as a baseline policy. I was recently told by one of my scarce readers that most psychiatrists claim that they themselves would wish to have shock therapy were they to become excessively depressed. No wonder that psychiatrists are now championing the rights of folks like myself to die. They gave up on truly helping the depressed long ago.
By the way, this may be my last entry. My cousin and I are in Panama, and he thinks it would be "cool" to ride down to the Darien Gap. Cool. I keep telling him that it's a high-crime area and that we should travel with a guide, but he takes the typically Anglo-Saxon attitude of "how hard can it be?" He keeps saying he's open to all travel ideas -- and I keep mentioning San Blas and Bocas del Toro -- but after a few hours of silence, he's back on the subject of the Darien Gap as if it were some kind of idee fixe with him.
He even blames his obsession on me. He says that I have been constantly talking about the Darien Gap. True, I've mentioned it several times over the last month in connection with guided tours of the place, but then I've been just as vocal about San Blas and Bocas del Toro without inspiring any corresponding enthusiasm on his part. He seldom mentions those latter places, and when he does, he always botches their names, as if on purpose to underscore his disinterest in them. And so he'll speak dismissively of Baru del Toro, confusing the Caribbean island chain with the Volcanic peak to its south, or Goona Yellow, xenophobically butchering the indigenous name for the San Blas Archipelago.
Of course, the Darien Gap is a high-crime area for a reason: it is a high-crime area because of the outlawing of coca and cocaine. In other words, it is a high-crime area because the U.S. wants it to be a high-crime area for reasons of domestic and foreign policy. But then if my few readers think that drug use is worse than death, I can scarcely expect to convince them of the self-interested perfidy of such policies.
Gotta run! My cousin has just popped his daily batch of Big Pharma drugs -- er, I mean meds, of course -- so we're ready to go to the Darien Gap -- where police are working nonstop to ensure that there are no competitors when it comes to my cousin's drug-related expenditures.
February 22, 2026
When actor Martin Landon turned his depressed daughter over to psychiatrists for help with her problematic drug use, he was shocked to find that the psychiatrists' first step was to place the child on drugs -- er, I mean meds, of course. When I first heard this story many decades ago now, I pitied Martin for his lack of scientific spirit. What a shame, I thought. Surely, modern medicine had "sorted" depression, as the Brits would say, and Landon should not stand in the way of his daughter's scientific treatment.
Today, however, I see that Martin was right, albeit for the wrong reasons. Far from "fixing" his daughter's depression, psychiatry was going to turn her into a patient for life on drugs that can never be kicked, drugs that underperform the hundreds (and potentially thousands) of outlawed substances that could improve his daughter's life without rendering her dependent, some of which grow at our very feet. And even if she was rendered dependent by these latter illegal drugs, there was still hope that she could get off the same, whereas antidepressants like Effexor have a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users26, a datum that I can vouch for by my own year-long futile attempt to get off the drug. This attempt led to far greater depression than I had experienced before in my life and even led to cognitive impairment. Apparently my brain chemistry now required the drug to work effectively.
Martin was as bamboozled as the rest of indoctrinated America in that he thought of drugs as pure evil -- but he was right about one thing: Meds are drugs, just as surely as psychoactive herbs are drugs, and our various names for these substances are just attempts to brand some as holy while slandering others as demonic, according to our own self-interests. It is all advertising, not science. Viewed without a public relations campaign, meds are not only drugs, but they are drugs from hell insofar as dependency for them is a feature, not a bug. Such drugs are MEANT to be taken for a lifetime -- which is convenient for the psychiatrists who prescribe them, of course, for then they do not have to answer for the sheer impossibility of getting off of them!
The irony is that we have been told since childhood that drugs are dead ends and lead to a mindless dependency -- and yet the drugs that best fit that definition are the Big Pharma drugs that were created for us as a result of drug prohibition which gave Big Pharma a monopoly on mind and mood medicine in the first place!
Some psychiatrists will argue privately, of course, that antidepressants are the only game in town and that is why they prescribe them. But this does not absolve them from their sacred duty to speak up on behalf of the patient's right to heal: to speak up, that is, against the drug prohibition that denies the patient their right to heal. Given their almost universal silence on this topic, one has to conclude that they are either afraid to do so, or that they themselves have become convinced by a lifetime of drug propaganda that there are no benefits to psychoactive substances whatsoever except for the synthesized Big Pharma drugs that pass muster with racist and xenophobic politicians.
This, by the way, is why I have become interested in reading Noam Chomsky's critique of American foreign policy in these lonesome latter years. I always dogmatically shunned his work, basically because I assumed that someone who is so clearly in the minority must simply have gotten ahold of the wrong end of the stick. But my analysis of Drug War attitudes -- and the roaring silence of seemingly sensible people on this topic -- convinces me that the vast majority of a population can be wrong and fundamentally so.
Of course, there is one factor to which I tend to pay short shrift: that is the fact that hundreds of thousands -- perhaps even millions -- of people understand the arguments that I am making here, but they themselves seek to benefit from illegal medicines, and the last thing they want to do is to draw attention to themselves on that score. They want to live their lives in peace, as fully as possible, using the medicines that are theirs by dint of their birthright on planet earth, and they do not want to draw the attention of the enforcers of Christian Science Sharia, who brutally seek to suppress the sort of healthcare freedom that they are practicing.
I am tempted to call drug users cowardly for failing to speak up, but I actually envy them for insisting on their own rights in spite of the trillion-dollar campaign afoot in America to throw them in jail. In some ways, I am the coward because I do not exercise my time-honored right to take care of my own health as I see fit.
February 21, 2026
I'm still waiting to hear back from NYT healthcare reporter Stephanie Nolen about the Claire Brosseau case.27 I am the only one -- the only one -- who is pointing out that it would be better for the depressed Claire Brosseau to use drugs than to kill herself.
Imagine that! That shows just how crazy North Americans have become on the subject of drugs!!!
The Panama Police continue to do their best to make me reconsider my plans to move to the country. We have been stopped at four "puestos de control" now for passport checks, the last one occurring yesterday within a mile of our Panama lodging on the entrance ramp to the main highway. I was never treated this way in Peru, nor in France, nor in Haiti, nor even in Puerto Rico. No doubt the instructions for this crackdown are coming from the regime in Washington, D.C.
Modern drug attitudes are beyond parody. Depressed westerners demand that the state use drugs to kill them, but they don't demand their right to the drugs that could make them want to live.
It is little wonder that Stephanie Nolen is ghosting me at the New York Times. The Times is responsible for drug prohibition in America because of its philosophically shallow reporting on the subject. It always seeks to hold drugs responsible for the problems caused by drug prohibition. There will always be heart-wrenching cases in a free world. If one is free to ride horses, a certain percentage will become maimed -- if one is free to drink alcohol, a certain percentage will become drunkards -- if one is free to drive cars, a certain percentage will become crash victims. Only when it comes to drugs do we tolerate no downsides whatsoever.
This is why I wish to form Depressed Americans for Ending Drug Prohibition, to put the New York Times reporters on notice that there are far more stakeholders in the drug prohibition game than the suburban American white children whom we refuse to educate about safe use. Once we negative that assumption in the public mind, such publications will no longer be able to demonize drugs based on solitary cases of misuse, no matter how heartrending the details may be made to appear on DEA-friendly shows like "48 Hours" with racist titles like "Now this new deadly drug is killing US!!! Be afraid, be very afraid!!! -- And get your representative to pass new intolerant bills to erode what's left of American democracy still further! Thank you, New York Times, for calling this new SCOURGE-OF-THE-WEEK to our attention!!!"
February 15, 2026
I've been writing to a variety of medical ethicists in the ivory tower today in an attempt to waken the world to the obvious fact that assisted suicide cannot be discussed meaningfully without discussing the drug prohibition that renders it necessary in the first place. It was the Case of the depressed Claire Brosseau 28 that made that insight clear to me recently, and yet even assisted suicide for physical complaints must be discussed in conjunction with drug prohibition. This is because pain is not the real problem for people, but their perception of pain. And so rather than promoting assisted suicide for pain patients, we should first allow them to use medicines that might make that pain bearable for them. As Jim Hogshire notes in "Opium for the Masses," opium has no more analgesic effect than aspirin, but it changes the way the pain is perceived, essentially helping us conceive the pain as being apart from our conscious self. (This, by the way, would be a topic of great interest to the study of consciousness in a free world, one not stymied in the stone age by the drug-demonizing ideology of substance prohibition.)
Any real center for medical ethics should be all about ending drug prohibition, which denies us the right to take care of our own health.
My letter to Director Peter Angelos, MD, PhD:
Good day, Dr. Angelos,
With respect, the most unethical thing about modern medicine for me is its refusal to push back against the drug prohibition which denies us the right to heal and which turns us into "patients" in the first place.
As a 67-year-old chronic depressive, I have spent a lifetime now on Big Pharma drugs that are far harder to kick than heroin, all because drug prohibition denied me the right to take care of my own health as I saw fit. So I have difficulty understanding why any group devoted to medical ethics is not screaming out for drug re-legalization, by pointing out that there are far more stakeholders in the drug debate than the white American young people whom we refuse to educate about safe use.
We have now reached the point where the depressed are demanding the right to assisted suicide!!! Surely they should instead be demanding their right to take care of their own health, to use the kinds of substances that could make them want to live!
Drug prohibition also outlaws drugs that can help people focus their minds. We would rather have dementia patients suffer than to use drugs. That's as unethical as it gets.
I consider drug prohibition to be nothing less than a crime against humanity for denying me the right to heal as a depressed person
PS I am trying to create a nonprofit called "Depressed Americans for Ending Drug Prohibition," to put politicians on notice that there are millions of silenced stakeholders in the drug debates.
There is something very strange about the fact that healthcare mavens are making profitable livings from pronouncing ex cathedra on medical ethics -- when they themselves are blind to the most unethical thing of all about modern medicine: that it is based on the total disempowerment of the patient by the outlawing of godsend medicines like coca and opium. Where are the medical ethicists who are concerned about the fact that we are turning the depressed into patients for life by shunting them off onto dependence-causing Big Pharma drugs? No one notices that fact, or if they do, they come at it from the viewpoint that drugs are not needed at ALL and that we should all get high on sunshine.
The whole medical establishment is based on the complete disempowerment of the patient -- and until these well-financed ethical establishments recognize that fact, it is hard to take them as anything but a bad joke, an attempt to focus our minds on peripheral issues. They need to stop standing up for our rights AS patients and start standing up for our right not to BE patients in the first place. They need, in short, to make it their sacred duty to end the unethical policy of drug prohibition which denies us our right to heal ourselves.
--
It's like a bad joke. I have grown up around over two dozen people, two dozen of whom take antidepressants, and two dozen of whom still report to be depressed. This is the "scientific" miracle that materialist science has wrought with the help of drug prohibition! What a cosmic joke -- a joke on us, the unnecessarily depressed.
And do those two dozen people complain? To the contrary, they consider it their medical duty to "take their meds"!
Surely this drug prohibition and its insane results is some kind of cosmic joke that humanity is playing on itself.
February 13, 2026
The New York Times, of course, ignores me completely. I don't mind. I just hope someone in the future remembers that I was the only person on earth who spoke up when the depressed started demanding assisted suicide. I was the first to point out that it was incalculably cruel to give them that right to death while yet denying them the right to use drugs that could make them want to live. Incalculably cruel.
And yet, God help us, this is the position that everybody takes -- except for the conservatives at the Washington Examiner -- who not only want to deny godsend medicines to the depressed, but want to also deny them their one escape from the cruel world into which prohibitionists have thrust them with their Christian Science Sharia
This situation raises a dilemma for me. How do you politely discuss these issues with those who are actively promoting the state-assisted death of people like Claire Brosseau without even protesting the drug prohibition that is making that death 'necessary' -- at least in the minds of the Claire Brosseaus of the world whose worlds have been censored from their birth when it comes to all positive talk about psychoactive medicines. Merely to be honest will surely be seen as questioning their integrity. And yet we cannot cease from confronting evil merely because in doing so we may hurt somebody's feelings.
America does not have a drug problem, it has a drug prohibition problem.
When I see NYT articles like today's latest attack on marijuana, I am glad I am a senor citizen29. That means that I only have a limited number of years left to be subjected to such philosophically challenged nonsense -- the kind of nonsense that has denied me the use of godsend medicines for a lifetime now and turned me into a patient for life on Big Pharma drugs that are far harder to kick than heroin.
Our crazed attitude about drugs has now resulted in the ultimate absurd outcome, where psychiatrists are advocating assisted suicide for their patients without advocating for their right to use medicines that would cheer them up in a trice!
As always, the media has gotten ahold of the wrong end of the stick. Yes, the partial re-legalization of marijuana has problematic results -- but that is all precisely because it is only a partial re-legalization. In other words, drug prohibition is the problem, not drugs. Why does the Times think that marijuana is suddenly so popular and so relatively powerful in dosage? It has nothing to do with hemp (or marijuana, as we have been taught to call it by xenophobes and racists). It has everything to do with drug prohibition and our refusal to end it.
Here's my, alas, futile email to the Times. (I wonder how many of the editorial staff who wrote the latest prohibition screed were drinking alcohol last night in a bar and driving home "just a little bit" tipsy. I find that boozing lifestyle disgusting -- but you don't find me trying to deny the Times staff their damn alcohol.)
Why do you find it surprising that more people are using marijuana? It is the only alcohol alternative that is legal! You prohibitionists have seen to that! It's your fault! Re-legalize our right to medicine and to take care of our own health -- then you can stop the scapegoating of users of whose lifestyles you disapprove. Let us actually grow the plant, damn it, and stop blaming inanimate objects for social problems!!!
Prohibition is the problem, not drugs.
When is the New York Times going to learn that?
Your prohibition has forced me to go a lifetime without godsend medicine -- and you have spread your hateful prohibition around the world so I cannot leave America and "vote with my feet" for the right to take care of my own health.
You guys have been printing alarm stories about drugs for a hundred years now (like Dr. Lennard's statistically challenged and self-interested denunciation of cocaine in the 1970s 303132) causing the depressed and pain patients to go without godsend medicines because you never recognize all the stakeholders in drug prohibition.
Damn it, NYT, people want to relax and improve their minds -- and William James himself wanted us to explore altered consciousness -- and so-called drug use has inspired entire religions.
You guys are little short of murderers for promoting a prohibition approach to drugs that has destroyed inner cities around the world... and created a weird drug mentality thanks to which the depressed now are asking to commit suicide with the help of the state.... all because the state won't let them use drugs like Freud's cocaine that could cheer them up in a TRICE! In a TRICE!!!!
Your Stephanie Nolen is ghosting me because she thinks the Claire Brosseau story is all about assisted suicide. The story is really about drug prohibition which has brought us to this sorry pass: that the psychiatrists who profit from drug prohibition are now championing the right of their patients to KILL THEMSELVES WITH THE HELP OF THE STATE... because the STATE won't let them cheer themselves up!
I am the only one standing up for Claire Brosseau's right to live fully and to take care of her own health -- while your "health reporter" Stephanie Nolen is ghosting me, pretending that drug prohibition has nothing to do with assisted suicide!
When will you guys stop championing this killer policy that has brought Trump and fascists to power by throwing hundreds of millions of minorities in jail?
Brian
PS What are your financial interests in Big Pharma and alcohol? Why are you not complaining about the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life on Big Pharma drugs that are harder to kick than heroin? Why is THAT not America's drug problem? Why is the fact that I am stuck on Effexor for life not a drug problem for you guys! Why do you never even mention the greatest pharmacological dystopia in human history: the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life?! After all the moaning about the dehumanizing aspect of dependency, you are saying nothing about the greatest drug dependency in world history, with the possible exception of the nicotine we export to the tune of $82 billion in revenue a year.
Answer: Because you want to stigmatize the drug use in which you are personally not involved and from which you do not benefit through advertising.
The only answer to this endless cycle of drug demonizing on your behalf is to end drug prohibition -- and to stop scapegoating people based on the choices they make about their own damn health.
When will you get your necks out of the ground and engage in the issues -- and stop this endless nauseating cycle of finding new reasons to keep people from taking care of their own mental and emotional health? You guys cause all the problems -- and then you point to those very problems as reasons to keep up your flawed policy of drug prohibition. Re-legalize Mother Nature and let people grow what they want and stop limiting their rights to the purchase of just a few powerful strains of marijuana through a company that pointlessly acts as a go-between between human beings and Mother Nature. Stop demonizing drugs. For every time you take drugs out of the hands of so-called recreational users, you take them out of the hands of therapeutic users as well. As if there was anything wrong with recreational use in any case. Is there anything wrong with having a "cold one" after a long day at work?
What hypocrisy! The conglomerate media advertises "hydration" games in which the goal is to use alcohol irresponsibly. That's the goal of the game! That's Christmas fun awaiting you now on the shelves at your local Walmart! But today's conglomerate media has a vested interested in the whitewashing of alcohol.
If you want to see the sad state of philosophy in America -- and the effects of daily brainwashing, especially via the censorship of all positive talk about drug effects in the media -- just read the comments to any NYT article about drugs. You'll see every logical fallacy in the book, and a few new ones that no one has even thought to categorize yet. I noticed one person talking about the evils of using any drug on a daily basis -- a position that he can only maintain because he has been successfully taught to think of substances like caffeine and alcohol (and aspirin and antidepressants) as blessed medicines as opposed to "drugs."
Socrates would have had a field day philosophically dressing down the brainwashed and self-interested boozers on the NYT Editorial Board, where they print all the news that's fit to keep our eyes off the prize when it comes to our once time-honored right to take care of our own health as we see fit -- a right so abridged now that the untreated but bamboozled depressed are now demanding a new exotic right: the right to suicide with the help of the state. And what state? The same state that outlaws all medicines that could inspire one to live!
This is why I wish to create a new nonprofit called Depressed Americans for Drug Relegalization. The mere existence of such an entity would remind the prohibitionists of the so-far carefully hidden fact that there are more stakeholders in the prohibition debate than worried white parents who refuse to teach their kids honestly about drugs and instead want to outsource drug dangers to foreigners and inner city communities, while trashing the rights of academia to perform research on consciousness and dementia -- meanwhile abolishing the rights of the depressed and pain patients to take care of their own health -- a right so basic that only a decades-long campaign by the self-interested medical establishment could cause us to pretend that it never even existed, to the point where 'self-medication', the time-honored right, is now considered the ultimate no-no... for glaringly obvious financial reasons on the part of those who argue so.
This shows how powerful propaganda is as a tool. If you refuse to let the public learn about any positive uses of psychoactive medicines, they will soon be persuaded that no such uses exist, especially if you accompany this media censorship with self-interested metaphysical blather about treating the "real" problems -- as if it is wrong to relax and focus the mind without focusing on the real reason that you desire to do so, as if it were wrong to cool off after a long day with a glass of beer.
North Americans are so bamboozled by Drug War lies that we literally would prefer suicide to drug use.
It's amazing, really. I am fighting to save Claire's life -- by reminding her and the New York Times and her own psychiatrists (and I fear even the Cato Institute itself) that there are definitely drugs out there whose strategic and informed use could make her want to LIVE! Yet no one will hear. And when I write university ethicists on this topic, they either ignore me or, stranger yet, they tell me that they themselves are against drug prohibition.
What they fail to understand is, that this is not enough. Somebody has got to actually bring up the subject of drug prohibition in the context of the problems that it causes or we will never hold it responsible for its endless crimes and instead keep coming up with makeshift "fixes" to social problems like "assisted suicide" that help to normalize the drug prohibition policy by pretending that it is a natural baseline. And in the case of assisted suicide, we accomplish this by sacrificing real human beings to America's prime imperative of drug demonization.
I am particularly galled by the conservatives who cry out against assisted suicide on moral grounds, however; for their real goal is not to help the Claire Brosseaus of the world but to force them to live on without the help of godsend medicines in fealty to the Christian Science ideology of Mary Baker-Eddy. And yet it is a Hobson's Choice when it comes to all involved parties, because the non-conservatives are just as disinterested, if not more so, in the health of Claire, for one of three reasons: 1) either they do not know about the psychologically obvious benefits of a wide array of medicines, extant and potential, or 2) they are afraid to speak of such things for fear of being "the odd person out," or 3) a combination of motivations 1 and 2.
This is why I am not a big fan of Gabriel Mate. He is no doubt a great therapist and an empathic soul, but he does not understand the full injustice of drug prohibition. Instead, he tends to promote the cause of drug prohibition by attempting to pathologize the desire for drugs. In so doing, he is really pathologizing the practice of taking care of one's own health in the mental and emotional realm. When we seek to take care of our own health, Gate says, it is a sign that we are dealing with inner pain. This is a rather convenient line for a psychiatrist to take because it turns the whole world into one big client list, for we all have inner pains of some kind, and the psychiatrist's role becomes very large indeed when we deny the world its time-honored right to take care of those inner pains, to take care of their own health -- which is exactly what we do when we outlaw psychoactive medicines wholesale.
--
Every day, our Panama trip comes to sudden little unexpected stops as we pause so that my cousin can smoke yet another cigarette, this cousin who believes wholeheartedly, not only in taking her meds, but in taking them ostentatiously at the prescribed time, this cousin who believes that she would die if she was forced to eat wheat, this cousin who yet professes to be the most progressively correct woman to ever walk the face of the earth.
These logically incoherent passions of hers make me think of the lies that western missionaries spread about opium use in China -- that it was killing millions. Here we have the western drug called nicotine that we have foisted off on the world, so thoroughly addicting the user that they have to stop every few hours to get a "hit" -- and yet we demand the right to inflict this drug on the world while yet spreading the lie that opium use in China was all about western oppression? Please! If the west has oppressed China with drugs, it was not with the opium that they have used for millennia -- but rather with the state drugs of the west, namely booze and cigarettes... and, as I always like to say (only half jokingly, of course) "don't get me started on antidepressants!!!"
And yet even nicotine is not evil. It too has sane uses -- for certain people in certain doses in certain cultures in certain situations, etc. etc. etc. The evil is drug prohibition and the refusal to learn about safe use based on specific details -- rather than based on the superstitious notion that drugs can be good or bad in and of themselves.
February 10, 2026
I was considering relocating to the expat town of Boquete in the Chiriqui province of Panama... until yesterday, that is. We had to drive through two "puestos de control," or checkpoints, during the last hour of our six-hour drive here from Panama City on Route 1.
Here is an immigration checkpoint in Panama in the town of Guabala -- where trunks and luggage are ransacked by the state to catch Christian Science heretics.
These are checkpoints designed to cater to Washington D.C.'s enormously hypocritical war on the coca plant, the time-honored medicine of the Inca, which Freud considered to be a cure for depression. And I don't wish to live in a country in which I am reminded of that anti-indigenous and anti-health policy every time I go out for groceries. These checkpoints can also be viewed as the proactive enforcement of the medical industry's monopoly on mental healthcare, because its prime targets are those drugs whose use would render the mental healthcare establishment superfluous for the majority -- if not the VAST majority -- of North Americans.
NOTE: I have not researched these particular checkpoints and the party line is that they are cutting down on illegal immigration. But such checkpoints necessarily give the police carte blanche to rummage through the luggage in your trunk to find out if you are a Christian Science heretic and to punish you severely for practicing that heresy.
Panama has much to recommend it: the Canal, the Oceans, the Rainforests, the Mountains. But do not come here to escape drug prohibition. They have roadblocks for confiscating the divine plant of the Inca. Francisco Pizarro would be so proud.
It's funny how I cannot seem to get away from the absurd results of drug prohibition, even far from U.S. territory, even during a trip on which I'm technically supposed to be relaxing. The cousin joining me on this trip is talking about her own supervised withdrawal from Effexor so that her psychiatrist can start her on yet another med. I don't dare tell her that Effexor is perhaps the hardest drug to "kick" in the world. She probably will not notice that fact, however, because the downsides of ending long-term use can take up to a year to be felt, before which her psychiatrist will have her "up and running" on the next great "miracle drug" from Big Pharma, so she may be getting off of Effexor, but she will not be getting off of the stuff in such drugs that is keeping her a patient for life. This is just witch doctor stuff. As Noam Shpancer at Psychology Today magazine tells us, no one knows why these sorts of drugs "work" -- assuming that they do "work" -- and psychiatrists are just throwing mud at the wall, hoping some of it will stick -- at least for a for years until new mud can be found.
