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The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
an open letter to the Drug Policy Alliance
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 22, 2023
Channel 5 UK recently interviewed Niamh Eastwood (Executive Director of Release) and Dr. David Nicholl (NHS neurologist) about the perceived need to criminalize the use of laughing gas 1.
Although the guests were diplomatic, the presenter was goading them on to admit what to her was an obvious conclusion: namely, that laughing gas must be outlawed to protect "our children."
Whenever biased coverage of this kind occurs, DPA should send complaint letters to station management, just as it now sends protest letters to Congress.
The letter would point out that "our children" are not the only stakeholders in the prohibition game. What about the rights of the hundreds of millions of the depressed to godsend treatment? What about philosophers who want to follow up on the work of William James, whose use of laughing gas inspired his entire philosophy? What about the rights of minorities in inner cities to be free from random gunfire?
The protest letter would continue with some more stubbornly ignored Drug War home truths, such as the following:
Drug prohibition has destroyed the rule of law in Central America, militarized police forces around the world, created "no-go" zones in inner cities, and censored scientists. News organizations should be taught to remember this before ignorantly championing a drug control policy that has killed millions and facilitated the election of fascists, even in the United States, by disfranchising millions of minority voters.
Even if "our children" were the only stakeholders in the drug game, the answer in a free society would be to educate them about all psychoactive substances, rather than to proceed down the murderous and anti-scientific road of prohibition.
Such letters should then be endorsed by DPA members and shipped to station management at Channel 5 -- and to every other station and network which (wittingly or otherwise) promotes drug-war hysteria by ignoring the seemingly endless downsides of prohibition.
Best Wishes
Brian Quass
abolishthedea.com
Author's Follow-up:
April 17, 2025
Am I really the only person in the world who sees the affront to philosophy from the outlawing of laughing gas , the substance which inspired the ontology of William James? If I am not, please let me know. Get in touch at quass@quass.com. Or even if you don't know, get in touch. I'd like to hear from someone who is not completely bamboozled by the paleolithic ideology of the War on Drugs.
I have written to hundreds of philosophers on the subject and been ghosted by almost all of them -- and gaslighted by the rest. I can find no philosopher who is willing to admit that the quest for truth has been stymied by drug prohibition. Do they not realize that drug use inspired the Hindu religion? Do they not understand that drug use gives us glimpses of other potential realities? Do they not recall what James himself said about such things in "The Varieties of Religious Experience:
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."
Yet disregard them we must because of the paleolithic belief that drugs are bad.
Wake up, World: drugs are bad only in the sense that fire is bad. Both are dangerous substances that humanity can put to beneficial uses -- if it prefers progress over dogmatic superstition.
How disgusting that the UK is making laughing gas 2 possession a criminal offence. It is just as wrong -- and asinine -- as outlawing fire.
Thanks to such viewpoints, the severely depressed have to have their brains damaged by shock therapy, the suicidal are denied the use of substances that could keep them from killing themselves, the hothead is denied treatments that could keep him or her from shooting up a grade school, and the philosopher is barred from studying the true nature of mind and matter.
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.
Musk vies with his fellow materialists in his attempt to diss humans as insignificant. But we are not insignificant. The very term "insignificant" is a human creation. Consciousness rules. Indeed, consciousness makes the rules. Without us, there would only be inchoate particles.
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!
LA Police Chief Daryl Gates said drug users should be summarily executed. William Bennett said drug dealers should be beheaded. These are the Nazi attitudes that the drug war inculcates. This racist and brutal ideology must be wiped out.
That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.
The prohibitionist motto: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."
In a free future, newspapers will have philosophers on their staffs to ensure that said papers are not inciting consequence-riddled hysteria through a biased coverage of drug-related mishaps.
Materialist scientists are drug war collaborators. They are more than happy to have their fight against idealism rigged by drug law, which outlaws precisely those substances whose use serves to cast their materialism into question.
Most people think that drugs like cocaine, MDMA, LSD and amphetamines can only be used recreationally. WRONG ! This represents a very naive understanding of human psychology. We deny common sense in order to cater to the drug war orthodoxy that "drugs have no benefits."
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.
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