The Brainless Initiative
why it's time to REALLY study the brain
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 10, 2024
At a recent get-together, a healthcare expert assured me that solving crossword puzzles does not help one avoid contracting Alzheimer's 1 Disease in their old age, that we can focus all we want, but if dementia has 'got our ticket,' then the disease will be sure to punch it eventually. This conclusion is not surprising coming from a materialist scientist, who sees the individual as a generic biological widget subject to the inexorable laws of a fully reified illness like Alzheimer's. But even in the age of the Drug War, the medical journals are full of instances in which the human will has altered the course of a seemingly 'destined' illness. I say 'even in the age of the Drug War,' for the Drug War severely limits the psychoactive arsenal that is available for us when it comes to 'unthinking' illness and thinking 'health' instead.
The fact is, no one yet knows what the limits are to mental power. And why not? Because no society has set out with the goal of finding out. Typical tribal societies use psychoactive medicines, but for specific ritual and religious purposes, not as part of an ongoing search for the limits of the human mind. Western societies, on the other hand, demonize psychoactive substances wholesale and so are totally unaware of the way that they can enhance our mental powers. Even when such powers are grudgingly acknowledged, they are demonized with slanderous phrases such as 'getting high' and 'getting wasted.'
But there is a third way of dealing with the fact that the world is full of psychoactive substances - and will be increasingly full of them thanks to the progress of chemical synthesis. That third way involves using psychoactive drugs to leverage the powers of the human mind to fight illness, improve quality of life, and - who knows - perhaps even learn something about the nature of reality itself2.
And how do we accomplish this? By studying drugs, not with the help of materialist scientists whose interest is in the microscopic, but rather with the help of psychonauts whose focus is on the drug user's experience itself in all its subjective and holistic glory3. The possibilities for research are legion and would be limited only by our own creativity, especially when we evaluate the use of various combinations of drugs for certain persons in certain situations with certain desired outcomes in mind: not just resistance to disease, but increased comprehension, increased empathy, increased patience, etc.
But the western world is blind to such a way of thinking. We have a previous commitment to the drug-hating religious ideology of Mary Baker Eddy. And so we launch a multi-billion-dollar BRAIN initiative while simultaneously outlawing all the substances that could help us demonstrate the powers of that brain4.
Author's Follow-up: March 10, 2024
As HG Wells told us, health is not a thing but rather a balance of qualities5. We may find no direct correlation between completing crossword puzzles and avoiding Alzheimer's Disease, but that does not mean that puzzle-solving does not help. Completing a crossword puzzle can trigger other mental improvements that trigger other mental improvements that trigger other mental improvements. We're basically talking about the butterfly effect here, by which every action in a system ultimately affects the entire system and cannot be parceled off as being separate from the whole. We should at least remain agnostic about the powers of such activities until we have fully studied the power of the human brain, and that's a task that we have scarcely even begun, thanks to the fact that we have outlawed almost all the ways of improving that organ.
Notes:
1: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
2: As William James wrote: "No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." (up)
3: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism DWP (up)
4: The Brain Initiative White House, 2024 (up)
5: Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument against the Scientifically Organized State Chesterton, GK (up)
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Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
I'm grateful to the folks who are coming out of the woodwork at the last minute to deface their own properties with "Trump 2024" signs. Now I'll know who to thank should Trump get elected and sell us out to Putin.
Pundits tell us that there are medical reasons not to "snort" cocaine. So what? There are medical reasons not to drive a car: you may have an accident. The question is: does cocaine use or car driving make sense in a given case! Details matter!
"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann
It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.
Cocaine is not evil. Opium is not evil. Drug prohibition is evil.
We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
News flash: certain mushrooms can help you improve your life! It's the biggest story in the history of mycology! And yet you wouldn't know it from visiting the websites of most mushroom clubs.
America legalizes alcohol and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.
We know that anticipation and mental focus and relaxation have positive benefits -- but if these traits ae facilitated by "drugs," then we pretend that these same benefits somehow are no longer "real." This is a metaphysical bias, not a logical deduction.
We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.
Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us
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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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