Let me add for the record that they do not "work" for me, insofar as a successful antidepressant, in my definition of that term, would allow me to thrive in life, not merely keep from killing myself, which is the low-bar that Big Pharma drugs seek to meet.
For all her progressive talk, my cousin truly believes that the doctors know best when it comes to antidepressants, or getting off them. But consider how doctors handle this. Like good scientists, they seek to eliminate as many variables as possible so that they can be in control. And to do this, they must punish the patient by having them go through withdrawal of one drug without starting another until the withdrawal is complete. This is a cruel protocol that punishes the patient so that the doctor can see "what's causing what," so that the variables can be limited for the benefit of doctors and insurance companies, never mind that human beings are complex entities inspired by a wide range of interacting input.
This sort of protocol only makes sense to doctors because they believe in biochemical cause-and-effect and do not consider the patient's feelings during the withdrawal process. They do not care that feeling good has knock-on effects as do negative feelings -- they care only about biochemical data, or at least they purport to care only about such data. In reality, they are punishing the patient because they know they could risk a lawsuit if things go south and they were not following the usual materialistic protocols that insurance companies have come to expect.
NOTE: Such "professionals" may be saintly in and of themselves, of course; my point is that the effects of their actions are manifestly immoral to the extent that they accord with materialist precepts, which force them to treat their patients, not as unique individuals, but rather as interchangeable biochemical widgets amenable to one-size-fits-all treatments for mental and/or emotional concerns.
Sure, there are some drug interactions that can be dangerous -- but materialist science focuses only on this one downside -- whereas common sense and simple humanity cries out for them to consider the potential suffering of the individual. This is why prohibition is such inhumane folly, because the kinds of decisions involved here depend on the individual's unique tolerances and goals in life -- something about which they themselves are the experts. A doctor can tell them of all the dangers in the abstract, considered outside of all context, but only the individual can decide whether the use of a given drug or drugs at a given time makes sense for them in their situation, whether the risks are acceptable for they themselves.
I can, of course, hardly cover this subject sufficiently in a blog post, but I hope that the educated reader can see the large point toward which I am pointing but which I would need an entire book to flesh out: namely, the fact that science in general is all about studying the world by simplifying it first -- and that this is why scientists can never be the arbiters on the subject of drug use. The efficacy of drug use is the result of the interaction of a vast array of variables, many peculiar to the users themselves. Science may try to take an input out of this context and discover its supposed importance in isolation, but they lose sight of the full picture when doing so. They lose sight of the fact that drug efficacy is ultimately determined by the user and that the user experience is not created by isolated inputs but rather by a vast array of interacting variables, each of which can both modify and be modified BY other inputs.
As I have said many times before, then, it was a category error to place scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place.
Nicotine is a drug. Caffeine is a drug. Alcohol is a drug. We use them in combination with all sorts of other drugs all the time. But when it comes to outlawed psychoactive medicine, the assumption is that all mixing is deadly. This is absurd, of course, but serves to keep materialist doctors holding the reins.
Speaking of nicotine, my cousin is out on the porch of our AirBnb out here in nature, rendering it a hazmat site as she smokes her first of many daily cigarettes. Just imagine, Americans "hating" on the peaceable smoking of opium at night -- and yet we sell cigarettes to the entire world and see no moral issue with this.
Nor would there BE a moral issue were all medicines re-legalized. It is common psychological sense that even the nicotine habit could be "kicked" easily with the help of common-sense protocols using a variety of mood-elevating and mind-focusing drugs. North Americans find this hard to believe only because, like our materialist scientists, they put no faith in the power of the mind, and therefore none in the power of drugs to focus and improve that mind. These protocols to which I refer have never even been tried by the west -- because they merely make psychological sense and do not flatter some materialist protocol by involving some known biochemical pathway.
--
Please read my increasing number of essays regarding the Claire Brosseau story, the story of the depressed Canadian who is seeking the right to assisted suicide when in reality she should be protesting drug prohibition which denies her, not only the medicines that could help her die peacefully without the help of her government, but would let her use drugs that could make her want to live!
And now a related word about the humiliating protocol whereby the depressed are turned into patients for life thanks to drug prohibition, which shunts them off onto Big Pharma meds for life:
When I was 40 years old, a psychiatrist -- one who had my OWN interests in mind, for a wonder -- wrote a year-long prescription for me for my antidepressant, apparently realizing that I was not a baby and that, after 15 years of therapy, I no longer needed to see a therapist every three months of my life to qualify for a prescription refill.
I still remember how the pharmacist rolled his eyes and shook his head when he saw that prescription for an entire year! "What?!" he seemed to say, "Trust a patient to use a drug wisely for an entire year! Unheard of!!!" The pharmacist thought that I should be treated like a child -- he just could not understand how a psychiatrist could trust a patient to use the antidepressant wisely without regular office visits.
This is what drug prohibition has wrought: it has turned Americans into babies with respect to drugs -- and anyone who refuses to be a baby is considered to be a bad patient!
Well, guess what, pharmacist: I never would have been a patient to begin with had self-interested doctors not helped to outlaw cocaine use by holding it to safety standards that we set for no dangerous activity on earth: not for horseback riding, not for mountain climbing, and certainly not for alcohol drinking or car driving.
February 9, 2026
America's demonization of opium is the proverbial case of the pot calling the kettle black. As William Brereton documents in "The Truth about Opium," many 19th-century doctors who were actually familiar with opium smoking considered opium to be a much safer and healthier drug as compared with alcohol.34 And yet xenophobic western racists and self-interested missionaries from the west depicted the opium smoker as either a bombed-out zombie or a devious character determined to seduce poor little white women into the supposed sin of miscegenation.
I think the excessive opium smoker is in a greater minority than the excessive spirit drinker or tobacco smoker. In my experience, the habit does no physical harm in moderation." Dr. Philip Ayres, former Colonial Surgeon of Hong Kong 35
As I write this, I am on vacation in Panama with two close family members, one of whom is so addicted to nicotine that we can never make more than two hours' worth of driving progress at a time before she has us stop for a cigarette break. [And yet we are stopped at checkpoints, not to check for nicotine, but for far less inherently addictive substances such as cocaine and opium.] But Americans not only tolerate such addiction, but they seek to spread it to the entire world through the sale of American cigarettes, just as they spread alcoholism worldwide by foisting our alcohol off on the world -- declaring it their capitalist right to do so in every country on earth. Seen in this light, the pretended western disdain for opium can be seen as a racist and hypocritical attitude designed to privilege the drugs of the west.
And so we rewrite history to make opium the villain of the piece when opium is a time-honored panacea, the outlawing of which incentivizes the production and use of far more powerful opiates, which, of course, is problematic in a country like ours that refuses to educate as to safe use, refuses to regulate as to quality and dosage, and refuses to provide true drug choice, so that a determined user can use what makes sense for them rather than what happens to be in the financial interest of the drug dealer to sell.
Nor is the drug dealer the problem. The villain is the prohibitionist who made drug dealers necessary in the first place. For the Reagans were inadvertently right about one thing when it comes to drugs: users are just as guilty as dealers from a moral point of view. What they did not understand is that there is nothing to feel guilty about. We all have a right to treat our own health as we see fit, and so it becomes our duty to disobey unjust laws.
Of course, the simpleton Drug Warriors will be quick to misunderstand and mischaracterize my position here. Clearly, drug prohibition often brings out the worst in human beings and many dealers will behave immorally. But that does not mean that drug dealers as such are evil. A drug dealer, in the abstract, is simply someone providing medicines that the government had no right to outlaw in the first place -- many coming directly from Mother Nature -- and as such they are no more deplorable than any other vendor. Indeed, the case could be made that they are less deplorable than doctors who knowingly put their "patients" on medicines that can never be kicked -- ever, which is the status quo of our current "mental health" establishment.
November 6, 2025
I've been reading Andrew Monteith's Christian Nationalism and the birth of the War on Drugs. Or rather I've been trying to read it. It's quite irritating to see how illogically the protestants trampled our rights to healthcare with their uninformed assumptions. They assumed, for instance, that "drugs" (whatever that means) destroyed one's ability to think clearly. This was just an early version of the BIG LIE of the 1980s perpetrated by the Partnership for a Drug Free America, that drugs fry the brain. It's a meaningless statement, in any case, given the enormous difference between psychoactive substances. The fact is, however, that many drugs do the exact opposite of frying the brain. Arthur Conan Doyle certainly did not make Sherlock Holmes a fan of cocaine because it fried his brain! Nor did opium fry the brain of American genius Benjamin Franklin.
The enormous irony here -- which almost no American is ready to face -- is that the only drugs that might be said to fry the brain -- by scrambling brain chemistry such that it can never return to normal -- are Big Pharma antidepressants! Oh, but Americans have been told that these drugs are "scientific" and so they can do no wrong. They turn millions into wards of the healthcare state and some of these drugs are literally impossible to kick for long-term users -- but no one is wringing their hands over the victims of the psychiatric pill mill. They have to grin and bear it so that Americans can hold onto their fantasy of all-powerful science. We must be gaslighted and told to take our meds -- so that Americans can feel they're a scientifically correct nation.
Well, it's election day and I voted. Hint: I did not vote for any insurrectionists, nor any apologists for the same. It's getting hard to avoid these clowns, however. The networks that served as cheerleaders for the insurrection are now parading as legitimate alternatives to Disney and Hulu, with the help of companies like Roku, who are rewarding and normalizing tyranny by treating Fox and friends like any other media outlets.
Speaking of... The UK Express claimed yesterday that the BBC had been caught red-handed "doctoring" the November 6th videos to make it appear that Donald Trump was calling for an insurrection. Um... okay. I suppose that's possible, but why bother? That's kind of like doctoring the Mary Poppins movie to make it appear that Julie Andrews was affable. Talk about a superfluous effort. Now, if someone could doctor the tapes in such a way as to make Donald Trump appear to be a freedom lover, that would have taken some doing.
I'm looking forward to Thursday, by the way, when I plan to read the 2023 book by Andrew Monteith entitled "Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the Drug War." I will be taking notes and kicking butt.
Well, I will be taking notes, in any case. Meanwhile, here are a few of my recent essays. They make sense to me. But I'm beginning to think that anything that makes sense is unintelligible to most Americans if the subject is drugs.
The sparsity of entries here (or rather the intermittent nature of their publication) is down to the fact that this blog has turned out to be something of a duplication of efforts on my part. It was meant as a kind of topical diary, linking the world of drug philosophy with the minutia of my private (or at least my semi-private) life; however, I soon realized upon working with this page that my entire site was itself a kind of diary, a diary consisting of daily updates in the form of admittedly charming essays and commentaries. It is a sort of implicit diary, if you will, one in which the daily minutia of my life might be inferred by the astute reader through a sort of Holmesian analysis of my proselytic adumbrations and the varying tenor of their exposition. Hint: You can generally tell my "good days" by the fact that my paragraphs are generally of equal length and fully fleshed out -- whereas both my whimsical and depressive days are typically characterized by impatient and emphatic declarations. Fortunately for my readers, these impassioned sallies of mine inevitably imply syllogistic upshots that compel assent by dint of the lived experience that clearly motivates them. For let's be clear: I make no bones about the personal stake that I have in these matters, do I? Hmm? Don't look at me, just ask YOURSELF. Do I? I mean, really now.
Nevertheless, I have decided to maintain and even sporadically update this document as an explicit "blog" in the perhaps somewhat extravagant hope that the insights contained herein will not be met with ENTIRE indifference by the online world -- at least in the fullness of time. I know this is a long shot, but what can you do? You counsel realism, but your warnings go unheeded. You try to tell yourself that it's fooling itself, that it does not have a chance in heaven. But then that self just turns right smack around and tells you straight to your face, it says: "Brian," it says, "you YOURSELF are myself, so who are YOU to talk?"
Naturally, such ripostes are not easy to parry. Myself does have a point, after all. In many ways, he's even RIGHT: I actually AM myself. So it seems that a clearcut rejoinder is out of the question. Still...
Well, let me "think on it" as they say in the restoration comedies, while you guys get back to possibly eventually reading this website.
Hmm...
August 19, 2025
As I struggle to get off of Effexor 36 , I find my philosophical attacks on drug prohibition are beginning to resemble a kind of diary. But then how could this be otherwise? The difficulties that I am encountering with Effexor are both my life story and the proof of my ongoing thesis that the Drug War is an attack on our most basic rights to take care of our own health as we see fit.
I am currently in the process of reading Mike Jay's drugs reader, aka Artificial Paradises, and commenting on the same in real-time with extensive notes in my essay entitled: Notes on Artificial Paradises by Mike Jay.
De Quincey calls himself the only member of the true church on the subject of opium. This is because he himself has actually used the substance of which he writes; whereas the experimental knowledge of all other pundits on the subject "is none at all." For similar reasons, I consider myself to be the only member of the true church of drug benefits. My life story is testament to the endless downsides of going without the godsends that America has decided to demonize rather than to learn how to use wisely; whereas almost all other pundits speculate from a lofty and puritanical perch about the supposed worthlessness of pharmaceutical interventions when it comes to mind and mood. They are glad to speak for me, not about how I feel, but rather about how they think that I should feel. They cannot see any benefit in self-transcendence: so why should I? And so they raise hysterical protests about the use of any drug from which they themselves cannot imagine receiving any benefits. And so they make a universal law out of their own parochial fears.
I ran across a refreshingly sane blog entry this morning about the UN policy on drug use by Ann Fordham, executive director of the International Drug Policy Consortium37. It inspired my new essay entitled A Drug Free World, and other bad ideas.
Check out these essays updated today. You will notice that I have added discussion questions to many of these posts, so that teachers and professors can get their students talking -- in this world that does everything it can to shut down free speech when it comes to the subject of drugs.
Meanwhile, I am creating a narrated version of the Rig Veda, the Vedic text that demonstrates that the outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of the religious impulse. Look for release of that audio program in the coming year under the auspices of funding sources that I will be announcing when appropriate.
"Bring from the firmament, 0 Ushas, all the Gods, that they may drink our Soma juice"
The Partnership for a Death Free America is busy saving your young white children from dangers. Their latest PSA, which dropped today, calls on Americans to outlaw skateboards -- those so-called toys that send over 200,000 young people to the Emergency Room every year! Preview the ad here: Skateboards Kill.
May 15, 2025
In a 2015 article in Vice magazine, Adam Rothstein claimed that peer-review journals -- and even the Wikipedia website -- are more objective than Erowid. Adam is completely wrong about that. To see why, see my latest essay entitled Thank God for Erowid.
May 13, 2025
Today I posted some new reflections about Mike Jay's 2000 book in my essay entitled End Drug Prohibition Now.
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May 11, 2025
I will be finishing the highly informative book "Emperors of Dreams" by Mike Jay today -- that is to say, I will be completing my first read-through of the text. I am taking extensive notes as I read, and I will soon be commenting on some of the philosophical issues that I find to be implicitly raised in the rare work. I call the book "rare" because Mike is one of the few authors whose writing on these topics does not betray a subconscious fealty to a variety of problematic drug-war assumptions. For more, look for the updates that I continue to add to my related essay page entitled: End Drug Prohibition Now.
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This morning I would also fain call the reader's attention to my update of an essay of mine from 2023 entitled Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me.
So, I was reading and enjoying "Emperors of Dreams" by Mike Jay40. I had my alarm set for 5:30 p.m. for supper. Here it is 9:14 p.m. and I still have not had supper, though. Why? Because at the end of the chapter on opium, Mike blindsided me by saying that he does not think we are ready as a world for drug re-legalization . I was dumbfounded -- because everything he had written to that point had made such sense to me.
I could not have disagreed more with his go slow ideas about substance re-legalization -- so my supper had to wait. I wrote an entire essay in rebuttal to Mike's position and advised him of the fact via email. We shall see if he reads my rebuttal essay and has something to say. Meanwhile, I invite you to read the essay in question while I go off to a long-delayed supper!
I find it quite depressing to do drug-related research. Take the fascinating subject of oneirogens, drugs that inspire dreams. Most sites that discuss such drugs include an irritating and groveling disclaimer that the drugs in question are not for people with mental issues. The statement is not so much false as it is troublingly incomplete. If such drugs could cause problems, it is because they have been insufficiently studied -- because of drug law and the passion-scorning materialist bias of modern science. Oneirongens as such have tremendous prima facie potential for helping folks with mental issues.
I have also added some important clarifications to my recent essay entitled Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms. Spoiler alert: Psilocybin has great promise for treating depression. But when it comes to replacements for shock therapy, we must look elsewhere: for instance, to anesthetics, to opiates, and to phenethylamines.
Finally! I've come up with the answer to the post-war poser.
How are you going to keep them down on the farm?
ANSWER: With the strategic use of godsend medicines.
For more, see my bombshell essay entitled Huxley's Reservations about Mescaline, in which I finally pick up the gauntlet that Aldous Huxley tossed down 75 years ago!
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Here is a comment I posted today on the website for the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics41.
This shutting down of research was based on a bizarre and anti-scientific idea: namely, that...
if a drug can pose a danger for white young people when used at one dose for one reason, it must not be used by anyone at any dose for any reason.
Meanwhile, the FDA approves of Big Pharma drugs whose published side effects include death itself 42 . Aspirin kills 3,000 a year in the UK alone. Liquor kills 178,000 a year in the US. Clearly the outlawing of psychedelics is completely irrational. And yet folks like Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman support drug prohibition. This is disingenuous in the extreme. They claim to be interested in safety -- but whose safety? Not the safety of the 60,000 who have been disappeared in Mexico over the last two decades thanks to the War on Drugs. Not the safety of the 67,000 minorities who have been killed by gun violence over the last ten years. Not the safety of the user who is ignorant about drug use thanks to the Drug Warrior's refusal to teach safe use. Not the safety of the folks who have to dangerously synthesize DMT because it is outlawed. Not the safety of inner city kids like 15-year-old Niomi Russell who was killed in drive-by shooting in 2024, thanks to the fact that drug prohibition had armed D.C. neighborhoods to the teeth. The FDA also approves of shock therapy, by the way. They would rather that we knowingly damage the brains of the depressed than to let them use the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions, as Soma inspired the rishi of the Punjab in 1500 BCE.
This has been Update Monday here at abolishthedea.com. First, I added some reflections to my 2022 essay entitled The Mother of all Western Biases. Then I updated one of the very first anti-Drug War articles that I ever wrote, a full six years ago now, entitled How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Drug War. (Ah, 2019! Those were the days, huh?) If that seems prehistoric, I went on to update an article that was even older than THAT: namely, In Praise of Thomas Szasz. (Ah, even earlier in 2019! Those were REALLY the days, huh? Even more so, I mean!) In that latter case, I explained why Drug Warriors (bless them) positively SHALL be hating on Thomas Szasz. And why? Spoiler alert: It is because Drug Warriors want to "arrest themselves out of problems" rather than to solve problems.
Here are a few other additional essays that I have also ventured to update with, shall we say, a few, ahem, "novel reflections" from my present-day self? (Sure, why not? "Novel reflections" it is!)
America has made its own dystopia with drug prohibition and refuses to see it. Instead of pointing out that drug prohibition has created extreme violence, Americans revel in movies like "Godfather" and "Scarface" -- and "Running with the Devil" and "Crisis." We are blind to the link between drug prohibition and violence, or just don't care. But then how will we recognize the links in movies when we have destroyed entire cities with drug prohibition and fail to see it? The only reason that there are no-go zones in America's inner cities is because of liquor prohibition and then drug prohibition, both of which brought guns and violence to the 'hood. But we ignore that fact as we sit back at home stuffing our face with popcorn as we watch movies in which the DEA runs riot over constitutional freedoms -- or in which the Mafia rules: that Mafia that was created out of whole cloth by prohibition. We Americans know that prohibition creates violence and we just don't care. It's the minorities who are suffering after all -- except for the increasingly common mass shootings, in which the pains of prohibition get spread out among the mainstream as well.
-- As my ideal thorough reader will know, I have had to lift heaven and earth to create a realistic withdrawal protocol for getting off of Effexor, since the pharmaceutical company refuses to make small doses of the drug with which I could stand a chance of actually accomplishing that seemingly unlikely feat (insofar as there is a 95% recidivism rate43 after three years for long-term users who attempt to get off the drug). I finally succeeded in finding a compounding pharmacy that would work with me, after first convincing my psychiatrist to allow me to do so, since he personally saw no problem with me remaining a patient for life. Unfortunately, I have been taking the extended-release version of the drug for decades now, and it turns out that Pfizer considers that formulation to be proprietary in nature and so they will not provide it for the purposes of helping folks get off their "miracle" drug. How convenient, right?
Nevertheless, I have succeeded in using a combination of 37.mg ER and compound 2.5mg pills to steadily reduce my daily Effexor intake over the last six months from 250 mg. to 37.5 mg. Having now, however, reached the lowest possible dosage for which mass-marketed pills are available, I am beginning the final phase of my protocol wherein a rely entirely on compounded (but fast-release) versions of Effexor. That is why I was disheartened, to put it mildly, by the difficulties that I have had in getting my mental health clinic to approve the compounded prescription refill request that I submitted Thursday morning. This is infuriating because it is so typical. This, in fact, is one of the main reasons why I want nothing to do with the mental healthcare field, because when it comes to drug refills, their nurses and doctors have always demonstrated a combination of incompetence and indifference to my time-sensitive requests as a patient.
In this case, the refill request was duly faxed to them on Thursday. On that same day, I contacted the clinic using their so-called "My Chart" website. After 24 hours, I contacted them again, at which point they claimed to be unaware of my refill request and asked me for the compounding schedule which I had forwarded them two months ago as part of getting that protocol approved. This was early Friday morning and they never got back to me again, although I double-checked with the compounding pharmacy and they insisted they had faxed the refill request on Thursday. They, however, faxed the request again, and I contacted the clinic again to see if they received it, but of course they did not respond. But then that make it super-clear on their phone recordings that there is no point in reminding them of anything because repeated calls and emails "will not expedite matters," as they put it.
This is yet another problem with drug law. Doctors have gotten complacent about their monopoly on doling out medicine, and now they are high and mighty. Their time on the golf course will NOT be interrupted by a patient who merely needs a medicine that will cause them grief to go without. The clinics need well over 48 hours to get refill matters processed and if that's a problem for the patient, screw them. They are the patient, and we are the doctors. My whole life viz. prescriptions has been a history of cavalier incompetence on the part of healthcare providers. I even experienced these issues when I was trying to get urgent medicines refilled for my elderly mothers. The medical clinics simply refused to be hurried and had no interest in the details of the problems that they were causing for their patient by refusing to act promptly. THEY are in charge of doling out the goods and they will do so when they see fit, thank us all very much.
May 2, 2025
I've got to stop reading emails just before going to bed. I spent a largely sleepless night last night thanks to having read the following subject line in an email from MAPS:
"Ketamine: Powerful Ally—or Risky Escape?"
That subject line is so loaded with unspoken assumptions that it called for an essay by itself -- though it also turned out that I had plenty to say about the Ketamine-related paper to which it referred. See How Ketamine Advocates Reckon without the Drug War.
May 2, 2025
Today I have made so bold to as to update the following essays:
I have yet to hear a drug debate in which the good guys went for the jugular. Here on some thoughts on that subject in my update to my essay entitled Why I Am Pro Drugs.
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Drug Warriors are murderers. They know full well that liquor prohibition brought machine-gun-fire to America's streets. And yet they champion prohibition to fight the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions. So they try to save the white kids that they refuse to educate by outsourcing prohibition dangers to minorities and foreigners. 60,000 Mexicans were disappeared over the last 20 years thanks to the War on Drugs. 67,000 Blacks were killed in America's biggest cities by gunfire over the last ten years -- and it was first liquor and then drug prohibition that armed Black neighborhoods to the teeth.
This is why it is not hyperbole to charge prohibitionists with murder -- and even with premeditated murder, insofar as they know that liquor prohibition created the Mafia as we know it today. In fact, the Drug Warriors are seeming totally unaware of two glaringly obvioius things: namely, the endless downsides of drug prohibition and the endless potential upsides of drug use -- as documented in the book "Pihkal" for instance and as made clear by the fact that drug use inspired the creation of the Hindu religion. The fact is, as Carl Hart reports, that many people use drugs wisely and for good reasons, in spite of the government's attempts to make drug use as dangerous as possible by refusing to teach safe use and refusing to regulate product.
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as an impediment to justice.
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If any reader understands with me the way that Drug War ideology has censored academia and non-fiction authors in general, then I urge them to send a copy of the following essay of mine to the psychology professor of their choice: Demonizing Human Transcendence. No academician has less excuse for ignoring the stultifying results of the Drug War than psychologists44, for William James practically founded their field and he called for the active investigation of altered states.
_3_ I have also updated my 2023 essay entitled Why doctors should prescribe opium for depression. In a free world, psychiatrists should be able to prescribe opium in certain cases of depression -- based on actual circumstances. For this, they must abolish the one-size-fits-all mindset of the Drug War and modern psychiatry. (The Drug War actually has a "one-size-UNfits-all" ideology, incidentally.) Of course, in a truly free world, materialist psychiatrists would not be gatekeepers for godsend drug use in the first place. They would be replaced by (or in some cases morph into) pharmacologically savvy empaths. The name more or less says it all, but for more on this subject, see my 2020 essay entitled Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism.
April 27, 2025
Today I have a surprise drug test for you: Take this Drug Test. Halos on and in the full upright position.
Speaking of which, William James' 20 Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion are not without their comic moments. In Lecture X on Conversion, James quotes "an excellent little illiterate English evangelist" named Billy Bray on the subject of how he communes with God.
"On one occasion," Bray said, "when at a prayer‐ meeting at Hicks Mill, I heard the Lord say to me, 'Worship me with clean lips.' So, when we got up from our knees, I took the quid out of my mouth and 'whipped 'en' [threw it] under the form."
Forgive the levity that I am about to invoke here, but I believe I can prove the idiocy of Bray's religious views as suggested above by the use of the argumentum ad absurdum -- while also saying something intelligent about the subject of drugs. Work with me here, folks.
Maybe it's just the scapegrace in me, but I cannot help thinking of the Lord following up his exhortation to Billy to "Worship me with clean lips" with the following indignant exclamation: "And get a haircut while you're at it! For God's sake, Billy, I mean, what was your last barber even THINKING?!"
Nor is this simply irreverence on my part. My philosophical point is this: If God is really interested in correcting our bad habits on such a retail basis, it begs the question, why does He come forth only with his disapproval about the habits which tend to be already on our own radar? If He views unclean lips as an implicit affront to majesty, so to speak, then surely He would be equally affronted by our wearing of a pair of dirty socks or of a carelessly cinched-up cravat. Such a God, were He consistent, would tut-tut our failure to button all the relevant buttons on our coat given the current climatic conditions.
In other words, such a God is of the Earth, Earthy, wherefore Billy Bray would be well advised to question the veracity of his religious visions.
This is what the Drug Warriors do when they consider drugs to be unholy. They improbably envision a God that cannot stand our use of the very substances that He himself created. It makes you wonder if God makes some hard-and-fast rule about gluten viz salvation. That seems unlikely to me. Ergo, the Drug Warrior had better join Billy in second-guessing their own religious presuppositions.
April 26, 2025
Good morning, starshine. (The Earth says hello, by the way.)
The attentive reader (should there be such) will have noticed that I have yet to fulfill my recent promise to philosophically evaluate the Erowid website.
This is because I have realized upon digging further into the site that I am not yet qualified to perform such a review. Some of the qualms that I originally thought I had about the resource are probably the result of my failure to investigate it thoroughly. So stay tuned.
See? I'm not such a bad guy. I try to be fair.
I am looking forward to reading the drug summary pages in particular.
What was my concern in the first place?
My concern was that the site might tend to place potential godsend meds in a harsh light by failing to put the downsides of use in context. If Erowid covered shark encounters, for instance, there would be plenty of reports about shark attacks. My question then would be: how successfully does the website put those attack reports in context, so that the casual site visitor does not come away with the idea that sharks are a clear and present danger for anyone who so much as dips a toe in the ocean?
Ideally, any horror story about a statistically super-safe drug should have a disclaimer reminding the reader that the gnarly outcomes being documented are extremely unlikely to occur. What's more, this disclaimer should appear on the same page as the horror story. The mere fact that the drug's relative safety might be documented elsewhere on Erowid is not enough. A casual site visitor who sees the horror story out of context is likely to come to a negative conclusion about the drug in question without bothering to perform any further research on Erowid. To the contrary, their next Google search could very well include the drug name plus the words "horror stories," since they are now associating the drug with negative outcomes only.
These are not yet criticisms of Erowid, just a foretaste of what I fear I might find upon a closer investigation. I will be delving further to see if Erowid is actually guilty as charged -- or as initially feared.
I also hope to find that the "main page" for each drug makes it clear, to the extent possible, how risky the use of the drug is compared to the use of other drugs -- and to the performance of other life activities. If I am more likely to win the lottery than to experience a given drug downside, then tell me. Give me at least some idea of what is foreground and what is background when it comes to potential dangers, do not just overwhelm me with acontextual data.
Again, I am not (yet) charging Erowid with any shortcomings, merely enumerating my existing qualms prior to truly investigating the site.
April 25, 2025
Check out our new radio ads at the Partnership for a Death Free America. They are part of our second anniversary celebration of making the world safe for suburban American young people.
Today I have updated my letter to Dr. Dasgupta of of the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center: Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion. Dr. Dasgupta is, of course, generally speaking, on the right side of the issues when it comes to drug legalization . But the very fact that a materialist scientist is considered an expert on such matters is highly problematic, because materialists ignore all obvious benefits of drugs. They talk about methadone and buprenorphine... but drugs to treat misnamed "opioid disorder" are omnipresent: phenethylamines and laughing gas, for starters. And "opioid disorders" is misleading: the disorder is "prohibition disorder." Young people were not dying on the streets from opiates when opiates were legal in America. It took prohibition to accomplish that by refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate the drug supply, and refusing to re-legalize godsend alternatives that the government had no right to outlaw in the first place.
Materialists are gaslighting us when they tell us that the only drugs to treat such conditions are methadone and buprenorphine. Do they really think we are dumb enough to believe that drugs that have inspired entire religions have no positive uses for helping us change behaviors? Do they really believe that drugs that inspired the following user reports in "Pihkal" cannot help people change unwanted behaviors.
"I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world."
"I feel that it is one of the most profound and deep learning experiences I have had."
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."
April 24, 2025
Coming soon: some philosophical concerns/observations about the Erowid website.
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I received a bulk email from the DPA and Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta today with the subject line "I've Studied Overdose Deaths for 20 Years." I opened it with hesitation, knowing that I was about to see materialist biases, and sure enough the message contained a prominent link reading:
"What are medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD)? What are barriers to people getting them?"
I had to immediately write a letter to Nabarun to answer his questions for him:
QUESTION: What are medications for so-called opioid use disorder?
ANSWER: Almost all the drugs that we have outlawed.
QUESTION: What are barriers to people getting them?
ANSWER: Drug prohibition.
I have also updated my letter to the elusive Nathan at DEA.org -- a site that creeps me out, since it treats the DEA as a legitimate organization rather than as the Gestapo that it is. For more, see Open Letter to Nathan at TheDEA.org.
April 23, 2025
William James saw the power of anesthetics like laughing gas to provide us with religious states, states in which we seemed to be somehow inspired with certainties about the nature of ultimate reality. Unfortunately, he failed to realize that substances like nitrous oxide were just one of many kinds of substances that can inspire such states. Had he noticed this crucial fact, perhaps it would have been harder for demagogue pols to convince us that psychoactive substances are somehow evil. For more, see my latest essay entitled A Philosophical Review of 'The Varieties of Religious Experience'.
_9_
Let us pray.
Dear God, we come before thee, asking forgiveness for our previous kneejerk support of a drugs policy that has destroyed democracy in America, destroyed the rule of law in Latin America, and rendered gunfire in inner cities so commonplace as to now be completely invisible to modern politicians, except insofar as they wish to make political hay out of the very violence that they themselves have brought about with their racist Drug War. Speak to the hearts of the bamboozled everywhere. Remind them that to utter words like "Fentanyl kills" is to support this racist Drug War. Remind them, moreover, that phrases like "Fentanyl kills" and "Fentanyl steals our loved ones" are philosophically identical to saying things like "Fire bad!" as did our prehistoric forebears in the benighted past. Remind us that all such statements are wrong for the same reason. They both imply a demonstrably false notion: namely, that a substance that can be misused by one demographic in one situation can have no benefits for anybody in any situation. Show them the absurdity of this viewpoint, God. Remind them that all substances have potential positive uses at some dose, for some person, for some reason -- nay, that even cyanide and Botox have positive uses in healthcare -- and that it is tyrannical and ultimately racist to outlaw substances for everybody in the world merely because they can cause problems for young white Americans whom we have refused to educate about safe use, for whom we have refused to regulate the drug supply, and for whom we have refused to legalize a wide variety of alternative choices for the safe and sustainable benefit of mind and mood.
Amen.
Imagine a 12-step group designed to help people free themselves from the mental shackles of a lifetime of anti-drug propaganda.
You want to do something in your neighborhood to fight the War on Drugs? Start holding Drug Warriors Anonymous meetings, where freedom-loving people can chew the fat as part of a recognizable protest movement against the racist and anti-democratic status quo. Drug Warriors Anonymous. Of course, you could call your meeting anything you want, but by using the term "Drug Warriors Anonymous" you turn your very organizational name into a protest and thereby make it clear why you are getting together -- that is, not to merely talk about drugs like the hedonists that freedom-lovers are supposed to be these days, but to champion common sense and time-honored principles about the value of free speech, academic freedom, and the sanctity of human life that we are willfully destroying today thanks to policies inspired by fear rather than understanding.
The Drug War outlaws philosophy -- and yet philosophers do not even notice. This is probably due to two major reasons: first, philosophers are scared to death of speaking up -- and second because most philosophers are materialists, and the Drug War privileges materialism 46 by outlawing precisely those substances whose use conduces to a non-materialistic worldview. For more on this completely unnoticed topic, see my new essay entitled How the Drug War Outlaws Philosophy.
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Outlawing drugs is a crime against humanity. Drugs have obvious positive uses for Alzheimer's 47 patients and the autistic, not to mention average so-called "normal" human beings. This is blazingly obvious in light of the fact that the Hindu religion owes its very existence to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. For more, see my 2025 update to my 2022 essay entitled Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!.
Speaking of glorified drug use, streaming channels are full of Jim Beam commercials, purposefully targeted at young people.
April 19, 2025
Today, I have concluded my series called "After the Drug War": After the Drug War Part 4. Bon appétit.
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^1942^The Partnership for a Death Free America 4849 is now two years old! We are celebrating by launching a campaign to outlaw fire! Listen to our latest ads by checking out the 2025 update to Partnership for a Death Free America.
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Julian Buchanan once mentioned how tempting it was at times to fall asleep at the philosophical wheel and become a pod person who believes that the Drug War is right. It is a world view that is promulgated in so many blatant and subtle ways, after all. Why should one struggle against it? It is tempting to believe that one is mad oneself, rather than to believe that the entire world is wrong. And yet whenever I have those moments, I am instantly snapped back to reality by ads for Jim Beam Bourbon on TV -- ads directed at young people, no less: ads that glorify bourbon drinking.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. We outlaw the kinds of substances that have inspired religions -- substances that inspire and elate as did the Soma that inspired the Hindu religion. Why? Because such substances would be dangerous for young people. And yet a substance that kills 178,000 a year in America alone is promoted in regular ads on prime-time television, ads directed at young people.
So it is easy for me to keep myself from falling asleep and becoming a pod person. Even without the Jim Beam ads, I have only to consider the fact that the MDMA-hating FDA approves Big Pharma drugs whose side effects include death itself 50 -- then I remember that it is NOT my imagination after all, that the entire world is completely brainwashed by the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
April 17, 2025
Phrases like "Fentanyl kills" are stupid for the same reason that the phrase "Fire bad!" is stupid. All such categorical statements are based on the following insane assumption: namely, that a substance that can cause problems when used by one person in one way for one purpose cannot be used safely by anyone in any way for any purpose! In other words, phrases like "Fentanyl 51 kills" are superstitious utterances worthy of our Stone Age forebears.
This insight is crucial for Americans to grasp if they ever hope to free themselves of the firm grip of mind control that the Drug Warriors have exercised over them since grade school. Since childhood, we have all had our brains fried by the propaganda of half-truths, lies and censorship: censorship of any and all positive stories about the substances that we are meant to fear rather than to understand. That is why I added a short blurb on this subject to my site introduction. See my April 2025 update to Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com.
Two years ago, the newscasters (er, presenters) at Channel 5 UK staged a pep rally in favor of criminalizing nitrous oxide. They were supposed to be merely hosting a discussion between two experts on the substance called laughing gas, but the announcers could not hold back their righteous indignation. I know how they feel. I know an entire family that was killed by fire -- and I am always outraged by folks who talk about safe fire use. Do they not realize that NOBODY can use fire safely! See my update ton my 2023 essay entitled The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter.
Today we are told that there may be alien life forms out there. It looks like the DEA is going to have to start gearing up to take their war against self-transcendence into outer space!
Imagine if driver's ed classes were conducted like so-called drug education classes. _1_ I got a hoot out of doing just that in my new short essay entitled: Driver's Ed and Drugs.
Any drug that elates has obvious uses for the depressed and others -- uses limited only by the human imagination. The Drug War is all about gaslighting us into thinking otherwise. For more, see my update to my 2023 article entitled Why doctors should prescribe opium for depression.
April 15, 2025
The Drug Warriors want us to hate drug dealers. Indeed, they need us to. Otherwise, we would blame the real culprits for the violence and suffering caused by drug prohibition. We would blame the Drug Warriors themselves! Learn more by reading my latest essay entitled Drug Warriors are the Problem, not Drug Dealers.
April 13, 2025
Americans believe that it is a righteous thing to kill drug dealers.
Really? How about the guys who supplied Michael Pollan with HIS drugs to write his books? How about the guys who supplied the Vedic people with Soma? This view can only be based on the warped idea that there are substances that are really bad in and of themselves, that have no good uses whatsoever. But all drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time, for some person.
Historians completely ignore the War on Drugs, just as scientists do. We live in a make-believe world thanks to such Drug War censorship: a world in which the positive effects of drug use are ignored, as are the negative effects of drug prohibition. It is a world of self-satisfied (not to mention cowardly) make-believe! For the latest on this topic, see my 2025 update of my 2023 essay entitled: Even Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug War.
April 10, 2025
If you are not sufficiently outraged by drug prohibition, I have the cure for you. Just read my 2025 update to Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State, in which I quote several infuriating excerpts from the book of that name by Richard Lawrence Miller.
_33_ For more on Miller's book -- including more infuriating outtakes -- see my essay entitled Why Drug Warriors are Nazis.
April 9, 2025
I have good news and bad news: The good news is that Andrew Weil's book "From Chocolate to morphine 52" is one of the most honest books that exist today on the subject of drugs. The bad news is that even the content of THIS book is informed by certain Drug War prejudices that were apparently instilled in the author by Drug War propaganda. To learn more, please see my 2025 update to my essay entitled: Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy.
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Being a Drug Warrior means never having to say you're sorry. To learn more, see the 2025 update to my essay entitled When you say 'Drugs'.
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_2_ Comic duo Adderall Zoloft and Paxil Buspar are back at the DEA Lounge and people are breaking down the doors to get in -- SWAT teams, by the look of it! Listen to their latest routine, which is anything but: Fried Brains Over Easy: another Drug War Comedy Routine.
April 8, 2025
In recent essays, I have been asking the following question:
What qualifies the drug-designing chemist to decide what emotional and mental states constitute a "cure" for my depression?
This question comes to mind when I find chemist Alexander Shulgin speculating that the depressed need something other than the godsend psychoactive medicines whose miraculous effects he describes in "Pihkal,53," as if the depressed are aliens from another planet, strange life forms that are not amenable to the psychological interventions that work for normal human beings. Folks like myself apparently cannot benefit from rapture and ecstasy. Who knew? Answer: Not anyone with common sense, for starters.
I have today noticed a line from Schopenhauer that nicely catches the concerns that I have about chemists who draw such bizarre but consequence-laden conclusions:
"The mere study of Chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher.54"
This statement, of course, had nothing to do with designing drug cures for the depressed, and yet it is more connected with my theme than one might think, for Schopenhauer intended the comment as a reproof of materialist pseudo-philosophers. And the creation of Big Pharma psychoactive drugs today is firmly in the hands of said materialist pseudo-philosophers, those who are dogmatically blind to common sense because they fail to see the inhumanity of the tenets by which they work: namely, those of the passion-free psychological theory of behaviorism. It is this behaviorism that turns our modern materialist scientists into collaborators in the Drug War, because it gives them a metaphysical pretext for signing off on the great Drug War lie: namely, that the glaringly obvious benefits of psychoactive medicines do not 'really' exist, that all benefits for the depressed must be discovered under a microscope.
In the minds of such materialists, rapture and ecstasy are all well and good for "normal" people, but folks whom we have classified as "depressed" according to the DSM cannot benefit from such things. Apparently, they have to shut up and take their meds instead -- and for a lifetime, at that.
Um, thanks but no thanks, Alex. I think I'll try the rapture and ecstasy instead. In my world, feeling good actually HELPS ME -- regardless of whether or not you can prove that to your own satisfaction with the help of quantifiable data.
So let's ask that question again:
What qualifies the drug-designing chemist to decide what emotional and mental states constitute a "cure" for my depression?
ANSWER: Nothing. I myself know what mental and emotional states constitute a cure for my depression, thank you very much. Drug-designing chemists do not have my interest in mind in any case: they have the interests of the pharmaceutical companies in mind when they pretend to create a one-size-fits-all drug for me -- wherefore the depressed actually have a duty to self-medicate: a duty to themselves!
Yes, self-medication 55 is dangerous, but why is it so? It is dangerous because drug prohibition makes it so, by refusing to teach safe use and by refusing to regulate the drug supply as to quality and quantity -- and of course by seeking to arrest the depressed for attempting to treat their depression in a way that does not turn them into a Big Pharma patient for life.
Next question: could America's "mental health" policies be more inhumane?
ANSWER: No. And as with so many modern dystopias, we have the Drug War to thank for that.
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Ever wonder what newscasts would look like if the media covered ALL risky activities the way that they cover drug use? See my 2025 update to my 2023 essay entitled Time for News Outlets to stop promoting drug war lies.
April 5, 2025
Obama wanted to study the brain. What we really need to study is the human being and the mind. For more, please see my April 2025 update to my 2020 essay entitled What Obama got wrong about drugs.
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I have added remarks to yet another 2020 essay of mine. (I feel tempted to make a joke here about 2020 hindsight, but don't worry, I shall refrain.) This second essay is entitled The Worst thing about the Drug War. As you might imagine, one is spoiled for choice when selecting for such a category.
Spoiler Alert: I originally decided in 2020 that the worst thing about the Drug War was that it was a worldwide phenomena and so I could not escape the injustice even by the most extreme form of repatriation, say to Bangladesh, for instance. Today I'm thinking that maybe the worst thing about the Drug War is that it outlaws the freedom of religion 56. In other words, my 2020 self said "potato" whilst my 2025 self says "po-tah-to."
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Prohibition is a crime against humanity. Pass it on.
April 5, 2025
Christian Science is a strange religion in light of the War on Drugs: at a superficial level, its very existence helps support drug prohibition by telling us that drug use is immoral and unnecessary (immoral BECAUSE unnecessary insofar as we should rely on the healing powers of Jesus Christ) -- and yet at a deeper level, Eddy's "beef" was not so much with drugs as it was with materialist medicine which denied the powers of the human mind. For more on this fraught and highly consequential topic, see my new essay on this topic entitled Christian Science and Drugs.
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Today I did a critical re-read of my July '24 comedy routine/essay entitled The Drug War Philosopher of the United States of America. I felt compelled after doing so to append a few clarifications. You know how it is: sometimes one revisits one's previous protest screeds and finds that they have retroactive scruples about the comments contained therein -- about their failure to make one's point as emphatically as one might wish.
By the way, if the reader is troubled by such things, there IS hope, for I understand that there are new treatments being devised for retroactive scruples every single day. I even hear that a vaccine might be forthcoming.
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I was told by one of my X followers that most psychiatrists would desire to have shock therapy if they were to become seriously depressed.
WHAAAAAAT!?
_5_ If this is true -- or even anywhere close to true -- it shows how thoroughly the Drug Warrior has succeeded in brainwashing us to believe that drugs can have no positive uses whatsoever.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
The drug user reports in Pihkal describe ecstatic states that would make life a blessing! The accounts of laughing gas in the work of William James describe literally heavenly states. The Hindu religion, for that matter, owes its existence to drug(s) that inspire and elate.
How tragic, if that tweet is true: that the Drug War has so warped the American mind as to make us complacently seek out brain damage when we are depressed.
I weep when I think of the childishness into which modern science has devolved thanks to America's cradle-to-grave brainwashing in the drug-hating ideology of substance demonization.
Materialists are sickos when it comes to treating mind and mood. They actually think that death and brain-damaging shock therapy are better than the use of "drugs." What a disgrace. For more, see my newly updated 2024 essay entitled: The FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive drugs.
I have also updated my essay entitled The Bill Clinton Fallacy. It now includes, for instance, the following important observation:
"The Hindu religion owes its very existence to a drug that elated and inspired, from which it clearly follows that the outlawing of psychoactive substances is a violation of religious liberty. Those who have ears, let them hear. Those who have ignorant white brothers, let them educate them rather than outlawing the religious impulse itself by outlawing the godsends of Mother Nature (and the many wonderful drugs that have been inspired thereby)."
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I need hardly add that America's troglodyte Congress passed the Halt Act. They still insist on treating health concerns as a criminal matter. See my latest update to my essay entitled: Another Cry in the Wilderness. This is all a completely bogus and fascist-oriented way of looking at the world. We need to educate, not arrest. We need to stop denying the power of medicines that inspire and elate. It is a violation of religious liberty to do so insofar as the Hindu religion was inspired by just such "drugs."
We need, in short, to develop a network of what I call "pharmacologically savvy empaths" to teach people to use drugs wisely and for good purposes. We need to finally recognize that drugs are not a problem; the only problems are a lack of education and direction in people's lives. We do not need the military to solve that sort of problem, we need living, breathing people who know the risks and benefits of all substance use (based on personal experience and historic research) and can inspire usage patterns that limit drug downsides to the bare minimum consistent with a free society.
We also need to acknowledge -- as if we were actually adults -- that we can never save everybody -- except by outsourcing the downsides of prohibition to minorities and foreigners, while meanwhile denying godsend medicines to all those who would use them wisely and for good reasons if given half a chance. For more on these topics, please read my essays entitled Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism and The Bill Clinton Fallacy.
April 3, 2025
Do you know how I am always griping about the failure of philosophers to discuss the subject of drugs with me? Well, there was one exception. I wrote Thomas Szasz a lengthy letter on the topic in the 1980s and he responded -- with a lengthy letter of his own. Only imagine! Learn more in my update to my 2019 essay entitled In Praise of Thomas Szasz.
_11_ I am always learning more reasons to hate the War on Drugs and the prohibition for which it stands. For that reason alone, I am nervous when reading my older essays. I fear that in so doing, I will find that I have been prolix in cases wherein a single sentence would have sufficed to blow the Drug War out of the water, so to speak.
That's why I was relieved today to find that I could still sign off on every line of my 2020 essay entitled America's Great Anti-Depressant Scam. In those COVID-era musings, I remind the reader how Big Pharma and the modern media lead Americans by the nose when it comes to our attitudes about drugs. A Big Pharma med can include death itself 57 as a side effect and Americans are unfazed. But if a statistically safe drug such as Ecstasy could even theoretically cause issues for a white American suburbanite, we are told that we have to battle against such drug use by all means necessary, even by destroying the Bill of Rights -- starting with the renunciation of the protections of the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
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morphine can give the educated user a deep appreciation of Mother Nature. But the Drug War teaches us how to fear such drugs rather than to use them wisely. What a waste of godsend resources. But then that is the whole point of the Drug War: to convince us that we can never use drugs wisely. It is the infantilization of Americans58 and the suppression of education and progress on behalf of the drug-hating ideology of Mary Baker-Eddy.
The Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. It follows, therefore, that prohibition is the outlawing of the religious impulse itself, for it outlaws precisely the kinds of drugs that inspired the Hindu religion. See more in my updated essay entitled: How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine.
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Remember that Corner on Coca game that I designed back in 2023? Please to check out 2025 update on same: Corner on Coca!. (Sorry, I've been watching too many of those slightly racist Charlie Chan movies !)
Today I discuss The Bill Clinton Fallacy -- which is the mad idea that prohibition saves lives. I have also updated my January essay entitled Case Studies in Wise Drug Use. I have added thereto a variety of examples of positive drug use from... from a religious text! That's right! From the Rig Veda itself. I am being honest in a way that no one else is about drugs.
In the former essay, I make it clear that if Bill is saving Roger Clinton from cocaine , he is only doing so by killing 15-year-old's like Niomi Russell59.
I also make it clear that the Rig Veda is full of positive reports of drug use. Yet Hindus themselves use Drug Warrior terminology and terms of the Drug War apartheid of Julian Buchanan to say otherwise. They too are bamboozled by Drug War terminology. The fact is that a psychoactive substance is a psychoactive substance is a psychoactive substance. Until we recognize this fact, we will never be able to indict Drug Warriors for one of their worst crimes: which is the outlawing of new religions. For more on this latter topic, please read my essay entitled How the Drug War Outlaws Religion.
March 31, 2025
It's been almost five years since I sent a plea via snail mail to the Washington, D.C. Holocaust Museum urging them to protest the Drug War on the grounds of the hatred that it has inspired. _33_ Any regular readers of this site, should there be such, will not be surprised to learn that I have received no response to that request, no, not even so much as an acknowledgement of receipt.
For readers who are so bamboozled by Drug War propaganda as to not see at once why the Holocaust Museum should speak up against it, please to read the following essay of mine from back in September 2020, while paying special attention to the 2025 update that it includes:
Had William James connected the dots between his use of laughing gas and the Hindu's use of Soma, 60 the Drug Warrior might not have been able to persuade us that drugs were evil. The use of both substances provide the user with glimpses of entirely new realities. Instead, the Drug Warriors have succeeded so well in associating drugs with evil that James's alma mater, the Harvard Psychology Department, does not mention either laughing gas or Soma -- or even the "anesthetic revelation 61 ,62" as James calls it, in their online biography of the man. That is just another example of the sad fact that American academia is under the thumb of the Drug Warriors. Drug War heresy will not be tolerated, even in the name of academic freedom.
Thank God for non-tenured philosophers like yours truly, who are in the rare position where they can speak truth to prohibitionist power and not lose their jobs.
Speaking of which, here are several of my recent essays on such topics:
I call your attention in particular to that latter essay: How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James, which has been updated with some timely speculations about the discomfiture that I have no doubt occasioned by my request for some honest parley on the verboten topic of drugs in academia.
Needless to say that the folks at the Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University63 ignored my pleas for them to cite the Drug War as a cause -- nay, THE cause -- of inner-city violence in their reports to media, insofar as the Drug War armed the 'hood to the teeth in the first place by incentivizing violence.
"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist." -Ann Heather Thompson, The Atlantic, 2014
Needless to add that Jamal at The Philosophy Forum64 is ignoring my request to join his forum. He apparently wants the philosophers therein to be sheltered from truth when it comes to the Drug War. This is par for the course. I was the only philosopher in the world to object to the FDA's plans to treat laughing gas as a drug65. Laughing gas: the substance that inspired William James's view of reality66.
Did I mention that Harvard University's bio of James does not even mention laughing gas, nor refer to his studies about ultimate reality in any way67?
Philosophy today is fake news -- although obviously for none of the reasons that our new king in Washington would ever think of adducing. The reason is obvious: everyone knows on which side their bread is buttered. They know that to speak honestly about drugs is to incur the wrath of one's employers. Were this the only downside of the Drug War and substance prohibition, it would be ample reason to end both. And considering there is an entire book's worth of additional downsides, it is amazing that I am the only philosopher speaking truth to power on this subject in a way that has at least a faint chance of being understood by the hoi polloi.
Philosophers are no doubt thrilled that I am not tenured -- for my lack of status gives them at least the semblance of an excuse to ignore me entirely.
Any time I get depressed about the brainwashed status quo, I just think of coca advocate Angelo Mariani, the maker of Coca Wine. He wrote a book in 1896 entitled "Coca and Its Therapeutic Applications68." In the process of doing so, he sent letters far and wide to academics who might be presumed to know something about the coca plant -- and guess what? His letters were mostly ignored. This was over a decade before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, and yet the idea was already prevalent among scientists that drugs could be bad in and of themselves and that Americans needed to be protected from the truth about them. One of his few respondents actually criticized Mariani for writing honestly about the subject. This is why I insist that the end of the Drug War requires a new philosophy of life on the part of Americans: one that places knowledge and education ahead of fearmongering and arrest -- one which believes that the truth will set us free and not ignorance69.
You can listen to my audio production of Mariani's book about the benefits of coca here: Coca Wine. Be sure to listen before the book is outlawed -- for that is the direction America is headed absent a principled change in our superstitious and dogmatically uninformed outlook on the subject of so-called "drugs."
The library shelves are full of censored books. They have not been censored by government, but by the authors themselves. This is because the authors have been brainwashed by Drug War propaganda to believe in the evil of "drugs." This cradle-to-grave brainwashing has been so successful that the authors do not even recognize that they are self-censoring themselves. And no one is going to "call them" on it because everyone in the intoxiphobic western world is censored in the same way.
The latest example is the 2024 book by J.W. Ocker entitled "Cult Following.70" The Drug War is the most pernicious cult of all time, teaching us not only to fear psychoactive substances personally, but encouraging us as a people to go out in the world and stop all others from benefiting from the drugs that we have chosen to fear rather than to understand. And yet Ocker does not mention the Drug War in his book on cults. To the contrary, true to his brainwashing, he focuses exclusively on associating the word 'drugs' with sinister forces. He ignores the Drug War -- i.e., the Great American Cult of Substance Demonization -- and reports instead on "narcosatanists" in Mexico in the 1980s.
Too Typical.
Just another in an endless series of non-fiction books that keep the Drug War out of sight and out of the mind of the reader -- nay, which tend to justify the Drug War by concentrating lopsidedly on only negative stories about drug use. Just like "The Witch" by Ronald Hutton71, an academic work which uses the word "drugs" only once, and then in a pejorative context, whereas the author glibly uses the word "herbs" time and time again. The author fails to recognize that the herbs in question were the drugs of the time and were endowed with psychoactive properties -- hence their use in "spells" and service magic.
Here is my letter to J.W. Ocker on this topic:
Good morning, JW.
I would suggest that the Drug War is the Great American Cult par excellence. It brainwashes us from childhood with the Christian Science belief that psychoactive drugs have no positive uses whatsoever, when in reality such substances inspired the Hindu religion and have been shown in modern times to have phenomenal beneficial powers. The Drug War cult teaches us not merely to hate such drugs ourselves, but to go out into the world as a people and actively ensure that no one else benefits from them anywhere, ever. Surely, that is a fanaticism worthy of the term "cult."
Here is just one of the many lines in the Rig Veda which extol the powers of the psychoactive Soma:
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture."
Alexander Shulgin has documented the same sort of drug-inspired ecstasy and insight in "Pihkal," with user reports such as the following:
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."
And yet the Drug War cult would never permit the creation of a Hinduism 2.0, based on the use of the uplifting and insightful phenethylamines synthesized by chemist Alexander Shulgin. Indeed, there would be no Hinduism today had our DEA been active in the Punjab in 1500 BCE. If Drug Czar William Bennett had been in charge back then, the Soma peddlers would have been beheaded. How is that for fanaticism?
In light of this backstory (and an endless list of similar inconvenient truths, such as the fact that Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin were both inspired by the use of opium), the Drug War is surely the Great Cult of Substance Demonization.
Unfortunately, almost all non-fiction writers ignore such things entirely. In "The Witch" by Ronald Hutton, the author only mentions "drugs" once, and then in a derogatory fashion. He fails to realize that the witches' "herbs" that he references so frequently and so glibly throughout his book WERE drugs -- just as surely as "meds" are drugs, although Big Pharma would have us think otherwise.
Just a few thoughts that I wanted to share! Thanks very much for your time.
PS My guess is that, like most well-educated persons, you generally accept these facts already, and yet you fear (alas, probably rightly so) that to associate yourself with such Drug War heresy would be career suicide.
Also, as mentioned yesterday, I have applied for membership in the Philosophy Forum72. No word back from the moderator. I am predicting, however, that I will be ghosted. I do not know the moderator, Jamal, from Adam; however, I have learned over the last six years of writing about drugs that philosophers hate to talk about the Drug War. They prefer to believe that substance prohibition has nothing to do with philosophy -- which is the whole reason why my site exists, by the way, for that belief is dead wrong in so many ways and at so many levels. That is why I am still spoiled for choice for philosophical essay topics to this very day, six years after I began parsing the Drug War for the absurd, inhumane, and anti-democratic premises upon which it is based.
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The Rig Veda is full of references to the psychoactive Soma. The Vedic and Hindu religions were inspired by Soma.
"The living drops of Soma juice pour,
as they flow, the gladdening drink,
Intelligent drops above the basin of the sea,
exhilarating, finding light."
This has enormous implications when considered in light of the inspirational medicines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, medicines whose user reports remind one of the experiences of the Soma user. In a sane world, we would be allowed to religiously use such phenethylamines in the same way and for the same reasons as Soma was used in the Punjab in 1500 B.C. But the Drug Warrior outlaws such religions.
"The euphoria grows in intensity for several hours and remains for the rest of the day making this one of the most enjoyable experiences I have ever had."
These, of course, are the sorts of substances that the DEA tells us have no known uses. The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for depriving humankind of such medicine.
SPOILER ALERT. If you wish to see the new horror movie called Candlewood, then do not read the following drug-related musings.
America's ignorance about so-called "drugs" shows up when you least expect it. Last night I watched the horror movie "Candlewood," in which a family of four leaves the Big Apple to live more peaceably in the countryside of Connecticut. It seemed a cookie-cutter plot. There was the teenage girl with dyed hair who was griping endlessly about being torn away from her friends and the stepmother who does not understand her, etc.
A suspicious-looking groundskeeper informs the family of an urban legend connected with their property, according to which their site is haunted by an "Indian princess" and a murderous jilted lover. The story is discounted at once by the father as just a tasteless attempt to scare his kids. However, each family member begins to separately see visions that tend to corroborate the story. Finally, the family gets around to comparing notes and finds that they are all witnessing similar and related phenomenon.
I will fast-forward through the blood and guts that ensue. Suffice it to say that the visions lead to such confusion that the parents end up killing their own two kids -- after which the parents kill each other for good measure. All of this was inspired by these crazy visions, right?
Well, guess where these crazy visions came from. As the closing scene makes clear, the city-hating groundskeeper had a practice of collecting local mushrooms -- seemingly at random and without regard for species -- and pulverizing them prior to adding them to the local water supply.
That's it. That's the total "explanation" for the murder and mayhem: a tainted water supply combined with a little fearmongering about an urban legend.
That shows the intelligence level that the producers expect of their audience these days. For the idea that mushroom ingestion would lead to domestic massacres like this -- not once, but repeatedly, from generation to generation, as the flashbacks suggest -- is silly. Even had the mushrooms been chosen for maximum psychedelic potential, there is no reason to suspect that violence would have developed from their ingestion. To the contrary, most users of psychedelic mushrooms report a greater feeling of oneness with the world, a greater appreciation of colors, and so forth. They do not develop a mad desire to make fast and free with kitchen knives and the loaded shotgun that the last tenant of the house had given pride of place on the wall above the living room fireplace.
This movie is all of a piece with Crack Raccoon and Cocaine Bear: movies that depend for their effect on America's childish ignorance about drugs.
March 24, 2025
The Drug War is the Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time -- not least because philosophers are afraid to address it! Here's my essay on the topic -- which is actually in the form of an application to join the Philosophy Forum73. It will be very interesting to see if I am approved -- given the amount of blocking and banning that I have encountered in my efforts to combat ignorant drug-war orthodoxy.
I'm something of an old film junkie. That is to say I am both old and I enjoy old films. This is partly due to the fact that I enjoy taking a break from modern movies , insofar as they tend to reek of the confused mores of our times, particularly with regard to their portrayal of substance use. Among my guilty cinematic pleasures are the movies in which Sidney Toler stars as Charlie Chan, the faux-Chinese detective created by American novelist Earl Derr Biggers (faux insofar as Sidney Toler was born in Missouri). There is one Charlie Chan movie, however, which I refuse to watch because it concerns Charlie's attempts to break up an opium smuggling ring, a criminal enterprise that was brought into existence scarcely two decades before the heyday of the Chan franchise thanks to the idiotic substance demonization of racist American politicians.
I was surprised, however, to see a little drug hypocrisy pop up in the 1941 movie "Charlie Chan in Rio." The plot concerned the Chinese detective's attempts to solve the murder of an attractive actress. In his efforts to do so, Chan is aided by a mentalist named Alfredo Cardozo, who has a trick whereby he elicits the truth from subjects by hypnotizing them. He does not hypnotize them, however, by swinging a watch back and forth in front of their eyes and advising them in an impressive voice that they are getting sleepy: instead, he gives them a jolt of caffeine via a small serving of coffee and then asks them to smoke a cigarette containing a special "herb." After a few puffs on the doctored cigarette, the subject falls into a trance during which they apparently cannot help but tell the truth. Cardozo assures Chan that the mystery "herb" is perfectly safe and the detective readily takes his word for it, subsequently using the cigarette to determine guilt and innocence among the well-heeled suspects.
It's amazing what a simple word can do. By referring to said substance as an "herb" instead of a "drug," the detective is ready to make practical use of the psychoactive effects to solve his case -- even though he has recently been to Hong Kong to arrest people for trafficking in substances that create similar trancelike effects in the user. This hypocritical perspective reminds me of the book by Ronald Hutton entitled "The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present.74" Hutton only uses the word "drugs" once in the book, and then only in a derogatory sense. But he uses the word "herb" repeatedly. What he fails to realize, of course, is that those herbs he keeps citing WERE drugs. They were drugs just as "meds" are drugs. Terms like "herbs," "meds" and "drugs" do not denote separate kinds of substances -- they simply connote the way that society feels about those substances. And so herbs are considered harmless, meds are considered scientifically justified, and drugs are considered pointless and evil.
The producers had a dilemma: they wanted to use the obvious beneficial effects of a drug in a plot twist, and yet drugs were obviously bad. What to do?
Answer: It's easy. Just refer to the drug as an herb.
--
A few installments ago (scroll down), I lamented the use of algorithms to flag and delete free speech about drugs. I highlighted the fact that sites that use such algorithms mistakenly take such algorithmic decisions as unimpeachable, since they are essentially performed by a computer. The problem with this viewpoint is obvious. It is the fact that these algorithms were originally created by human beings. You are therefore not being fair simply because you are leaving your censorship decisions up to an algorithm. The algorithm itself has biases, insofar as it was written by a human being.
I noticed that this blind faith in algorithms is widespread. It is alive and well, for instance, on the Project Gutenberg website. Here is a case in point.
I recently enjoyed reading a Gutenberg asset entitled "Mr. Punch's Pocket Ibsen" by comic author F. Antsey. It contained satires of a number of Ibsen's plays, featuring lines like the following from the blackmailer Krogstad in "A Doll's House":
"Bad thing for the complexion, suicide--and silly, too, because it wouldn't mend matters in the least."
Yet I noticed after reading that the AI-generated summary had failed to notice that Antsey's versions of Ibsen's plays were satires. Instead, the algorithm's summary informs us that "the compilation aims to present these theatrical masterpieces in a more accessible format for earnest students and enthusiasts of Ibsen's work."
That was the funny part of this story. But the hilarious part arrived when I attempted to inform Project Gutenberg of this clueless summary. I was told that that the algorithm was essentially correct and that no changes were going to be made to the AI summary.
What? Do the folks at PG even know what satire is? Satire is NOT an attempt to present a theatrical masterpiece in a more accessible format for earnest students: satire is a SEND-UP of theatrical masterpieces and the like!
It's funny, though, I knew in my heart that it was a bad idea to send them my suggested corrections about the AI summary, even though the Project actually solicits such. I knew in my heart that the proper understanding of my criticism would require a knowledge of literary basics and that this was perhaps asking too much in the digital age, an age wherein folks feel they can stop reading literary masterpieces and just "look up" the relevant bits whenever they're challenged for details.
It's great praise for Antsey, in any case, that his mockery of the original works was subtle enough that his satires are accepted as serious renderings of Ibsen's plays. It makes me wonder what Antsey would have had to have written in order to make his satirical intention clear to the Project Gutenberg staff members and/or their genre-challenged algorithms.
Apparently, Antsey would have had to have included slapstick lines like the following:
KROGSTAD pompously enters stage left and emits a loud and long BUUUURP!
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
Commentary: There would be no Hindu religion today had the Drug War been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.
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According to the current behaviorist approach, our chemists -- not you as a depressed person -- get to decide how a depressed person should think and feel in life in order to be considered to be "cured." The obvious question is: where did chemists get their expertise for deciding what constitutes a 'cure' for depression? Why cannot depressed persons themselves decide what constitutes a cure for themselves based on their own unique hopes and dreams in life? If chemists are really to be in charge of such things, you would think they would all be required to have dual degrees in both chemistry and philosophy -- nay, in religion and psychology, too, for that matter.
No two philosophers have entirely agreed on what constitutes "the good life" since Plato: why are we so casually letting chemists, of all people, decide what constitutes the good life for the depressed in terms of their ideal mood and mentation? This paternal status quo becomes particularly outrageous when we consider that these chemists are dogmatically ignorant of the unique biographies of the lives that they will be so fundamentally affecting by their dilettante guesses on such topics.
I have yet to hear back from the Urban Health Collective. (See March 18th blog entry.) Let us hope that they are still formulating a response. I would hate to think that their failure to mention the Drug War in their reports to the media about inner-city violence is a result of their fear to rock the boat. That attitude is all too prevalent these days in public service organizations: it is almost always "see no evil, hear no evil" when it comes to the Drug War. You can link inner-city gun violence to lack of education, lack of job opportunities, and even to Covid and global warming, but almost no one dares to link violence to the real cause: i.e., drug prohibition, which armed the 'hood "to the teeth" in the first place -- and for the same exact reasons that liquor prohibition brought machine-gun fire to American streets. That was not caused by Covid or global warming -- that problem, like today's, was caused by the outlawing of desired substances. Everyone knows that: prohibition incentivizes violence. But that is an inconvenient truth for it suggests that the Drug War is idiotic and dead wrong -- and so it is a truth that is almost totally ignored by almost every public service organization of our time. Let's continue to hope for now, however, that the Urban Health Collective will prove to be an exception to this rule.
"If the present generation or any other are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free. Wrongs cannot have a legal descent."
-- Thomas Paine
I sent an email today to the Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University75. I was responding to a data brief76 concerning gun-related deaths in inner cities. The presentation gave some plausible reasons for an upswing in violence since 2020, but they completely ignored the reason why the hood is loaded with guns in the first place.
But soft, you shall read!
Hello, team!
I respect the work that you do, however, I have one suggestion for your organization.
On the first page of your June 2023 data brief entitled "Gun Deaths in Big Cities," you make the following observation:
"The proliferation of guns has been particularly lethal for densely-populated urban communities that have been subject to years of structural inequities, and underinvestment, and a lack of opportunities for young people."
While this is certainly true, you neglect to mention why there was a proliferation of guns in cities in the first place: it was surely due to the War on Drugs and drug prohibition, which incentivized drug dealing, which led to competition, which led to violence. This is not surprising as liquor prohibition created the Mafia as we know it today. It brought us Al Capone and the debut of machine-gun fire in American streets.
As Ann Heather Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014:
"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."
For these reasons, I would suggest that you begin citing drug prohibition and the Drug War as a major cause of inner-city violence. The Drug War will never end if we refuse to hold it responsible for the evil that it causes.
March 17, 2025
As Whitehead tells us, all English sentences are elliptical: they rely for their meaning on implicit propositions that are to be supplied by the auditor or reader in order to make a sentence fully intelligible and meaningful in the sense that it was uttered or written. To use a couple examples from Whitehead himself, an 'expositor' might say that 'This college building is commodious,' by which he or she is actually advancing at least two unique propositions: 1) that this is a college building, and 2) that this building is commodious, or more precisely, that this building is commodious as a college building. Likewise, if the expositor says, 'That criminal is your friend,' he or she is clearly making at least two claims: first, that the individual in question is a criminal and that this person is a friend of yours. As Whitehead said, one might respond to that assumption-filled sentence by retorting as follows: 'He is my friend and you are insulting.'
This is why fallacious Drug Warrior arguments are difficult for many drug-law reformers to answer, because they both conceal and rely on a host of multiple false but implicit propositions in order to establish their plausibility. And so when such arguments are advanced, the freedom lovers are disoriented. It's like they have been hit by a cluster bomb of illogical and misleading propositions. 'Where do I begin to refute such a hydra-headed misunderstanding?' they say to themselves. To respond effectively, they cannot simply identify and refute the tacit propositions of the Drug Warrior individually: they have to identify and refute the unspoken syllogism as a part of which those propositions were falsely assumed to support the Drug Warrior's explicit argument in the first place.
That's why the best response is often a comic one -- one which fights fire with fire by rendering your own implicit comeback syllogism implicitly.
Let's take an example of one very popular Drug Warrior 'argument,' namely, the sentence that:
'You would not say that if you had a child who had died of a drug overdose.'
If ever a statement was loaded with stealth propositions, this is the one. It really takes a ready wit to fire back effectively against such a stealth argument.
Here is one possible comeback salvo, however:
'And you would not say THAT if you had a child who had been disappeared in Mexico thanks to the War on Drugs.'
Or I might ask them if they were in favor of horseback riding remaining legal. If they answered in the affirmative, I would respond as follows: 'You would not say that if you had a child who had been killed by falling off a horse.'
Then I'd ask them if they were in favor of cars remaining legal... Well, you get the idea. I would show them that I could get on a moral high horse over prohibitions just as quickly and as plausibly as they can.
I might also ask them if they had friends who had committed suicide because Drug Warriors had outlawed everything that could have cheered them up.
Opium is a wonderful drug -- the closest thing to a panacea. And yet Americans only know how to fear it. Its strategic and wise use has endless potential for helping us think creatively. It can help us view our life problems metaphorically, with the kind of analytic detachment that we westerners assume is only available to the mystic on a mountaintop who has spent an entire lifetime to acquire it. Learn more in this update to my 2020 essay entitled Using Opium to Fight Depression.
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Feeling a trifle down today. I was thinking to spread my ideas on Reddit, but I am just so tired of being barred by algorithms and immoderate moderators. I was thinking of posting my essay on our insane approach to mental health on the mental health Reddit -- but that Reddit reeks of pop-science materialist beliefs in pill mill psychology and the disease-mongering of the DSM. My thoughts there would be basically unintelligible. Belief in the 'scientific' nature of mental health is a religion there, and not one to be slighted with impunity. There is a self-congratulatory air to such Reddit groups, as who should say: 'We've found the path, folks, we have found the way -- now we just have to see which long-term 'med' is right for YOU.'
This is why I sometimes wish to change the goal line: rather than asking for America to change its materialist and puritanical ways of thinking about the world, I sometimes think we should focus on a more realistic goal, like getting America to have at least enough modesty and self-doubt to allow other countries to approach drug use in an entirely different way. Maybe we could just say:
'Okay, America, you go on believing in your one-size-fits-all pills and the idea that science should be in charge of mind and mood medicine. You go on believing that unsanctioned drug use is wrong. But at least -- at least, Dear America -- consider maybe allowing another country to go a different way on this subject.'
Someone should form such a country for that very reason: a country in which Mother Nature is free to all and in which mind and mood are not a matter for government control via drug laws.
I used to scorn the idea that America practiced colonialism and imperialism, but I find us guilty as charged after contemplating the Drug War from a philosophical point of view. Sadly, it does not take too much strong-arming to get world leaders to go along with a superstition that allows them to better control their people and to crack down on indigenous dissent. We have a nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over our heads and yet our actions show that we would prefer annihilation to the use of 'drugs.' And so I empathize with the drug tester quoted in Pihkal who wrote of his inspiring experience as follows:
'I saw how we created the nuclear fiasco to threaten the existence of the planet, as if it would be only through the threat of complete annihilation that people might wake up and begin to become concerned about each other.'77
I keep trying to remind myself that I write for futurity, but that's easier said than done. And why is that so? Because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help me make my peace with that understanding. The Drug Warrior might tell me to read Marcus Aurelius -- but guess what? Marcus wrote his oh-so-reasonable effusions under the influence of opium -- whereas you, dear Drug Warrior, have deprived me of every substance on earth that could inspire me with sangfroid similar to that of the second-century Roman emperor.
Censorship
Here is another thing that I have learned after six years of studying drugs and drug use from a philosophical point of view: I have learned that censorship is alive and well -- and occurring in mainstream places, not just in fringe journals and the like. The worst part is that much of this censorship is performed by algorithms, so that one can never learn exactly why they are being censored or by whom. I find that creepy and frustrating in the extreme. To paraphrase Poe, these modern censors have 'out-Kafka'ed Kafka.'
Take the Internet Archive, for instance. I attempted to post a review of a technical study of MDMA by the NIH in which I denied that the NIH had any standing on such matters, insofar as they were blind to all glaringly obvious benefits of drug use. An algorithm told me that my comments were 'spam' and so would not be published. I emailed the Archive asking why my review was being flagged as spam. It was only after threatening a lawsuit that an Archive employee deigned to respond to my email.
She hazarded a guess that the algorithm blocked my review because my comments did not concern the specifics of the report that I was critiquing -- but I pointed out to her that I was not critiquing the report as such but rather the fact that the NIH was biased from the start in performing all such studies insofar as they ignored on principle all obvious benefits of the drugs in question. My point was that the NIH has no standing on such topics. Besides, I am not a scientist. I am not qualified to discuss benzene rings and drug homologues, let alone to critique a discussion about them by the NIH. But I am a thinking human being. I can point out that the focus on such biochemical topics is a shell game designed to keep America's eyes off the prize when it comes to their right to mental and emotional freedom. Or at least I can try to point that out. But according to the Internet Archive, you can only critique the science, not the rationale which made the science relevant in the first place.
That woman, by the way, said that the Archive never interferes with the algorithms. She actually thought that was a good thing. She thought that it meant that the Archive employees could not exercise any personal prejudices in censoring reviews. I pointed out that their algorithms were created by SOMEBODY and that THEIR points of view matter. It is for that reason that the Archive should be paying close attention to how such algorithms actually work. It is madness to just say, 'Oh, it's an algorithm, and it is working consistently and without bias.' That is totally false -- or at least unknowable without constant monitoring. Yet the IA employee prides her organization on letting the algorithm act as it will -- thereby placing our right to free speech in the hands of some anonymous geek, one doubtless a third my own age and who may not know Aristotle from a Philly cheese steak.
Those who have ears, let them hear. Better yet, let them spread these ideas online, where they struggle to get even the smallest foothold thanks to the systemic prejudice of self-satisfied censors.
Alexander Shulgin
I have updated my essay on the insanity of mental health treatment in America. For all his open-mindedness, Alexander Shulgin wrote as if the depressed were from another planet. He seems to understand as a human being that the drugs he is reviewing have wonderful benefits for all people -- and yet as a chemist who works with Big Pharma , he also speaks as if a different kind of medicine needs to be devised for the depressed (as opposed to 'normal' people like Alex himself), a one-size-fits-all medicine that will work behind the scenes and not in the glorious and obvious ways that are described of drugs in Pikhal. He apparently is clearly thinking less about what would help the depressed and more about what kind of drugs would be acceptable to Big Pharma , which are two hugely different things. Why won't he trust folks with the blues to respond positively to rapture and insight? Why does he not see the vast array of common-sense approaches that suggest themselves for the strategic use of a wide variety of drugs based on the user's specific needs -- whether they are depressed, searching for god, or just wishing to have a little relaxation in life?
Answer: Because as a chemist after the almighty dollar, he knows he must think of the human being as a widget, and not as his friend or loved one. If he were designing drugs to help a friend or loved one, he would obviously use drugs with glaringly obvious results: and not insist rather that they become wards of the healthcare state by using a one-size-fits-all drug designed to produce the maximum possible income for Big Pharma companies and the chemists who work for them.
In Pihkal, Alexander and Ann Shulgin prove that drug users are the experts when it comes to psychoactive drug use, not materialist scientists. The reason? The latter are dogmatically obliged to ignore all obvious benefits of psychoactive medicines thanks to their belief in the inhumane tenets of behaviorism. For more on this subject, please see my latest essay entitled Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane.
March 14, 2025
It's amazing! Americans actually prefer suicide to drug use. That is just how fanatical we have become thanks to our cradle-to-grave indoctrination in the substance demonizing ideology of drug prohibition. This issue has taken on a greater urgency for me lately after a relative of mine visited the E.R. for severe depression. That's why I wrote the following sort of 'protest essay' today entitled: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use.
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In Pihkal78, Alexander Shulgin gave qualitative feedback on his experiences under the influence of a wide variety of phenethylamines. Below, I cite some of his observations and comment on what his experiences suggest in the way of beneficial uses for drugs in a future age -- one in which the world has moved beyond the substance-demonizing ideology of the Drug War, a world in which the prohibitionists have been routed after having been definitively revealed for the violence-causing and murder-facilitating demagogues which they so demonstrably are.
'I felt my voice integrated and dropped in a way it never had before, and that remained for several days.'
This suggests obvious uses in voice therapy and training.
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'I am experiencing more deeply than ever before the importance of acknowledging and deeply honoring each human being.'
A drug for therapeutic use with hotheads -- those who might otherwise shoot up grade schools.
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'It really showed me where I was unfinished, but with self-loving and tolerance. Tremendous processing and letting go. Seeing things very clearly and also able to laugh at my trips. Lots of singing.'
Imagine using such drugs in combination with therapy facilitated by someone whom is trusted and respected by the drug user. The whole problem with most therapy is that it presupposes an honesty and insight on the 'patient's' part that is not realistic. In looking back on my own psychotherapy, I realize that I was seldom being forthcoming -- even though I actually felt that I was. Drugs like this could open the floodgates of therapeutic chat in a lively and life-affirming way.
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'Became totally absorbed by the music.'
Someday, music education will involve the use of drugs. This will require the recognition that materialists are NOT the experts when it comes to matters of mind and mood.
March 13, 2025
I've made so bold as to update my site introduction:. I tried to imagine what prohibitionists must be thinking by supporting a policy that kills so many more than it saves. Besides, even if drug prohibition saved net lives, it would not follow that the Drug War made sense. We do not outlaw horseback riding, even though to do so would mean far less death and injury in the world. Horseback riding is, in fact, the number-one cause of traumatic brain injury in the States, yet I have never heard of anyone calling for the outlawing of equestrian sports. I won't mention the fact that liquor kills 178,000 every year in the States because Kevin Sabet says he's tired of hearing that fact. Kevin seems to believe that it's some kind of logical error to state any fact that so clearly points out the hypocrisy of the War on Drugs. I guess he would call it 'the strong suit fallacy,' according to which a philosopher can only play their 'strong suit' argument, at most, once per a debate or essay? Who knows?
Kevin, by the way, is the poster child for the logical fallacy pointed out by HG Wells. That is, he fails to understand that health is a balance of factors and is not created by any one thing, be that genetics, personality or drug use. And if, as Kevin believes, we can state in general that too many folks are using marijuana, he has only himself to blame, for his hateful anti-scientific drug prohibition policy has outlawed almost every single alternative for such use. Look in the mirror, Kevin, if you want to know what's wrong with America's drug policy. How many people have to die before you recognize that prohibition itself is the problem, prohibition and the ignorance about safe use that is mandated by Drug Warriors themselves? Prohibition created the Mafia, for God's sake. It continues today to create cartels and drug gangs. It destroyed the 1st and 4th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It led to the election and re-election of an insurrectionist president thanks to the imprisoning of millions of minorities. But I'll tell you what: If you want my respect for your logical consistency, then start demonizing horseback riding. How much longer are horse dealers going to get away with peddling that junk? Surely, according to prohibitionist logic, we should have former horseback riders making the circuit of the elementary schools, warning kids away from the horrible practice of horseback riding.
I can hear them now talking to wide-eyed youngsters in class:
'You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!'
March 12, 2025
I was paused at a stoplight on Route 33 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia last weekend, when I saw a car brightly painted with the business name of 'Brew-Haha!' And I thought to myself: 'Hmm? And they say we can't 'glorify' drug use? What is that business name doing but glorifying alcohol use???'
Now there is finally hope for those who have been brainwashed by Drug War propaganda. Join Drug Warriors Anonymous today. To learn more, click the link below:
It has been five years since I wrote to Gabrielle Glaser about her article in the Atlantic about Alcoholics Anonymous. Gabrielle has not yet seen fit to answer me -- but then she is in good company. No pundit or academic has ever responded to my insights about the Drug War -- because to do so would have branded them as Drug War heretics. Worse yet, it would have branded them as scientific heretics, since I maintain that it was always a category error to put materialists in charge of the study of mind and mood medicine. To learn more, see my update to the letter that I wrote to Gabrielle five years ago. It will be found as an appendix to my 2020 essay entitled: Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser. To go directly to the update, click here.
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William James gave me a job as a philosopher. He charged the lover of wisdom with the task of figuring out what 'anesthetic revelation 80 s' have to tell us about the nature of reality. He was set on this course by a paper written by Benjamin Paul Blood81, an American philosopher of his time who had highlighted a rarely mentioned fact: namely, that the outcome of anesthesia on medical and dental patients (using the then-prevalent expedient of laughing gas) gave the inebriate a new way of seeing the world, one in which the self disappears and a sense of unity and oneness prevails. This outcome suggested to Blood that our views of life are the result of just one inadequate way of looking at the world, through our fallible senses. The 'anesthetic revelation 82 ' gave us another reason to mistrust our ability to understand ultimate things, besides the Kantian critique of our inherent insufficiency for such work. James summed up his view of this 'anesthetic revelation 8384 ' as follows:
'One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.'
And it is this aspect of James' philosophy that is censored by the Drug Warrior ideology of substance demonization. That is why we look for a reference to laughing gas in vain in his online biography at Harvard University, where he founded the very psychology department.
March 11, 2025
William James urged philosophers to use laughing gas and similar substances to learn about the nature of reality. And yet his alma mater, Harvard University, does not even mention laughing gas in their online bio of the man. No wonder the university did not send anyone to Washington to protest the FDA's plan to treat laughing gas as a 'drug'. Harvard is embarrassed by James's use of laughing gas and has rewritten his biography to hush it up. This is especially painful for me to notice on this particular week, when a relative of mine visited an E.R. for severe depression -- an emergency room which, of course, withheld all substances like laughing gas from her that could cheer her up at once and inspire her. Why? Because America believes that suicide is better than 'drug use.'
And so Harvard's censorship of William James' biography is bad for two reasons: 1) it is a cowardly nod to government censorship of academia85, and 2) it is an action that helps normalize substance prohibition and the bizarre and cruel attitude that death itself is preferable to 'using drugs.'
I protested said censorship in a letter to Matthew K. Nock, the Chair of the Harvard Psychology Department, the department which was founded by William James himself. You can read that letter in my new essay entitled: How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James.
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American drug policy is insane. We would prefer that the depressed commit suicide rather than to use drugs that elate and inspire. We would prefer to damage the brains of the depressed with ECT rather than to let them use drugs that elate and inspire.
But do you know what the craziest part of all is?
The craziest part is the fact that I am the only philosopher in the world who is pointing this out. I am the only philosopher who has drawn the obvious link between materialism, behaviorism, and American drug policy. This is no doubt because of today's technological triumphalism, thanks to which it is assumed that 'science can handle anything it puts its mind to.' I am the only philosopher who draws the connection between suicide and drug laws86. I am the only philosopher who draws the connection between ECT and drug laws87. I am the only philosopher who stood up for William James by urging the FDA not to start treating laughing gas as a 'drug,' since James himself told us to use the substance to learn about the worlds of perception and reality88. I am the only philosopher who has pointed out that reports of positive drug use are the ultimate 'damned' facts in the Fortean sense of that word. One can champion almost any niche cause in the world today in academia, but if you point out that opium has positive uses, not only will the fact be damned but so will you yourself for pointing it out -- damned by the intolerant society of the Drug Warrior8990.
The rest of the philosophers are busy using specialized vocabulary to decide whether or not they are actually brains in a vat.
My guess is that they ARE brains in a vat: maybe that explains why we have such an inhumane drug policy. But whatever else American philosophers are, they are definitely asleep at the wheel. The Drug War is based on a raft of false assumptions and lies -- and it is the philosopher's job to expose such choplogic. But our modern thinkers are either bamboozled themselves by the drug-war propaganda of substance demonization to which they have been subjected since grade school, or else they are scared to speak up lest they run afoul both of racist Drug Warriors and of the behaviorist scientists who collaborate with them. How do they collaborate? By pretending that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine. That's an obvious category error, as would have been clear to the South American natives whom the west has suppressed and forced to renounce 'drugs' in favor of alcohol, those indigenous peoples whom even William James referred to as savages, apparently never thinking for a moment that there was anything we might learn from the people whom we conquer in the name of utilitarian 919293 materialism.
Whitehead told us that we can tell that a philosophy is wrong or at least misapplied when it leads to 'absurdum.' And what has the philosophy of the Drug War led to? It has led to a world wherein we prefer suicide to drug use, wherein we prefer brain-damaging ECT to drug use -- all because of materialism and behaviorism, which say we can safely ignore anecdote, history, and even psychological common sense about incentives and anticipation. Scientists are the slow kids in the class when it comes to obvious psychological common sense. They have yet to figure out if laughing gas can help the depressed -- never mind the obvious fact that the substance could give the suicidal a break from depressive thoughts94. But so dogmatic has American science become that we would rather the depressed kill themselves then to use evil rotten terrible 'drugs.' This attitude is at once childish and evil.
Americans are sickos when it comes to drugs -- and so far in denial that they travel the globe to burn plants and arrest foreigners who fail to adopt their own unprecedented hatred of psychoactive substances. For it never yet occurred to any country on earth to outlaw all psychoactive plant medicine until we handed teetotalers the mother of all consolation prizes after their failure to definitively outlaw alcohol: the right to outlaw virtually every other substance that altered mind and mood.
This is why we need more than the tweaking of a few drug laws: America needs a whole new philosophy of life: otherwise all drug law reforms will become scapegoats for problems caused by our drug-war mentality of substance demonization.
We can start by replacing materialist psychiatrists and drug researchers with pharmacologically savvy empaths (see below).
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Charles Fort didn't know from damned. Accounts of positive drug use are such 'damned' facts that even most Forteans will ghost you if you tell them such things. I recently wrote a letter to a bigtime Fortean, Mitch Horowitz, author of Uncertain Places, to remind him that reports of positive drug use are the most damned facts of all times. I did this because the author was rambling on about 'damned' facts in his recent book but never mentioned the most obvious damned facts of all: those facts about positive drug use. And yet Mitch ghosted me. Do you see the irony hear, folks? The facts of positive drug use are so damned that even Forteans refuse to talk about them! (If you're not positively drowning in irony right now, you apparently have not yet read 'The Book of the Damned 95 ' by Charles Fort9697. For more, see my essay: Charles Fort Didn't Know from Damnation.)
Here's more on how the Drug War promotes drug abuse. In fact, the DEA's survival requires that there always be drug abuse. If it cannot be found, then it must be created. It need not even really exist -- but it is crucial that it always be thought to exist -- even if the abuse in question were caused by the Drug War itself and its failure to regulate product and its refusal to teach safe use and its incentivization of criminals, etc. etc. etc.
March 9, 2025
I've got a bone to pick with you. Yes, YOU! My records show that you have not yet deigned to read my essay entitled HG Wells and Drugs. So go ahead: deign! Deign!
Word has it that you have also scorned a related essay of mine from three years back. You know, the one I called Moonfall? That's the essay in which I take sci-fi authors to task for ignoring common sense psychology and thereby becoming dupes for the muddled metaphysics of the Drug War. Speaking of which, I am not even sure that you have read my recent adumbrations in THAT quarter. But not to worry. It just so happens that I have a link handy. Wait a minute, it's here somewhere... Oh, yes, here it is: The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War.
Did I mention that I have also updated my 2020 open letter to Erowid?
Trump is sometimes right, though always for the wrong reasons. America is full of fake science, for the simple reason that almost all writers and thinkers and scientists take the Drug War for granted. They consider it a natural baseline. They therefore are blind to how prohibition biases us against entire ways of being in the world98.
Here are a list of some topics that cannot be discussed intelligently without reference to drugs, but which are discussed in this way in any case thanks to the brainwashing -- and/or the frightened self-interest -- of those who opine on such topics.
Electroshock therapy
Euthanasia
The nature of consciousness
The nature of the Platonic 'good life'
Suicide
The nature of reality
This is just a sampling of a long list of topics that are cast in a very simplified and censored light by our refusal to consider what drug use and drug freedom implies about such topics. Take the latter item: the nature of reality. The drug law outlaws all the substances that show us the wide range of realities in which William James believed. The Drug War outlaws substances whose use conduces to a non-materialistic way of seeing the world. Therefore philosophers are engaging in make-believe when they discuss the nature of reality without reference to the effects of Mother Nature's medicines. This is why the make-believe continues, by the way, because materialists recognize that this game is biased in their ideological favor.
March 7, 2025
Here is an essay on four things that come to mind on the subject of: HG Wells and Drugs.
March 6, 2025
The Drug War disincentivizes safety. See how in my latest essay entitled Thank God for Soul Quest.
March 4, 2025
The more I study the philosophy of the Drug War, the more I realize that Americans are living in a make-believe world. It is a world in which the downsides of prohibition and the upsides of drug use are seamlessly censored out of daily life -- and out of any and all media. U.S. historians routinely pretend that substance prohibition does not exist -- even though it was an unprecedented step in human history when our country outlawed Mother Nature wholesale in the 20th century: unprecedented in the history of the world!
Even books about drug-law reform do not come close to describing the full downsides of outlawing drugs -- and I have yet to find any books which recognize the full potential benefits of drugs. This is because the great potential of psychoactive drugs is merely a matter of psychological common sense, and Americans have been taught to ignore common sense thanks to their adherence to materialist and behaviorist principles, both of which tell them that scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine. Our job is to wait for science to create reductionist cures -- to wait and wait and wait -- and who knows? The FDA may someday approve a few of them, at least for one or two specific illnesses in that disease-mongering insurance manual they call the DSM.
Meanwhile, everyone knows that laughing gas can cheer up the depressed, that MDMA can make us compassionate, and that opium is the closest thing there is to a pharmacological panacea. We all pretend otherwise in this make-believe world of ours. Worse yet, we are so deeply in denial about the pathological nature of our purblind outlook about drugs that we require the entire world to adopt our jaundiced point of view with respect to Mother Nature's medicines on pain of economic blackmail and military invasion. We believe in the enormous lie that drug use is riskier than any other activity on the planet. Meanwhile, we ensure the truth of that proposition by our very prohibition, which ensures that users will be uneducated about drugs and subject to receiving corrupt product. If Ecstasy is dangerous, it is only because it is an unregulated form of MDMA, and hence liable to contamination with god-knows-what other products -- and this is all the fault of drug prohibition, NOT drugs.
I have added some more reflections on this topic to my latest studiously ignored essay:
Occult author Mitch Horowitz favorably referred to Emile Coué in his 2022 book 'Uncertain Places.' This gave me pause... in spades. But soft, you shall read...
I am halfway through reading the delightful 'Uncertain Places' by Mitch Horowitz. Unfortunately, Mitch is like almost all non-fiction authors in that he ignores the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room: the fact that the Drug War has outlawed precisely those medicines that conduce to the world view that he advocates. In the absence of that admission, some of Mitch's statements just are not true. He claims, for instance, that we are all free when it comes to the world of imagination. But this is not true at all in the age of the Drug War. We have no freedom to experiment with the kinds of states that William James himself said we should study. We have no freedom to use the kinds of substances that inspired stories like 'The Crawling Chaos' by HP Lovecraft. We have no freedom to use the kinds of substances that inspired the 'Kubla Khan' of Coleridge. We have no freedom to use the kinds of substances that inspired the Hindu religion.
Imagination most certainly is NOT free in the age of the War on Drugs. Unless we admit this sad truth, we will fail to hold the Drug War responsible for its downsides, and so the criminally counterproductive policy of drug prohibition will continue forever.
And what about those aliens flying those UFOs? Imagine if we did communicate with such. We would ultimately have to demand from them the right to destroy any psychoactive medicines that they have on their planet! For the Drug War is a jealous god, it can tolerate no rival views -- neither indigenous nor extraterrestrial.
February 28, 2025
I have taken the liberty of updating my admittedly delightful essay entitled 'The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War.' I have shown (ahem, rather conclusively, I flatter myself) how the psychological theory of behaviorism has blinded modern science to the glaringly obvious benefits of drug use. I have demonstrated how a theory which was designed to render psychology objective and certain has instead mired the field in the deterministic prejudices of the past, meanwhile serving to 'justify' inhumane drug policy on the grounds of it being, ahem, 'scientific,' which, I don't THINK so.
Those who have ears, let them hear. Those who have eyes, let them see. Those who have dogs, let them lie in the corner and take a long-overdue nap while their master (i.e., you) clocks the verities herein contained:
Just getting ready to read QQ1008 by Mitch Horowitz. I fear that the author is going to ignore drugs and the Drug War... but we shall see. The Drug War, is of course, hugely relevant to such topics and any reasonable expositor will make that clear. Most authors today, however, pretend that the Drug War is a natural baseline and so can be safely ignored when discussing societal issues -- and nothing could be further from the truth.
February 26, 2025
Looks like I'm going to have to start paying more attention to drug-war censorship. I'm still waiting for the Internet Archive to explain why my view of NIDA and its articles is being blocked by them by algorithms that claim that my comments are spam, of all things. It looks like 'spam' has come to mean anything that site publishers do not like.
New York Attorney General Letitia James was just on Bluesky, thumping her chest about how many dealers she had put behind bars. I wonder how much she is getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out to her that the Drug War in which she is complicit has caused the disappearance of 60,000 Mexicans in the last 20 years, turned inner cities into shooting galleries, destroyed the 4th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and put bureaucrats in charge of deciding whether new religions were 'sincere' or not.
I also called the Internet Archive and left a message, asking for a clarification on whether they are still allowing free speech about drugs. Their algorithms barred my review of a NIDA article yesterday, apparently because it dared to question the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
February 25, 2025
I just got a cold slap in the face. After writing a review of a NIDA 99 article on the Archive.org website, I clicked 'submit'... only to be told that my comments were flagged as spam and would not be published. I don't ever think I'll get used to this Kafkaesque form of censorship practiced so shamelessly today on the web. Free speech is dead on the subject of drugs. Drug warriors have decided that they are right and there's nothing more to say.
Imagine a healthcare system in which healers were allowed to use ANY SUBSTANCE ON EARTH that would help a person achieve desired mental states, a world in which healers actually used psychological common sense to facilitate change.
Why are scientists so dumb when it comes to drugs? Why do they ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense in evaluating psychoactive substances? I think I've figured it out...
My heart is still going out to those Connecticuters who cannot decide whether or not to kill people for selling plant medicine. What a poser, my friends! What a poser!
Fortunately, I received a letter from a reader that took my mind off of that highly fraught subject. My response is another attempt to cut to the jugular on the subject of what is wrong with the War on Drugs. I call it Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs.
February 21, 2025
Oh, those poor Connecticuters100!They are in a positive tizzy. Should they kill people for selling Mother Nature's plant medicines? Or should they not? What a dilemma, right? I can see them now, plucking daisy petals in the brainwashed chambers of their mind: 'We kill them, we kill them not. We kill them, we kill them not...'
If safety was their goal, they'd be promoting the instant decapitation of everyone peddling alcohol, which is the ultimate 'junk' if we assume that government is in charge of our health.
GK Chesterton101 understood this in his time when prohibitionists were raising a stink about alcohol: once we put the government in charge of our health, we can outlaw anything whatsoever with plausibility. Why? Because the prohibitionist fails to realize that health is a balance of forces and unhealthiness does not reside in any one thing, except in a lethal dose, perhaps, in which case anything at all can be plausibly demonized, since one can overdose on a sufficient quantity of any substance whatsoever.
I can empathize with the Connecticut Drug Warriors, however. I almost died ten years ago from anaphylactic shock after eating too many chili flakes, and I am STILL trying to track down the scumbags who sold me that junk! Check out my inspiring story using the link below. (I'm on the grade-school circuit, for a mere $1,000 per inspiring lecture!)
Irony of ironies, that the indignant 19th-century hatred of liquor should ultimately result in the outlawing of virtually every mind-affecting substance on the planet EXCEPT for liquor. Learn more in this update to my 2020 essay entitled: A Connecticut Drug Warrior in King Arthur's Court.
And now a word about Schopenhauer and his infamous pessimism:
It's so typical of curmudgeons to try to make a universal law out of their own psychological issues. Schopenhauer does not seem to understand that attitude matters. As Hamlet said, 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.' It is neither the shortness of life nor the inhumanity of our fellows that ruins life for most people -- but rather their attitude TOWARD such circumstances. Every manic-depressive knows that a blue sky and party cake does not make a person happy, nor living amid postcard scenery. One can commit suicide 102 in Disneyland just as well as Skid Row. It is attitude, attitude, attitude that matters -- from which it follows that it is a sin to outlaw substances that can help us adopt a positive attitude toward life. That's why it's so frustrating that philosophers like Schopenhauer pretend that life can be judged by circumstances alone. Only once we acknowledge that attitude matters can we clearly see the importance of the many mind-improving medicines of which Mother Nature is full, the meds that we slander today by classing them under the pejorative label of 'drugs.'
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In a way, we should not have needed Kant to 'prove' our inability to opine advisedly on metaphysical truths. The very fact that we are required to put forward such speculations in a fallible and inherently ambiguous communication medium that we ourselves created -- namely that of human language -- should give us reason to moderate our philosophical ambitions. It almost sounds like self-dealing for language-makers to prove ultimate things via a language that they themselves have created. It sounds like a rigged process. Besides, both saint and psychonaut tell us that truth is proven experientially, not with words. As Meister Eckhart says, 'God is nothing that we can express.'
To use words for such ultimate purposes seems to presuppose that our language contains the necessary words to speak of such things, which is something that we cannot possibly know. To assume that it does contain such words is to presuppose our understanding of the ultimate things that we are trying to describe in words. That is what philosophers call the fallacy of petitio principii.
Before the word 'gaslighting ' was added to our vocabulary in the 21st century, English speakers found it quite hard to figure out what was going on when people were trying to mess with their head. They lacked the vocabulary necessary to identify such psychological manipulation. We can only assume that there are many words still missing from our vocabulary that would be needed to help us make sense of and describe what's going on with ultimate reality. The idea that human language could ever be comprehensive enough for such purposes seems unlikely. Moreover, to parse ultimate realities via words would be superficial at best. It would be like the description of an emotional state, rather than the experience of that state.
So, we need to doubt two things, really: first, that we can speak accurately of ultimate things in words, and second, that doing so would have any purpose. Its only point would seem to be to give metaphysicians free rein to create a whole dictionary worth of nuanced terms in an attempt to establish some agreed-upon wall of words as a sort of lifeless shadow of the world of ultimate experience.
But then philosophers seem to like nothing so much as creating specialist vocabularies. Such lexicons certainly have their place in philosophy, but I fear they are sometimes used for the purpose of disguising shallow thinking -- or worse yet, for camouflaging social protest. One has to be especially leery of this penchant for neologizing in the age of the Drug War. If ever a social policy called for the clear-cut disdain of the logician, it is the War on Drugs, and yet much of the rare pushback that one finds in academia is couched in academese. Between the circumlocution and the irrelevant and verbose qualifications, the reader gets the impression that the author is trying to distance him or herself from any firm conclusions, this at a time when the Drug War is cruising for a philosophical bruising, based as it is on contradictions, hypocrisy, racism, xenophobia, and a host of faulty but unacknowledged religious and metaphysical presuppositions -- as well as a total inability to properly distinguish cause from effect.
Drug warriors are so full of mindless bluster, they're just asking for it. And what does the philosopher do? Gives 'em a love tap!
February 19, 2025
Ever wonder why you see no discussion of positive drug use on websites? It's because publishers are in charge of squashing free speech via censorship, in the same way that businesses are in charge of denying our rights under the 4th amendment via drug testing. The whole Drug War is a scheme to get rid of democratic norms, which is no surprise, since the mass incarceration 103 of minorities hands election victories to the racist and imperialist Drug Warriors.
Anyone familiar with the philosophies of both Immanuel Kant and William James should understand that philosophers have a duty to investigate what we westerners call 'altered states' and hence have a duty to disdainfully deride and denounce the outlawing of psychoactive substances. Kant's basic message, as inspired by Hume, is that we cannot understand ultimate realities in words, but as James insists in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience,' it is our duty as philosophers to try to understand such realities EXPERIENTIALLY, i.e., with the help of psychoactive substances such as nitrous oxide.
'No account of the universe in its totality,' wrote James, 'can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.'
This is why it is a shame that I am the only philosopher in the world who contacted the FDA to protest their recent plans to begin treating nitrous oxide as a 'drug' and so further discourage its use in metaphysical research. Alas, such goal-driven substance use is already considered unthinkable by most academics thanks to their brainwashed fealty to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. Thus I was the only philosopher in the world who spoke up on behalf of the legacy of William James and on behalf of academic freedom, for that matter, by pleading with the FDA to refrain from further marginalizing an already vastly underused substance. (In a sane world, the suicidal would be given laughing gas kits in the same way that we provide epi pens for those with severe allergies.)
But then this is the point of my entire website and the hundreds of essays that it contains: to demonstrate to the world that the Drug War and prohibition are a cancer on the body politic and not just a matter of a few laws set up to discourage hedonists. For the idea that we should hate psychoactive substances is itself a metaphysical notion peculiar to the western mindset and not some logical truth that any unbiased mind must accept. Unfortunately, scientists seem to know, as it were subconsciously, that the Drug War is a good thing, for it is clearly biased in the name of the materialism which they themselves profess. In the wake of the technological revolution, science is feeling omniscient, and so it naturally wants to avoid dealing with drug effects and the variability of human emotions. They cannot be quantified, as behaviorist materialism requires. So philosophers and scientists alike see a benefit in drug laws that outlaw substances that facilitate mystical feelings and ontological intimations: 'Good riddance to such namby-pamby data,' says the materialist in their 'heart of hearts.'
And so the Drug War outlaws precisely those substances whose use conduces to a non-materialist view of the world, one in which we have intimations about the supposedly 'unknowable' world of the noumena. And why is the noumena unknowable to us? First, thanks to the merely pragmatic nature of our perceptions as explained by Kant. But also thanks to the inherent limitations of that incomplete and fallible communication system that we call human language, whose inevitable shortcomings and vagaries seem to bar us from definitively saying anything that could not, at least in theory, be plausibly gainsaid in that same inherently malleable language.
These limitations of human language contrast tellingly, however, with the vivid existential convictions about reality that are communicated by substance use according to the trip reports of the psychonauts of all ages. We can debate the ontological significance of such experiences, of course, but let us remember that it was precisely such 'use' that opened James' mind to a world of potential realities of whose existence he had previously been blissfully unaware. Why? Because of his previous self-satisfied acceptance of materialist principles.
Unfortunately, modern philosophers have ceded their job of metaphysical investigation to psychonauts like James Fadiman, Alex Gibbons and Jim Hogshire. Not that there is anything wrong with the research of these latter truth seekers, but it is a shame that philosophers are not working with them to promote human progress and philosophical understanding. And so if metaphysics is dead in the 21st century, it is because today's philosophers have abandoned the pursuit of truth in the name of supporting America's hateful and superstitious war on psychoactive substances.
According to Kant, we can know nothing about the noumenal world, or ultimate reality, but this claim is not true*. In claiming otherwise, Kant was unaware of the metaphysical insights provided by psychoactive drug use. There is such a thing as 'experiential proof' inspired by such use -- an absolute conviction that is felt 'in every fiber of one's being,' as opposed to having been 'proven' for one syllogistically in the fallible and eternally insufficient communication method that we call human language.
This is Kant's Holy Grail, had he only realized it, a way to move forward with metaphysical research: by looking for experiential proof of ultimate realities rather than merely logical ones.
*Kant's claim could be salvaged, perhaps, by specifying the type of 'knowledge' that we're talking about here. My point is simply that Kant seemed unaware of the power of psychoactive drugs to inspire states that provide us with convictions with respect to the noumenal world. Whether the source of those convictions is 'knowledge' properly so-called is an interesting question, but one well beyond the scope of these comments and unnecessary for their rational evaluation.
February 14, 2025
Insights about drugs are hidden in plain sight. But Americans are too brainwashed to notice them. That's because they got to us early: in grade school, to teach us the drug-hating principles of Mary Baker-Eddy, founder of the religion of Christian Science.
I found one insight last night while watching the first episode of Rod Serling's 'Night Gallery.' To learn more, please read my new essay on the subject entitled: The Dead Man.
I have also taken the liberty of updating that 404 page you receive when you click on an invalid link. Watch out, though. A 404 gives cops reasonable cause to search you for drugs. Click here to learn more!
I've also taken the liberty of updating my essay entitled What's Drugs Got to Do With It. Spoiler alert: I consider how Schopenhauer's unchangeable will can be squared with Acquired Savant Syndrome. (I know, I know: it's another obvious attempt on my part to acquire readers at any cost, right?! Go for the jugular, that's my motto!)
February 5, 2025
Here's another essay of mine with a title that is sure to break the Internet:
I wrote to the CBS TV station in Charlottesville a couple of years ago, when my elderly mother was in hospice in that city, suffering unnecessarily thanks to the wholesale outlawing of psychoactive substances. It irked me that the television station was publicizing an upcoming 'anti-drug' rally -- sponsored by... wait for it, folks... Budweiser: a company whose products kill 178,000 a year in America alone -- that's according to America's CDC.
Of course, I do not hold liquor responsible -- but if Drug Warriors were consistent and logical, they would certainly do so.
The problem is that the Drug War outlaws all alternatives to liquor -- which is why it's outrageous hypocrisy when Big Liquor sponsors a 'just say no' rally.
For my latest thoughts on the topic, plus a short comedy sketch, click here.
February 3, 2025
I try to respond to at least one bone-headed Bluesky post per day. It's interesting that most threads that I respond to are not really discussions, but rather echo chambers. Everybody believes drugs are the problem and they're just taking turns to demonize substances. Today, the topic was those evil Mexicans sending us Fentanyl.
I reminded the thread participants that they need only look in the mirror to see the people responsible for Fentanyl entering the country. Substance prohibition created the cartels just as surely as liquor prohibition created the American Mafia. So if they want a Drug War, then they need to stop whining -- they asked for it. As prohibitionists, they are the ones who are incentivizing the violence. They are the ones demanding that young people be ignorant about safe use. They are the ones demanding that supply be unregulated. They are the ones who decided that education is a dirty word when it comes to psychoactive substances.
Instead of getting together on Bluesky for orgies of drug-bashing, they need to look in the mirror and behold the cause of the problem: their ignorant fearmongering and the anti-democratic laws that it has spawned, which have destroyed American freedom and handed otherwise close elections to tyrants. How? By incarcerating more citizens than any other country on earth -- most of whom are minorities -- and thus removing them from the voting rolls.
The sad truth is that America is a failed democracy because of the Drug War, and the strategic political fearmongering for which it stands.
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Here's an update on my two-year-old essay entitled What Terence McKenna 105 Got Wrong about Drugs. In this update, I remind the reader that McKenna is not alone: that Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman have some very conservative views about drug policy -- ones that are demonstrably hypocritical and productive of great harm.
Amazingly, I seem to be the only philosopher in the world who has connected drug use not simply with self-medication 106 , but with an obvious vocational need in certain people to jettison pernicious self-doubt -- to jettison self-doubt or else suffer dire consequences, namely the loss of their very calling in life. And yet these are the same people whom we seek to arrest and punish with long jail sentences. The hatred of this prohibitionist tendency is beyond words. It is the fanatical enforcement of Christian Science precepts against individuals whose only crime was attempting to succeed in life, was attempting to feed their families, was attempting to live their one-and-only life's dream. And yet we punish these people with jail sentences. But then I've always said that the Drug War represents a complete inversion of values, it is an exercise in finding uses for the police and the military -- and for what purpose? For the purpose of cracking down on poor minorities and the psychologically and/or financially disempowered.
January 31, 2025
I have yet to find one thinker on the topic of drugs who has not fallen for at least one or two Drug War lies. A list of the partially bamboozled includes Rick Doblin107, Carl Hart108, DJ Nutt109, Terence McKenna110, Rick Strassman111, Michael Pollan112 and Andrew Weil113. This is to be expected because we Americans live and breathe Drug War propaganda these days, thanks to censorship. We are not allowed to hear, read or see anything which suggests the positive use of outlawed substances; meanwhile, no one connects the dots between gun violence 114 and the War on Drugs. And no one points out the fact that young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal, that it took prohibition to create that dystopia.
Perhaps the main reason that the list of bamboozled 'experts' is so long, however, is the fact that materialist science is the new American god, and so many on the list basically accept the lie that Big Pharma 'meds' are not 'drugs' in the pejorative sense of that word. They actually believe that Big Pharma has 'sorted' depression, as the Brits would say, and that anyone who hasn't been thus 'cured' is merely treatment-resistant, in the same way that others are lactose intolerant with respect to milk. What they fail to realize, however, is that there are no such things as drugs at all -- i.e., no such thing as substances which can be declared to have no positive uses a priori. They fail to realize moreover that it is a category error to place materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood. They fail to realize that any psychoactive drug can be used as an antidepressant as part of an imaginative protocol that makes common psychological sense.
But materialist scientists do not believe in common sense. They do not believe in anecdote. They do not believe in history. And so they tell us with a straight face that obvious godsends like MDMA and laughing gas have no potential uses for the depressed. They are thereby supporting a hateful behaviorism that ignores the patient entirely and dictates 'cures' based on theory, and then blames the patient if they are not cured by the same.
Andrew Weil is one of the most clear-minded thinkers that you'll find on the subject of drugs in America, but even he has been brainwashed by certain elements of Drug War ideology. To learn how, read my update of my review of his 1998 book entitled 'From Chocolate to morphine 115 .'
I have written to numerous philosophers on drug-related topics over the last five years and have always been ghosted -- except for one case, in which I was gaslit by a philosopher who told me that all was well, that philosophers were not censoring themselves about drugs. Talk about a big lie. Why then was I the only philosopher in the world who protested to the FDA about their attempts to outlaw laughing gas, the substance whose effects inspired the ontology of William James? Despite writing over 100 individual letters to philosophers at Harvard and Oxford on this topic, pointing out how the new law was a further attack on academic freedom, no one even responded, let alone protested. I would have thought that I'd gain some traction at Harvard, where James founded the Psychology Department, but no such luck. It is apparently more than a philosopher's job is worth these days to complain about the War on Drugs -- which, of course, is yet another reason why drug prohibition is anathema in a purportedly free country.
I've just made so bold as to update my essay entitled How the Drug War Turned Me into an Eternal Patient. Spoiler alert: I begin tapering Effexor tomorrow -- absent, of course, the many drugs that could help me succeed.
Speaking of hateful prohibition, I used to think that America was on the way to becoming the shining light that it always boasted of being. Now it seems that the best hope we can cherish is that its founding principles will someday be the inspiration for a sociopolitical reboot, one in which the populace is more educated, less subject to the proselytization of an absurdly rich oligarchy, and aware at long last that prohibition causes all of the problems that it purports to solve and then some -- that prohibition is, in fact, the ultimate case of fearmongering, that it inevitably results in censorship, mass incarceration 117 of minorities, the militarization of local police forces, and the overthrow of American principles, hence the election of you-know-whom.
January 28, 2025
Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.
January 27, 2025
There is an additional reason that I am devoting my twilight years to ending the hateful War on Drugs, and that is because my job in so doing is AI-proof. Artificial intelligence can never deal with the world's drug biases -- except perhaps tyrannically, by imposing its own supposedly logical 'viewpoint' on the world. For the 'viewpoint' of any AI app with respect to a philosophically fraught subject is a product of the algorithm that created it and the assumptions upon which that algorithm was coded. You can be sure, moreover, that coders will be under ongoing pressure to ensure that their AI algorithms are productive of politically correct output when it comes to the Drug War.
Philosophy, in general, is one field that AI can never conquer, except via ideological fiat. Such a technological triumph would always be guilty of the logical fallacy of petitio principii: it would presuppose the correctness of many of the highly debatable principles upon which such preeminence would be based.
This essay is important, however, for I am the first philosopher to reveal the hidden Drug War prejudices of Schopenhauer. And these are highly relevant to an understanding of his principal work, 'The World as Will and Idea/Representation,118' wherein he presupposes predestination and an unknowable Will. For he does so in total ignoration of both the psychological and mystical effects of a wide variety of psychoactive drugs. The mindful use of a variety of drugs, including opium, can get ourselves outside of our biasing and limiting ego, which is, after all, the fundamental goal of the mystics whom Schopenhauer praises. Yet the German pessimist appears to be unaware of this potential, which I argue, however, exists (at least to a certain degree) as a matter of psychological common sense. Moreover, psychedelics give us glimpses of those potentially noumenal worlds that William James said we must study in order to understand the nature of ultimate reality119. While the ontological status of such drug-inspired worlds may be debated, they cannot be dismissed out of hand as philosophically irrelevant, and that appears to be what Schopenhauer has done.
More accurately, he appears to have been totally unaware of the very existence of the sorts of drug-induced states involved here. Of course, Schopenhauer died when the American philosopher was just 18 years old, but the ideas that James championed in his lifetime date back thousands of years, to the use of Soma in the Vedic religion, to the use of opium in ancient Greek ritual and to the use of psychedelics in the Eleusinian Mysteries 120 . It is also worth noting that the high-profile recipients of the kykeon at Eleusis often couched their praise of the rite in the awed and reticent language of mystics like Meister Eckhart121, whom Schopenhauer holds up as a kind of role model for true understanding, or rather the truest possible understanding available here below to humans as such122.
Schopenhauer considers that we essentially are our 'wills.' Our very bodies are merely the incarnation of our will. This will, moreover, is determined once and for all, even before our birth. Our behavior is thus causally determined and is the inexorable result of our will employing the specific motives available to it in life (its psychological and physical environment) as necessary to 'have its way.' One can apparently transcend this determinism, however, by denying one's will (that is, by transcending the ego), something of which only geniuses (or at least potential geniuses) are thought to be capable -- geniuses and madmen, perhaps, a duo which Schopenhauer tells us have much in common. Schopenhauer's shortcoming consists of his failure to understand that many psychoactive drugs help one transcend ego, if only in psychological ways, and that some drugs, psychedelics in particular, have the potential to disable perceptual filters that keep us from seeing potential noumenal worlds. Again, the ontological status of such worlds may be debated, but the first step is for philosophers to acknowledge the simple fact that such states exist.
I laugh every time I hear a Drug Warrior complain about big government. The worst government intrusion of all time occurred when the government took control of pain relief by outlawing opium.
While reading the sermons of Meister Eckhart last night, it occurred to me that his descriptions of transcendent states read just like the accounts of breakthrough psychedelic trips published in the books of psychedelic researchers such as Stanislav Grof and James Fadmian. This has huge implications with respect to how the Drug War outlaws not just specific religions, but the religious impulse itself. For more, please read my new essay entitled 'Meister Eckhart and Drugs.'
January 21, 2025
-- I have updated my 2020 essay entitled How the Drug War Killed Leah Betts. Leah was the 100-pound teenage raver who became a cause célèbre for UK drug prohibitionists in the 1990s after she was supposedly killed by Ecstasy. She was actually killed because prohibitionists spread fear rather than education and so Leah did not know that she needed to stay hydrated while using the substance during vigorous activity such as dancing.
And so the UK cracked down on their own British Summer of Love -- and, of course, by so doing turned the dance floors into shooting galleries as former E-users switched to anger-facilitating drugs like alcohol. But then being a Drug Warrior means never having to say you're sorry.
Leah was no more killed by Ecstasy than crash victims are killed by cars. Cars only kill people in Stephen King novels. Crash victims may owe their deaths to poor signage, lousy driving, defective equipment, or some combination of such factors, but never to cars themselves.
-- Okay, so we're going to ban TikTok. While we're at it, why don't we ban Fox News and Trump's social network as well? Surely, we should shield our kids from folks who use lies and half-truths to support insurrection.
Incidentally, I'm always a little leery about making such statements because I have been promoting my blog on X and that is the network owned by the well-heeled coup leader named Elon Musk 123124 , the guy who helped Trump buy the 2024 election. But then I figure that anyone who supports such fearmongers does not understand the War on Drugs. Substance prohibition is all about fearmongering for strategic purposes: namely, for the purpose of convincing Americans to give up democratic freedoms in the name of fighting a phantom called 'drugs.' For drugs have never been our enemy, but rather ignorance ABOUT drugs: the very ignorance that Drug Warriors insist on promoting as part of their superstitious, racist and anti-indigenous public policy of wholesale substance prohibition.
Speaking of which, I have opened an account on BlueSky this morning, whither many of my ex-X followers seem to have fled.
In case people still haven't made the connection, Trump is the master of fearmongering. His job on behalf of multi-billionaires is to keep Americans at each other's throats and obsessed about issues of his own making so that no one has time to promote any real changes, which are always anathema to the powers that be.
January 20, 2025
Imagine that we had been taught from childhood that operating on a human being is wrong. Then we walk down the street as an adult and encounter a guy with a broken leg. We would think to ourselves: 'Oh, dear! I wish I could think of some way to help that guy -- but the problem of broken legs just seems to be completely insoluble!'
That would be idiotic -- but no more idiotic than looking at a drunkard on the street and saying, 'Oh, if only there was a way to help him!'
This is why Louis Theroux is frustrated that he cannot help an alcoholic. He does not really want to help. None of us do. We want to turn the alcoholic into a good drug-hating Christian Scientist instead. Learn more in this important update to my essay on this topic.
January 19, 2025
We should outlaw organizations like DARE and put them on trial for brainwashing our kids in the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. With this in mind, I have just updated my essay on this topic.
Here is my latest essay on the subject of addiction: Addiction. Addiction is the golden goose of the Drug Warrior. They do not want to end it, they want to leverage it through fearmongering in order to keep Americans docile in the face of the destruction of democratic freedoms, like free speech and the protection against unreasonable search. There are a host of common-sense ways to prevent addiction, but they are all blocked by the Drug War. Please read my essays on this topic to learn more.
Now then, about Schopenhauer... (How's that for a head-spinning segue?! I hope the reader is covered for whiplash!)
The views that he puts forth in 'The World as Will and Idea125' are interesting to contemplate in light of the research of folks like James Fadiman126 and Stanislav Grof127. The results of their trials of psychedelic substances suggest that there is far more potential flexibility to the human personality than that ostensibly pessimistic philosopher would allow. Schopenhauer, it will be remembered, does not believe in free will -- at least in a practical sense -- because our very bodies are expressions of our individual wills with which we were born. Our behavior is thus predictable in theory. We, each of us, have a kind of hidden purpose or destiny in life that we will pursue, will we or nil we. So says Schopenhauer.
And yet I wonder if the transcendental experiences provided by certain drug use do not give us access, at least in some small and unspecifiable way, to the will itself and allow us to modify it to some degree, thereby helping us, as it were, to get outside of our own ego and to transcend our limitations. We know that certain drug use results in a kind of perceived ego death, and it is this ego death which, according to Schopenhauer himself, puts us in touch with the otherwise unknowable ultimate, the Will writ large. This is why Schopenhauer regards death as a kind of illusion, since willing itself never dies, but rather the instantiation of that will that we each represent with our discrete human bodies.
Schopenhauer admits that environment affects us (in the form of what he calls motives), but he insists that our fundamental personality (our will) is the same in the cradle as it is in the nursing home. Yes, we gain knowledge during our lifetime, but that knowledge is always acquired and employed in furtherance of the hidden objectives of the will. His point is not so much that self-improvement is an illusion, but that people simply don't change, fundamentally speaking.
All I am saying here is that that assumption seems to be called into question given the enlightenment that comes from apparent ego death during psychedelic experience. The drug trials referred to above seem to suggest that people have indeed transcended their own selfish will, at least to some small extent, with the help of drugs and have, in some cases, been able to modify the will's prime directive for their life for the better.
I'm not trying to prove any specific claim here, just to raise some issues that the philosophically minded reader might like to entertain.
And so, as Mike Myers would say: 'Talk amongst yourselves.'
January 15, 2025
If Labor hadn't been hornswoggled by Drug War ideology, the outlawing of indiscriminate drug testing would be their cause célèbre. Why? Because such drug testing represents the political castration of the American worker. Learn more in my recently updated essay entitled 'Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition.'
In an open letter published here a couple of months ago, I asked Charley Wininger why MDMA would not work for the depressed. Charley is the author of 'Listening to Ecstasy128.' Still no response, unfortunately. Please see my updated essay on the topic entitled MDMA and Depression.
January 14, 2025
Drug war propaganda is alive and well in Hollywood -- so much so that I called Vudu to get a refund on the $6 I had shelled out last night for 'Smile 2.' The brainwashed screenwriters put me off the movie in the first five minutes with their rehashing of the usual misleading Drug War tropes. The writers had to come up with a thoroughly repulsive character, you see, so of course they opted for a drug dealer. It never seems to have occurred to them that drug dealers only exist because of prohibition. Why? Because prohibition incentivized violent drug dealing. So the vigilante that goes after the drug dealer in the film (presumably to saddle him with a 'curse') should have reserved his fury for the politicians who created a world full of gunfire and torture in the first place.
But the writers have been brainwashed like everybody else and so they just completely fail to make the connection between prohibition and violence -- which is, however, thoroughly inexcusable given that prohibition created the Mafia as we know it today.
Such depictions support a false consciousness, and America will never wake up from the Drug War nightmare until they start holding it accountable -- rather than simply reserving blame for the bad guys that the Drug War created out of whole cloth.
When white Americans like my mother began having trouble with their GP-prescribed oxy, lawmakers were full of pity and concern. What a contrast to the way they treat minorities like dirt for their drug-related issues. For more on this topic, see my newly-updated essay on the book 'Whiteout: How Racial capitalism 129 Changed the Color of Opioids in America130.'
For more proof that American drug policy is anti-patient and inhumane, read this account of the phone conversation that I had yesterday afternoon with a compounding pharmacist. I had called requesting low-dose formulations of Effexor so that I could taper off the drug without counting pill beads. Little did I know, that's not how compounding pharmacies work. It's not their job to help patients taper off drugs. Now, if I were a dog, that would be another story. Compounding pharmacists are all about compounding drugs for animals.
January 10, 2025
Here is my update on a letter I wrote to the 116th United States Congress in 2019. I was just a kid at the time, so go gentle on me. Indeed, I was scarcely 60 years old when I sallied out against that particular windmill. But I have got to hand it to me, I made some decent points in that letter! Well done, me! Of course, today, I would have been more stodgy and authoritative and I would have peppered my letter with footnotes to impress the no-doubt gullible recipients.
Speaking of footnotes, I am increasingly attempting to haul them into my essays for illustrative purposes; however, it must be remembered that most of my arguments against the Drug War are deductive in nature. They consist of syllogistic conclusions drawn from commonly accepted facts. For such arguments, footnotes are, strictly speaking, unnecessary.
I mention this by way of criticizing the constipated language of heavily-footnoted research when it comes to academic writing about drugs -- or about emotion-related subjects in general. Many academics write as if they were terrified that their paper might be understood by anyone outside the ivory tower, and so they use a 50-cent word -- or more typically a $1.50 neologism -- when they might have conveyed their message more clearly with an established word drawn from a small dictionary. They often do this, it seems to me, because they realize that if they removed all the insider verbiage, then they would have very little to say, indeed.
Of course, the goal of the academician should be to use the 'mot juste' and if that means using big words -- or even neologisms -- then so be it.
But this is just a partial outline for an essay that I do not have time to write at the moment. I will be 'back atcha' with the relevant essay as soon as I find time to amass the sample citations that would prove my point.
But let me suggest a few problems with the seemingly willful academic obscurantism of which I speak:
Researchers who practice this mystification deprive their papers of real-world impact to the extent that they hide (or rather bury) their conclusions in academic verbiage. What's the point of criticizing the status quo if no one knows that you're doing so? Conversely, such overloaded papers which fail to properly prove a conclusion can yet be used by demagogues to support a cause, since the sheer number of footnotes and neologisms can convince the science-loving American that the paper is correct and it is only their, the reader's, inability to grasp genius that is preventing them from seeing this clearly.
This allows the demagogue politician to defend disastrous public policy on the grounds that it is 'scientific.' Or, in other words, 'It MUST be scientific: just look at these research papers that are completely undecipherable except by genius! Look at all the footnotes that they contain! Is that scientific or what?!'
I have updated my . It's amazing that no one has ever thought of these uses, to my knowledge, at least. The fact is there are endless positive uses for drugs, limited only by our creativity. But Drug War propaganda has 'headed us off at the pass,' stopped us from even daring to think such dangerous thoughts.
And what about this second-guessing of prescriptions by bureaucrats? It is based on the idea that there is an objective way to determine best dose when it comes to psychoactive medicine. This is clearly false. The dosing in such cases depends on assumptions about what constitutes 'the good life,' philosophically speaking. Is it wrong to take a drug daily at higher-than-usual dosages? It entirely depends on how one balances risk in achieving one's psychosocial goals, and this in turn depends on the nature of one's psychosocial goals and also depends on what the would-be user considers life to be 'all about.' The DEA agent considers the prime imperative in life to be safety. Few people live their life by such a rule, with the exception of hypochondriacs. For many, self-fulfillment comes first, not safety.
And yet the Drug War focuses all talk about drugs on downsides, clearly demonstrating that the Drug Warrior is a hypochondriac by proxy when it comes to drugs. That is one particular world view, not an objective view that all rational minds must necessarily embrace.
The answer is to re-legalize substances so that folks can self-prescribe for mood and mind medicine based on their own values and their own ideas about the meaning of life -- self-prescribe, that is, with the ever-available help of pharmacologically savvy empaths that can teach them drug use strategies that have been proven to be effective in helping the would-be user to achieve the psychosocial outcomes that they desire -- that THEY desire, mind, not their doctors nor the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
But until we let human beings adjust their own body chemistry, as has been the rule throughout human history, we should judge prescribing doctors (if judge them we must) on a wide variety of factors, most of which the Drug Warrior bureaucrat is completely unaware of and never studied in community college.
January 4, 2025
Today I have updated two related articles: 'Tapering for Jesus' and . These essays highlight an issue that no one else to my knowledge has ever highlighted: namely, the dogmatic stupidity of modern science when it comes to common sense psychology.
I have also added some notes to my essay on Beta Blockers: . I made it clear that even beta blockers and antidepressants are not bad in themselves. That is the sin of the Drug Warrior, to think that drugs can be bad per se.
Back in April 2022, I wrote a letter to two UK criminologists about drug policy, in the hopes that we could share ideas. Needless to say, they never responded. Since then, I have been thinking how odd it is that criminologists are even consulted on such topics. We don't invite criminologists to the table when we are talking about aspirin and antibiotics. Why are they experts in coca and opium?
I ring in the New Year by traveling back in time to 2019, when The Wall Street Journal published an article by Marci Hamilton linking drug use with child abuse. One scarcely knows where to begin in confronting such choplogic, but here is my latest attempt to do so. Update to 'Marci Hamilton Equates Drug Use with Child Abuse.'
Ta-da! Here are my thoughts on George Santayana and his 'Life of Reason.' I call this essay, 'If this be reason, let us make the least of it!' Yes, it is all about drugs. A lot of things in this world have a drug angle -- but most authors today are brainwashed into ignoring that fact.
December 29, 2024
Coming tomorrow: Santayana and drugs.
December 28, 2024
Here is a letter that I wrote to a friend this morning, after she was so unwise as to bring up the subject of drug law in our correspondence.
Thanks. Sorry, but I can't stop myself from adding a few more details. Low-priority, but if you have a mo', feel free to read....
Soma inspired the Vedic and hence the Hindu religion132. This is one reason why the Drug War represents not simply the outlawing of A religion, but the outlawing of the religious impulse.
Coca has long been considered a divine plant among the Peruvian Indians133.
The Eleusinian mysteries involved the use of a psychedelic substance (possibly ergot-based, like LSD) and inspired western thinkers for two thousand years, from Plato to Cicero to Aristotle, until the ceremony was tellingly outlawed by a Christian emperor in 392 B.C. as a threat to Christianity. The mysteries are thought to have inspired Socrates' view of the afterlife and the soul134.
Christian propaganda to the contrary, opium has been used wisely for millennia. It was used in Iran as recently as the '60s until the U.S. instructed the Shah to crack down on the drug, since Drug Warriors did not want the world to see that safe use was possible. It was considered a godsend by all ancient physicians -- Galen, Avicenna, Paracelsus135136.
Jefferson and Franklin enjoyed opium -- but Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello 137 in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in violation of all that he stood for, politically speaking138.
In 1914, we turned opium users into criminals, preventing them from using peaceably in their houses. Now young people are in the streets, using far more potent opiates139. We should have left well enough alone, but Drug Warriors hated the perceived Chinese connection with opium use and 'cracked down,' and now we have young people dying in the streets. And yet all news on the subject is written from the assumption that the drugs themselves are the problem -- failing to realize that even Fentanyl has proper uses (as in hospice care) and that we are causing vast unnecessary pain by 'cracking down' on drugs rather than on destructive social policies like prohibition itself. And that crackdown has destroyed American democracy, abnegating the first and fourth amendments and throwing millions of minorities in jail, thereby handing elections to fascists.
Thousands are dying of overdoses because of a lack of education and an unregulated drug supply, which means, 1, that no one knows for sure what one is actually 'using,' and hence, 2, it is impossible to verify the actual dosage that one is consuming.
In reality, drug use is no different from free climbing a rock face, riding a horse, or driving a car140. It is a potentially dangerous activity for which education and responsibility are required. But fearmongering politicians have emphasized only the dangers (and when dangers were lacking, they simply made them up out of whole cloth). They pretend that prohibition has no downsides and that 'drugs' have no upsides -- except for alcohol and maybe drugs made by Big Pharma. And these are the same politicians who think that gun control is an abomination. Nor are they really against drugs, per se. They have no problem with the daily use of drugs. They have no problem with drug dependency, even. They just insist that the drugs so used must be provided by Big Pharma .
Meanwhile, these substances that we have been taught to call (or rather to denigrate as) 'drugs' are now so hated that folks like William Bennett and Police Chief Daryl Gates have called for 'drug users' to be beheaded and shot, respectively141.
The story of lies, hatred, half-truths and false assumptions goes on and on. I always felt that the Drug War was nonsense, but discussing such things openly was always considered to be 'bad form' in America -- and still is, as witnessed by the fact that few academics to whom I write even dare to acknowledge my correspondence. Drug warriors are like the sirens of mythology in that they lull one to sleep and to acquiescence with their superficially plausible propaganda -- all of which falls apart, however, once one sits down dispassionately and considers it from a psychological, philosophical and historical point of view.
The chief propaganda, by the way, is the almost complete censorship of positive drug use -- which will not be seen on screen or in magazines. To the contrary, one will only see or read moral narratives in which drugs are evil142. The plots of sitcoms on this topic have been edited by various White House administrations over the last five decades. The government is engaged in a fear campaign about drugs, not an education campaign. That is why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse and not a National Institute on Drug Use.
Finally, if Americans cannot use drugs wisely, there is something wrong with America, not with drugs. But the Drug War is the ultimate case of denial. America has turned evil drugs into the leitmotif of world politics, thereby putting the few remaining indigenous peoples in an awkward position, for they still honor and revere the kind of holistic plant-based healing that the Drug War teaches us to despise.
And this attitude is aided and abetted by the psychological theory of behaviorism, which tells us that emotion-free scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood143. This in turn allows scientists to tell us (without even laughing) that the above-mentioned substances have not been 'proven' to work -- since behaviorists have no interest in anecdote and history, or in psychological common sense, for that matter. They merely want to know what's going on under a microscope144.
This is why I write regular philosophical essays about prohibition and the Drug War, to make the connections that no one else seems to be making. I'm afraid you're right, however, in thinking that it may be hundreds of years yet until the penny drops for most human beings -- that drugs that inspire compassion and help us live with ourselves are not evil -- indeed, that no drugs are evil except insofar as they are used ill-advisedly.
We can only pray that they won't be forced into that reevaluation by a nuclear nightmare and/or the effects of global warming.
The fact is that most people do NOT use drugs ill-advisedly (see 'Drug Use for Grownups' by Carl Hart145) even though prohibition does all that it can do to turn drug use into a dangerous dead-end.
Alexander Shulgin created hundreds of non-addictive drugs that inspire compassion and mystical bliss146. The strategic use of such drugs could play an important role in pulling the world back from the brink of destruction. An idea of this sort has been used by the Polynesians. Their chiefs would drink the psychoactive kava before meeting with potential adversaries to help ensure cooperation and understanding. America needs to stop the fearmongering before we can even begin to imagine such solutions.
This does not mean simply the change in a few laws: it will require a brand-new attitude toward life, one that borrows from the indigenous people of the world in believing that nature itself is full of psychoactive substances and that they were placed on earth for our benefit, not for our destruction. This should not come as a surprise to westerners given that the God of their own religion is on record as stating that creation is good. Indeed, it has been the position of the Christian Church for centuries that evil is to be found in people, not in things147148.
In July 2023, I wrote 'In Defense of Opium,' in protest of a drug-demonizing article written by Marco Margaritoff. Today, I have updated my essay, after having read the chilling 'nuclear war 149150151 : A Scenario' by Annie Jacobsen.
December 25, 2024
If you want a glimpse at how Drug War ideology has taken over academia, consider the study of witches. It is generally agreed in academia that the social outsiders that people call witches have historically been scapegoats for social ills and that their status as boogiemen has been a product of fearmongering. These considerations should immediately evoke the subject of drugs in an unbiased mind, and for two reasons:
1) The Drug War is the ultimate example of strategic fearmongering on behalf of the powers-that-be.
and
2) The so-called 'herbs' that witches were claimed to have used were drugs. Those who deny this fact are insisting upon a fictional distinction between 'herbs' and 'drugs,' which is as nonsensical as supposing a difference between 'meds' and 'drugs.' Psychoactive substances are psychoactive substances, and it is only the strategic manipulation of our definitions that makes us believe otherwise.
And yet academics in the field do not discuss 'drugs' according to the modern understanding of that term, except in ways that make it clear that they view modern 'drugs' and witches' 'herbs' as very different things, indeed. Drugs are bad while herbs are... Well, don't ask them what, but they're not evil drugs, that's for sure. And so a field of academic study that might help us better understand Drug War madness is rendered impotent to shed light on that topic.
December 24, 2024
Politicians are mad, not to say evil. They protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment to the U.S. constitution and enlist businesses to perform drug testing on would-be employees in order to ensure that Christian Science heretics cannot secure gainful employment in the United States. Amazingly, Americans cannot see this for the sham that it is.
There are no evil drugs, only evil drug policies, like failure to educate and support of prohibition, which ensures corrupt and uncertain drug supply.
The Drug War is essentially the enforcement of the anti-indigenous mindset of Francisco Pizarro via draconian laws, and this in a country that prides itself on having risen above colonialist practices. The Drug War is just colonialism by other means. Americans cannot recognize it as such because it is garbed in the cloak of a psychologically naive reductive materialism. This pseudoscientific viewpoint is based on the demonstrably false and anti-scientific claim that the drugs that we are outlawing have no positive uses in any case.
December 23, 2024
I watched one of those B horror movies from the 1950s last night. It was called 'She Devil' and concerned a poor but attractive young lady who was suffering from an apparently incurable case of tuberculosis. An ambitious doctor gets wind of the case and submits the patient to a new untested drug treatment, with the reluctant help of his more cautious and elderly advisor and mentor. The drug restores the woman's health but has the unintended side effect of changing her erstwhile meek disposition into that of a heartless egoist, one determined to have her way in life no matter what.
After noticing the change, the worried mentor asks his protege if the drug he had created could have affected the lady's personality:
'Do you suppose it could be the serum, that it produced an emotional as well as a physical change in her?'
Without missing a beat, the ambitious protege responds:
'I wouldn't know about that. As a biochemist, I don't deal with the emotions.'
He is so self-satisfied and glib as he makes this pronouncement that a modern viewer wants to smack him right in the puss.
A modern biochemist might not be so frank as this B-movie scientist, but Behaviorism is still the order of the day in academia, even if it goes by other names. The drug researcher doesn't care about obvious emotions. Otherwise they would see at a glance that the strategic use of drugs like coca, opium and psychedelics could work wonders, and not just for the depressed and anxious but for those seeking help in achieving spiritual states and self-understanding and/or writing exotic prose and poetry. They cannot see this obvious fact because they believe that to be scientific, they have to ignore obvious emotions and look at brain chemistry instead under a microscope. Anecdote and historical usage mean nothing to them.
These drugs have inspired entire religions but that means nothing to today's scientists. They have accepted the anti-scientific Drug Warrior premise that a drug that can be misused, even in theory, by young American white people must not be used by anyone, anywhere, ever, that we are just too dumb to ever learn to use drugs wisely. These are the same people who insist that we can use guns wisely and that free climbing a sheer cliff face is a reasonable activity, as is driving a car, the same people who sign off on liquor and Jim Beam commercials for young adults, the same people who let Big Pharma advertise 'meds' for which the recognized side effects include death itself 152 .
Drug researchers today may be the smartest and nicest people in the world -- but they are forced to play dumb and be cold-hearted thanks to their adherence to the mendacious dogma of today's know-nothing and anti-scientific Drug Warrior
December 22, 2024
I have written many essays about the role that reductive materialism plays in blinding us to common sense about drugs. But I have yet to identify the psychological theory that underlies this obtuseness. It is the anti-indigenous and cold psychology of JB Watson 153 , called Behaviorism, hence the title of my latest essay, 'Behaviorism and Drugs: why doctors and researchers are blind to common sense.154'
Also today I have added an update to my reflections on Peru and psychedelic healing. I point out that the Drug War is the triumph of idiocy. I also make the point that, while psychedelics have great potential, we should never forget the fact that we are blind to the far more obvious potentials of OTHER outlawed drugs, like opium and cocaine 155156 , both of which can be used for a wide variety of fully rational and even meritorious reasons.
Drug War propaganda is hidden in plain sight. Every movie that concerns drugs is propaganda in a Drug War society. The movies may not be propaganda 'in and of themselves.' They may just be touching true accounts of people who have had trouble with drugs. And yet when considered collectively, all such movies are propaganda insofar as they show only one possible outcome of drug use, namely, that which is connected with sorrow and repentance.
Imagine that there were a host of movies in which aspirin was implicated in an untimely death. Aspirin, after all, has been implicated in thousands of deaths when taken on a daily basis157. Such movies may be perfectly accurate and touching, and yet viewers would soon recognize that these movies were part of a smear campaign against the drug. This is because we have no war against aspirin, and so the propagandistic smear campaign would be obvious to everyone.
Not so with 'drugs.' And so Hollywood 158 keeps cranking out movies that demonize drug use and we are blind to the smear campaign that this represents. And so movies like 'Double Life' and 'Four Good Days' keep piling on with their anti-drug message without any alarm bells sounding in the minds of viewers.
To put this argument another way: 'The Lost Weekend' is a great movie and not propagandistic 'in and of itself,' but it would still be propaganda when aired in a society wherein no favorable depictions of alcohol use were allowed.
But the problem is worse than this. Many movies and books that would seem to have nothing to do with drugs will be found to contain throwaway lines that serve to diss demonized substances and drug use in general. This is bad enough, and ignorant enough, in itself, but it is made worse by the fact that there are almost no throwaway lines in modern media that mention positive drug use to counterbalance the anti-drug bias.
In 'The Witch' by Ronald Hutton159160, we read nothing about drugs except for one single sentence in which the author likens deadly native medicines to 'drugs' in the modern sense of that term. It is clearly a pejorative reference which caters to the Christian Science sensibilities of the Drug Warrior. What the author fails to realize, however, is that the 'herbs' that he frequently mentions in his book in connection with witchcraft are also drugs. To say otherwise is to believe in an imaginary distinction based on how we 'feel' about substances. It is like calling substances 'meds' when they are prescribed by doctors and 'drugs' when they are outlawed by politicians, and then assuming that this classification represents a scientific and logical distinction rather than an arbitrary and social one.
Academicians studying witchcraft surely know that they are opening up Pandora's box once they recognize that herbs are drugs and so they continue to use only the former appellation. 'Herbs' sounds innocent enough and the use of that word permits the writer to pass on to other topics without dealing with the highly fraught topic of drugs and social norms. Were they to do so, they would recognize that the fearmongering sensibilities that inspired our hatred of witches never died out. They have just been strategically transferred from the witch to the witch's potions, in a word, to 'drugs,' which are considered to be the new cause of evil in modern life.
This new Christian Science viewpoint inevitably leads to the ascension of a brand-new witch in modern life: namely, the drug dealer. Hutton writes of the 'service magician' who uses 'herbs' (wink-wink) to help his or her customers to achieve various personal goals in life. And what is the modern drug dealer but a service magician doing the exact same thing? But academicians do not want to go there -- indeed, almost nobody does - and for obvious reasons. We live during a time of Drug War Sharia, and the failure to ascribe anything but pure evil to drugs and their venders is heresy, punishable by potential ostracization and banishment from professional circles, etc.
December 20, 2024
Psychedelic researchers talk about set and setting with regard to psychedelic drugs. But set and setting is important in the use of ALL psychoactive drugs, especially those like opium and coca. In his essays on intoxication, Aleister Crowley points out that the experience of drug users is based on their education level: not just their education level about drugs but their education level period, full stop161. An imaginative and educated user finds a time and place to use a drug like opium to inspire creativity and to think in new fruitful ways. They use their education and imagination to contrive a set and setting conducive to successful drug use. They have a goal other than simply 'getting high.' Poorly educated users, on the other hand, simply use opium in an attempt to 'get high.' They put all their faith in the drug, as if it were aspirin, and none in their own powers. They take the drug and wait for something to happen. It is these latter users who have a habit of getting in trouble with drugs, because they have no imagination wherewith to leverage the drug effects successfully, for a rational purpose.
Drug warriors use the negative results of that latter ignorance as an excuse to ban drugs, which is a form of fearmongering. We don't stop driving because there are lousy drivers. We don't stop free climbing because some young people fall off cliffs. But the Drug Warrior leverages the west's suspicions of psychoactive medicine into a big social project to outlaw all psychoactive substances that are not controlled by state and industry. It is an outrage and we can only hope that humanity will survive long enough to realize the enormous injustice of this hateful and anti-scientific paradigm foisted on us by ignorant and often racist politicians.
December 19, 2024
The good news: Author Ronald Hutton acknowledged my essay on his book 'The Witch' and responded with the words 'Thank You.' The bad news: That's all that he said. I cannot speak for the author's motivations, but it is clear that the vast majority of academics are scared of broaching these topics. They know that it is more than their job is worth to be critical of the War on Drugs, or what can be called the modern ideology of substance demonization.
December 18, 2024
Resolved: That drug dealers are the modern witches.
This is the conclusion that I came to in my philosophical review of Ronald Hutton's 2017 book entitled 'The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present162.'
One can find drug-war biases in all sorts of non-fiction books. It often pops up in the most unexpected places, in some throw-away line involving a hasty comparison or a strained analogy. Take the 2017 book entitled 'The Witch163' by Ronald Hutton. It is an excellent academically oriented book on the varieties of witchcraft worldwide. However, the author demonstrates his drug-war biases when he likens the secret buying of killer poisons with the purchasing of 'drugs.' Apparently, he sees a connection between murderers and those who buy and sell demonized substances that can improve mind and mood. This is a complete non-sequitur and could only seem plausible to someone who has been brainwashed from childhood to consider 'drugs' to be evil. This, of course, is a superstitious point of view unworthy of an educated American, let alone a respected academic.
It's unfortunate. Instead of protesting the Drug War which censors academia, academics themselves join the substance demonization bandwagon and support the party line.
December 16, 2024
In a sane world, psychiatrists would transform into empathic coaches or shamans. Their prime imperative would be to help people achieve their own goals in life (not that of society or the psychiatrist) using drugs wisely and as safely as possible and to help them avoid all unwanted dependency. These new shaman doctors, representing the best of the west and the east/indigenous, would help one choose among a vast and ever-growing pharmacopoeia of psychoactive substances, all of them legal (again) in this utopia. Nor would any media hoopla surround such provision since the enormous downsides of prohibition would finally be acknowledged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths from civil wars overseas, the thousands dying in the streets because of contaminated supply and lack of safe-use information, the young kids being killed in drive-by shootings thanks to drug gangs that owe their very existence to substance criminalization -- and the fact that drug criminalization ends up destroying American freedoms, as it censors academia, all based on the absurd presupposition that a drug that can even theoretically be misused by white American teenagers must not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason, at any dose, ever.
December 15, 2024
The Drug War is the ultimate case of denial. The Drug Warriors not only fail to recognize how prohibition and fearmongering have caused endless problems, but they insist that the entire world be in denial about this as well. So rather than fixing the problem by accepting drug use unemotionally as just another potential risk in life, like free climbing, driving and shooting guns, they enact laws designed to keep drugs a problem for eternity, and not just in America but around the world as well.
The assumption here is that if white American young people cannot use drugs wisely, then nobody can -- this despite the fact that prohibition does all it can to prevent wise use in America, by encouraging the sale of unregulated product and refusing to even talk about safe use.
Besides, let's suppose that it is true, that Americans are not mature enough to use drugs wisely. Then there is a problem with America, not with drugs, and certainly not with the rest of the world.
So deep in denial are we as a country, that we threaten to invade other countries when they fail to share our jaundiced view of drugs.
And this is all based on the most unscientific and superstitious of principles: namely, the idea that a substance that can be misused, even in theory, by white American young people must not be used by anybody, anywhere, ever. This is why I am forever saying that prohibition causes all of the problems that it is purported to solve, and then some.
December 14, 2024
Back in March of this year, a guy on 'X' told me that 'What goes up must come down?', apparently meaning to say that any emotional and psychological benefits from 'drugs' would be eventually paid for with interest164.
What goes up must come down165? Tell that to guys like Steve Urquhart, a former Republic senator. He founded an entire psilocybin church, the Divine Assembly, in 2020, so inspired was he by the uplifting effects of psilocybin, its ability to help him see CLEARLY in his 'sober' life166. Tell that to the practitioners of the Hindu religion, whose faith would not exist today but for the enlightening effects of the psychedelic Soma in the Indus Valley thousands of years ago.
But Drug Warriors lump all drugs together as one evil thing and so feel free to discuss them wholesale. And so they dismiss drugs like psilocybin out of hand. It's a childish way of reasoning and makes exactly as much sense as dismissing penicillin on the grounds that cyanide can kill -- which would, of course, be a mistake in any case since even cyanide -- like all drugs -- has some positive uses, at some doses, in some circumstances.
Banning drugs a priori based on fearmongering is childish, anti-scientific and inhumane.
December 13, 2024
Not long ago, I was at least slightly offended by the Green Day song 'American Idiot.' American idiot, indeed, I thought. Is this really the message that we want to send to the world about the education level of the American populace?
However, recent events seem to entirely justify that title. We live in a society wherein the majority of Americans have been led by conspiracy theories into thinking that truth is the same thing as opinion, that you can simply deny any fact whose very existence implies an inconvenient truth viz. one's political beliefs. Nay, you can make up your own facts that would seem to justify your own prejudices. No sooner had that recent mass shooting occurred in Maine when a blogger got online and traced it to a leftist conspiracy. His original 'tweet' garnered 95,000 likes, more likes than most of us anti-prohibitionists are likely to accrue in our entire lifetimes.
These 'likers' are the same people who are blind to the violent mass dystopia that stares them in the face every day, that of the Drug War, which has destroyed their protections under the fourth amendment, denied them free speech, and barred them from religious practices that involve plant medicines, meanwhile killing tens of thousands through unregulated product, drive-by shootings, and civil wars overseas.
There's no denying the fact: we Americans are living in an Idiocracy.
It is, however, some comfort to remember that Edgar Allan Poe saw this coming.
In his short story entitled 'Some Words with a Mummy,' a group of archaeologists attempt to convince a revivified ancient Egyptian that modern America is the ideal republic.
'We then spoke of the great beauty and importance of Democracy,' quoth the narrator, 'and were at much trouble in impressing the Count with a due sense of the advantages we enjoyed in living where there was suffrage ad libitum, and no king.'
The mummy (a certain Count Allamistakeo) responded that Egyptians had tried the same thing once. They had created an 'ingenious' constitution that they believed would set a glorious example for mankind.
'For a while they managed remarkably well,' quoth the Count, 'only their habit of bragging was prodigious. The thing ended, however, in the consolidation of the thirteen states, with some fifteen or twenty others, in the most odious and insupportable despotism that was ever heard of upon the face of the Earth.'
The scientists then asked the Count for the name of the usurping tyrant. 'As well as the Count could recollect,' quoth the narrator, 'it was Mob.'
December 12, 2024
I read a short story last night entitled 'Tomorrow' by Eugene O'Neill. As might be expected from that author, it was touching and yet extremely depressing. The title 'Tomorrow,' of course, refers to the eternally renewed resolution of the drunkard to reform tomorrow, which is, of course, a tomorrow that will never come.
If Americans truly felt that laws had to be concocted to protect Americans from substances, then the story would read as a clarion call for the outlawing of liquor. But it will never be read that way by Americans today, subject as they are to the media's constant whitewashing of liquor and their constant demonization of all of liquor's many less dangerous alternatives. How? By lies, half-truths and (above all) censorship, thanks to which one never sees a demonized drug used responsibly and efficaciously on TV or in the movies . Said use is always either portrayed as a dead-end street or a childish undertaking worthy of laughter and, ultimately, disdain, at least from the grown-ups of the world. Meanwhile, the very fact that drugs were used efficaciously by folks like Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius is routinely suppressed from biographies.
This negative attitude toward drugs is beginning to recede today when it comes to psychedelic drugs. In fact, while I was writing this blog entry, I received a heads-up about a brand-new article in the New York Times entitled 'The C.E.O.s Are Tripping. Can Psychedelics Help the C-Suite?'.
But the penny still has not dropped for the western world. The real problem is prohibition itself, which advances the absurd and cruel proposition that a drug that can be used problematically by white American young people must not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason whatsoever. The world is full of silent and unnecessary suffering thanks to that anti-scientific dictum -- not just because of the withholding of existing protocols but because of the vast array of imaginative empathic/shamanic protocols that we dare not even imagine today thanks to the Drug War orthodoxy of substance demonization.
And so Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but the real headline is that drugs have never been evil at all, that the evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about them. And how do we talk about them today? With the superstitious and self-serving hypocrisy promoted by cynical politicians.
December 11, 2024
I have updated one of my essays on Immanuel Kant on Drugs. See footnote number six in .
December 10, 2024
We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.
December 9, 2024
Folks like Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman like to characterize the '60s as a period of wild and dangerous excesses. But such a time period must not be judged in the abstract. If we're are going to fairly judge the utopian movement of the time, we must contrast it against the mainstream mindset against which it was rebelling. It was this latter mindset that embraced thermonuclear weapons -- weapons that almost destroyed the United States, not once, but twice in the very decade that we're talking about here: once thanks to the dangerously irresponsible policies of the US Air Force and once thanks to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Only one dissenting Russian voice kept annihilation at bay in the latter incident.
Yet, the hippie movement was all about peace, love and understanding, and LSD was used to help promote that attitude. Which group seems saner to you: those who hug trees or those who hug thermonuclear weapons? Which group would pass the test of the Categorial Imperative of Immanuel Kant 167 ? Hint: not the ones who think that drugs that inspire compassion are a bad thing!!!
But Drug Warriors hate peace, love and understanding.
That's why the UK government cracked down on Ecstasy in the 1990s, this despite the fact that use of the drug in question had helped bring unprecedented peace, love and understanding to the dance floors and killed nobody, properly speaking168.
The mood of the time is nicely captured by a handful of quotes from the documentary 'United Nation' by promoter Terry Stone:
'It was the first time that black-and-white people had integrated on a level... and everybody was one.' -- DJ Ray Keith.
'It was black and white, Asian, Chinese, all up in one building,' -- MC GQ.
'Everyone's loving each other, man, they're not hating.' - DJ Mampi Swift.
Meanwhile, as the CDC reports today, alcohol kills 178,000 a year169.
Governments (and stealth conservatives) hated that freedom from anger: they did not want a society like that. Life was all about winning and competition after all. So they cracked down on Ecstasy and the dancers switched to alcohol -- after which the concert organizers had to bring in special forces troops to keep the peace.
Special Forces.
It seems that there's nothing that conservatives hate more than these 'Summers of Love.'
And so they trot out a few oddball cases of misuse -- all of which could have been avoided if we had provided the education that we refuse to provide to drug users based on anti-scientific Drug Warrior hysteria, namely, the noxious notion that honesty about drugs is wrong insofar as it might encourage use. Let them die, we say, but don't let them be educated. It might lead to a world wherein defense money is no longer spent on thermonuclear weapons, not to mention endless tanks, jets and conventional weapons. Can you imagine what such a state of affairs would do to the stock market?
To which we hippies respond: Can you imagine what a thermonuclear weapon would do to it?
December 8, 2024
Yesterday, I ran across a 2024 stat from the CDC stating that:
'About 178,000 people die from excessive drinking each year.170'
But in the age of the Drug War, all such obvious problems are hidden in plain sight. They are entirely off the radar of the mainstream. No one senses a national emergency
Here is another problem hidden in plain sight: One in four American women are dependent upon Big Pharma meds for life. This unprecedented mass dystopia is also off the radar of the mainstream.
So not only does the Drug War suppress common sense, but it contorts our perception of reality.
At the end of the day, the Drug War has nothing to do with real dangers: it is all about making us 'feel' a certain way about given substances: namely, to despise almost all psychoactive substances with the exception of liquor and Big Pharma meds.
If and when a freedom-loving America gets a reboot, it must somehow be laid down as a fundamental principle that fearmongering is forbidden and that the experts on psychoactive drugs are not politicians -- no, not even scientists, for such drugs are all about mind and mood and personal motivation and concepts of deity and concepts of what is 'the good' in life, philosophically speaking. So to the extent that there are experts in this field, they are empaths and counselors and teachers and preachers, not scientists. Science's only job when it comes to psychoactive medicine is to tell us of potential dangers: they have no expertise in deciding whether use is worth the risk in any given case, since those decisions depend on the potential users' goals in life, their definition of 'the good life,' their beliefs about deity and ultimate reality, etc.
Meanwhile, with the current system of fearmongering, we outlaw a drug that has, properly speaking, killed nobody, while greenlighting one that actually kills 178,000, i.e. is what philosophers call a sufficient cause for those deaths.
The handful of deaths ascribed to MDMA are all actually 'down' to other causes, principally the failure of the partaker to keep hydrated while using the drug under physically stressful conditions, like rave dancing. And the advice to do so is purposefully withheld from the users by the Drug Warrior based on their dogmatic notion that to talk about safe use is to encourage use. America encourages all sorts of risky behavior in its movies and songs. We only discourage 'drug talk' because we live in a make-believe world in which we insist against all evidence (including that of common sense, anecdote, and world history) that drugs can have no positive uses whatsoever. It is the core faith of our anti-scientific and inhumane religion. It is, in fact, a rabid form of Christian Science, even if most devotees of this new religion have never even heard of the church founded by the drug-hating Mary Baker Eddy171.
December 7, 2024
In the age of the Drug War, psychiatrists, psychologists and doctors lack all common sense. They are dogmatically blind to the power of drugs that elate and inspire, based on their adherence to reductive materialism, which tells them that such things are not 'real' cures. The human being is a biochemical machine, after all, and the scientist's job is to fix the biochemistry, not to make people merely feel good. There are hundreds of millions of victims of this mindset, but the doctors never notice them because they are silent: they are the ones who waste their days holed up behind locked doors, contemplating suicide.
Such a materialist mindset completely ignores the power of virtuous circles that a wide variety of pick-me-up drugs could create when properly chosen and scheduled -- on a calendar, I mean, and not by the DEA. Such a mindset completely ignores the power of anticipation. Such a mindset completely ignores the motivating power provided to these individuals of just plain being able to get things done in their lives.
The doctors have no scruples in this regard because, like all Americans, they have been taught since grade-school that drugs must be a dead end, that the creativity of humankind will never find a way to use them wisely.
The cruelty of this modern reductive paradigm is seen in the way that psychiatrists 'adjust meds.' They insist that the severely depressed patient get off one drug entirely before starting another. Imagine if a drug dealer insisted the same thing. You would think that he was crazy. But the doctor knows best. He or she needs to be in total control of the variables, if only for insurance and regulatory purposes, and so it is for his or her convenience that the patient must go without anything during drug changes, thereby rendering them absolutely miserable.
Doctors praise antidepressants because they do not cause cravings, but for whom is that a benefit? For the prescribing doctor, of course, because the people whom they force to go without medicine merely suffer in a silent hell and do not pester the doctor to help them out.
This is the mindset that teaches doctors to damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than to give them the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions, as Soma 172 inspired the Vedic. This is the mindset that causes whole nations to vote in favor of letting people use drugs to die but will not let those same people use drugs that could make them want to live.
It is a complete perversion of values, all wrought by the anti-scientific, superstitious substance demonization of politically scheming politicians, populist pols who come to power by fearmongering.
This is one of the many reasons why the re-election of Trump is an existential disaster, and not just for drug policy but for democracy itself: Trump is the ultimate fearmonger.
UPDATE:
The New York Times published an 'Ask the Ethicist' piece about a man who had a kidney replacement and then went back to binge drinking. I responded as follows:
This dilemma illustrates the problem with the War on Drugs.
Just imagine how different our reaction would be if the liver damage was being caused by something other then booze, by one of the endless psychoactive drugs that we have outlawed. We would be blaming the drug, not the person. But no one responds to your dilemma by saying that we should outlaw booze.
This is just one reason why the Drug War is so absurd. It is all about making us 'feel' a certain way about certain substances. Alcohol is to be considered harmless when used wisely, while we have adopted the dogmatic view that 'drugs' simply can never be used wisely. And yet the CDC tells us that, 'About 178,000 people die from excessive drinking each year.' The hypocrisy of our attitudes is breathtaking.
December 6, 2024
To oppose the Drug War philosophically, one has to highlight its connections to materialism and to the psychiatric pill mill. And that's a problem, because almost everyone in the west is either a Drug Warrior, a materialist, and/or has a vested interest in the psychiatric pill mill, either because they themselves are dependent upon Big Pharma meds or because they, as psychiatrists, have been prescribing them for ages. In other words, one is left with a very small potential audience once all the vested interests have clapped indignant hands over their ears and gone elsewhere.
I was stunned when reading his 'Pills-a-Go-Go' that Jim Hogshire himself is a defender of Big Pharma . He does not seem to realize that antidepressants have some downsides that come with no other drugs: they alter brain chemistry such that it is almost impossible for long-term users to quit them (this is certainly the case with Effexor). This means that these end up being the only drug you're ever even ABLE to take for your depression and disqualifies you for the new psychedelic treatments thanks to the way it has screwed up your serotonin system in advance. Of course, these pills wouldn't be so hard to kick if we hadn't outlawed everything that would help you kick them. That's just common sense. But modern researchers do not have common sense. They want all their drugs to be proven 'scientifically,' by materialist reductionism, and so they are blind to common sense psychology, like the obvious fact that certain pick-you-up substances could get one through those few tough hours in the wee hours of the morning that are the bane of the recidivist.
Here are some more thoughts on Jim Hogshire's odd take on antidepressants . Does he not even see a problem with the mass dependency of 1 in 4 American women? It's a real-life Stepford Wives but no one notices.
In reality, the antidepressant pill mill is justified on the grounds of reductive materialism; therefore the two are symbiotic and very closely related.
December 5, 2024
The Drug Warrior and the materialist scientist both ignore common sense when it comes to drugs. Neither sees any use in the strategic use of drugs that elevate mood and inspire action. The former believes that such an approach represents an immoral shortcut and the latter claims that such treatments are not 'real' cures -- as if we should be in the business of curing sadness in any case. Look at the results of that hubristic materialist attempt when it comes to depression: a nation full of Stepford Wives, 1 in 4 American women dependent upon Big Pharma 173174 drugs for life. Anyone so dependent should have the option of choosing another 'poison,' if we must regard drugs in that superstitious way. But Americans have been taught to judge drug use via worst case scenarios -- unlike any risky activity on Earth. We do not view drinking in this way, nor hunting, nor driving a car, nor even free climbing.
This is why I have a low regard for modern psychology. It has played ball with this naive understanding of human motivation; otherwise, it would be pushing back against the Drug War. Why? Because it outlaws an endless number of potential treatment protocols for the improvement of mind and mentation: treatments based on the wise use of a wide variety of currently outlawed drugs to create virtuous behavioral circles in those who use them.
December 4, 2024
Back in March of this year, I received a 'tweet' on X from the Isaac Newton of psychology. He told me that 'what goes up must come down' and that therefore, psychoactive drugs were of no help, emotionally speaking. You could tell this guy was a typical Drug Warrior because he had the simplicity to talk about 'drugs' as if that meant anything. 'Drugs' is a category, and a political category at that: It simply means 'psychoactive substances of which politicians disapprove.' He might as well have said, 'Animals will bite you.' It's such a simplistic statement that one scarcely knows how to respond. Yes, but which animals, under which circumstances, at what times and in what places? See my original essay here or click here to read my latest update of same.
December 3, 2024
I never was a rabid patriot, but I was raised to believe that America was on the path toward peace and happiness, although clearly following a very tortuous path, indeed. However, after Big Money and Fearmongering persuaded most Americans to give up on democracy in favor of fascism (see the results of the recent presidential vote), I am no longer so sanguine. I mention this for two reasons: first, to set the record straight for future generations as to where my sympathies lay when it comes to the current national nightmare. And to remind them that we came to this pass thanks to fearmongering, which is what the Drug War is all about.
The message is clear: We need to re-invent democracy, not with new principles, but by affirming that we truly believe the old ones, the idea that Mother Nature is ours by right, as is clearly maintained in the doctrine of Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. As John Locke wrote in chapter five of his Second Treatise on Government:
'The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being.'175
In a new, improved America -- one that is willing to defend the principles upon which it was founded -- it would no longer be possible for natural medicines to be withheld from the public based solely on how the population has been taught to FEEL about them by the propaganda of demagogues. This is the problem with the new batch of authoritarians: they have no interest in principles, only in expedients that will get them where they want to go, politically speaking.
December 2, 2024
The people at Common Sense flag movies for bad language and 'drugs.' They do not flag movies for promoting fascist Drug War narratives, as when the DEA stages murders and hangs suspects from meat-hooks. Sure, they may flag them for violence, but not for exuding a message that justifies the overthrow of the democratic system of government.
Here are some essays about movies 177178 and the Drug War.
December 1, 2024
It is bizarre that we should have 'the right to die' in a world that outlaws drugs. That means, in effect, that we have a right to die, but we do not have the right to use drugs that might make us want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world -- and yet which remain unaccountably invisible to almost everyone, including almost all proponents of the aforesaid euthanasia.
For more on this topic, see my previous essays:
November 30, 2024
I cited the assisted dying act yesterday on X and was told that I had misspoke: that the act DID allow one to continue using alcohol and tobacco and that technically one could kill oneself, not 'be' killed. A trifle frustrating, for as Whitehead reminds us, all sentences are elliptical, and all the more so on X, with its character limitations. English sentences are always lacking some detail which the reader is supposed to understand implicitly. It's obvious, I trust, that one is allowed these days to use alcohol and tobacco, regardless of what other statues may be in effect. As for the latter objection, even if one kills oneself with a drug, that drug is surely provided by someone. No man is an island, even in the act of suicide.
I fear such fine points detract from the real bombshell here: that is, the fact that the assisted dying act is bizarrely dystopian in a world wherein we do not allow the use of drugs to help make people want to live. The frustrating thing is that the law's new proponents would never dream that drug law has any connection with this case. Drug prohibition is hidden in plain sight thanks to well over a century of drug demonization in western countries.
But then I am thin-skinned, I admit it. And, to be honest, I should not be 'on' X in any case, owned as it is by a fascist. Thomas Browne could have been speaking of Elon Musk when he wrote the following in his popular 17th-century work entitled 'Religio Medici and Hydriotapha':
'There is a rabble even amongst the gentry.'
November 29, 2024
The UK just legalized assisted dying179. This means that it is legal to kill someone, but it is not legal to make them want to live. These people would rather have grandpa die than to let him smoke opium or take ecstasy or use coca, laughing gas, or the inspirational drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin180.
November 28, 2024
Welcome back. You know, when I write my friends about the subject of drugs, I always have the fear that they're thinking in their heart of hearts, 'Oh, here we go again: this guy is always going on about 'drugs',' this despite the fact that the folks in question profess agreement with my positions, or at least have the tact and/or cowardice to refrain from gainsaying me. It's not so much that I distrust them, but I know the power of propaganda, and I know that all Americans have been indoctrinated from childhood to believe that mere honest conversation on this topic is suspicious and betrays an obsessive interest in a subject that good people just do not talk about.
Given these fears, I like to remind my interlocutors that antidepressants are drugs, that alcohol is a drug, that caffeine is a drug, that nicotine is a drug, and that even Red Bull contains drugs. Indeed, many of these people that I contact are taking antidepressants daily (like myself, alas), and so I am really tempted to respond to their seemingly implicit objections with: 'Don't talk to ME about an obsessive interest in drugs, you take antidepressants every day of your life!' But then it seems odd to respond to an objection that no one has actually made, one that is merely implicit -- but again, the temptation is there, because I can just hear their brains cranking away in that way.
I may be wrong, of course, but we should never underestimate the power of propaganda to control our thoughts, and especially our knee-jerk attitudes. For to paraphrase William Shirer from his classic book on Hitler:
'No one who has not lived for years in a DRUG WAR SOCIETY can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda.'
Oh, by the way, Instagram will not let me set up an account. They provide no explanation. The 'sign-up' button simply will not work for me. It looks like Free Speech is now as dead as protection from unreasonable search. I may have to visit Menlo, Park, California, to ask the people at META what gives.
META: 1601 Willow Rd, Menlo Park, California, 94025, USA.
If I am going to be censored like this, I want to know why.
November 27, 2024
Welcome to the Drug War Blog, or what is basically the diary of the Drug War Philosopher, videlicet myself.
I may as well use the first entry to justify my claim to the status of 'philosopher,' since I am not board-certified as such. If it is any comfort, I was offered a job as TA in the field 30 years ago, but I turned it down, a decision that I came to regret when I finally realized that a lack of accreditation had rendered me a nonentity as far as academics were concerned. You can hardly blame them, of course, considering how much money they had to shell out to get that title. And here's me sitting there: 'Hey, fellas, I have something to say TOO!' No, they will never let poor Rudolf join in any of THEIR reindeer games, thank you very much.
But I would still stubbornly point out that I am the only philosopher (accredited or otherwise) who has protested to the FDA about their recent plans to treat laughing gas as a drug181, nitrous oxide being the substance that helped inspire the ontology of William James, America's preeminent psychologist. He believed that we must study the effects of such substances in order to learn about human perception and about Reality writ large:
'No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.' -- William James182.
Yet, disregard them we must because of the Drug War.
So you be the judge about who really cares about the philosophic enterprise and who cares more about blending in with Drug War Society and its norms.
After watching my mother suffer because of the drug war, I hate to hear people tell me that the problem is drugs. WRONG! That's a western colonialist viewpoint. God loved his creation (see Genesis). He did not make trash. We need to use entheogenic medicines wisely.
The term "hard" is just our modern pejorative term for the kinds of drugs that doctors of yore used to call panaceas
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.
UNESCO celebrates the healing practices of the Kallawaya people of South America. What hypocrisy! UNESCO supports a drug war that makes some of those practices illegal!
His answer to political opposition is: "Lock them up!" That's Nazi speak, not American democracy.
The fact that some drugs can be addictive is no reason to outlaw drugs. It is a reason to teach safe use and to publicize all the ways that smart people have found to avoid unwanted pharmacological dependency -- and a reason to use drugs to fight drugs.
Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful.
Let us pray.
Two years ago, the newscasters (er, presenters) at Channel 5 UK staged a pep rally in favor of criminalizing nitrous oxide. They were supposed to be merely hosting a discussion between two experts on the substance called laughing gas, but the announcers could not hold back their righteous indignation. I know how they feel. I know an entire family that was killed by fire -- and I am always outraged by folks who talk about safe fire use. Do they not realize that NOBODY can use fire safely! See my update ton my 2023 essay entitled The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter.
Today we are told that there may be alien life forms out there. It looks like the DEA is going to have to start gearing up to take their war against self-transcendence into outer space!
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