what the first episode of Rod Serling's 'Night Gallery' tells us about drugs
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 14, 2025
The first episode of Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" aired on December 16, 1970, and began with a Fritz Leiber story called "Dead Man." The plot concerned a young man who was able to "will" his body to manifest all sorts of diseases on a cue provided by the tapping pen of his hypnotist/doctor.
The youth quickly manifested first "endopulmonosis" and then "Verblen's disease" to the astonishment of the doctor's medical colleague who had been summoned to witness a demonstration. Eventually, the young man even manifested death itself, only to return from that state in response to another cue. Fortunately for the young man, he was also able to manifest good health and a final cue returned him to normal -- or rather to better than normal, as his default condition was one of ridiculously good health. That was how things were supposed to be. The young man was only meant to manifest illnesses for occasional demonstration purposes while otherwise enjoying robust health. Unfortunately, a love triangle was to intervene, after which all bets were off, but that's not important as far as this essay is concerned.
The point is that the doctor describes his protocol to a medical colleague as just an extreme example of a long-recognized phenomenon: namely, the correlation between mindset and health. If a person feels happy and has something to look forward to, they tend to resist illnesses altogether, or else to get over them more quickly than those without such happiness.
If Americans were not blinded by the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism, they would see that this correlation implies that outlawed drugs have a huge potential benefit that no one ever mentions: namely, the power to improve one's physical health simply by cheering a body up and giving it something to look forward to. This drug-inspired attitude improvement can help one fight real bodily illnesses, even if it cannot always totally conquer them as in the Leiber story. Attitude improvements have enormous potential for keeping patients out of clinics and hospitals, which is a blessing in and of itself, given the shameful proliferation of iatrogenic illnesses in such places. But American psychologists are blind to the power of strategic drug use to improve attitude1. Why? Because behaviorism tells them to ignore anything psychologically obvious when it comes to drug use, like patient happiness and laughter, and to look under a microscope instead to determine what is "really" going on with a patient.
This reminds me of the weird phenomenon of fearmongering to which an American is subjected as soon as they reach the age at which they're eligible to receive Medicare. Take me, for instance. After recently attaining that age, I was bombarded by my official Medicare provider, United Health Care, with phone calls about my health. They actually wanted to send a nurse to talk to me about my health needs and to get me scheduled for all sorts of procedures, according to a schedule reminiscent of one that might be followed by an anal-retentive car lover for their 2025 Toyota Rav 4.
They seem to believe that I have a goal of living forever.
This is not a sudden interest in my health, however, but rather a sudden interest in my Medicare dollars. Certainly, none of these folks were worried about my health before I qualified for Medicare. Besides, if they were really interested in my health, they would be pushing endlessly for the re-legalization 2 of drugs so that I could keep my mind positive and so avoid illnesses altogether. The fact that such health companies fail to do this shows that they know where the money is. They have a vested interest in denying the holistic lessons of drug use and toeing the drug-war line instead: the one that inhumanely insists that a substance that can be misused by an American young person for one reason, must not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason.
A more inhumane and hateful policy cannot be imagined. It leads to endless suffering, but fortunately for the Drug Warriors, this suffering occurs behind closed doors, and those who are thereby rendered hopeless and/or suicidal are not considered stakeholders in America's racist and imperialist Drug War3. Modern psychologists connive with this anti-scientific approach to drugs by embracing the long obsolete philosophy of behaviorism, one which is completely out of keeping with the latest findings in quantum physics and relativity. They behave as if only the parts matter and completely ignore the big picture. David Bohm criticized this modern penchant for fragmentation in academia in his 1980 essay collection entitled "Wholeness and the Implicate Order":
"A similar trend has already begun to dominate in psychology. Thus we arrive at the very odd result that in the study of life and mind, which are just the fields in which formative cause acting in undivided and unbroken flowing movement is most evident to experience and observation, there is now the strongest belief in the fragmentary atomistic approach to reality.4"
Discussion Topics
May 24, 2025
Attention Teachers and Professors: Brian is not writing these essays for his health. (Well, in a way he is, actually, but that's not important now.) His goal is to get the world thinking about the anti-democratic and anti-scientific idiocy of the War on Drugs. You can stimulate your students' brainwashed grey matter on this topic by having them read the above essay and then discuss the following questions as a group!
What does the Night Gallery episode tell us about the correlation between mindset and health?
What does this correlation imply about the potential benefits of psychoactive medicine?
What are the some of the potential physical benefits of attitude improvement?
What would healthcare companies do if they were really interested in our health?
Those who suffer silently are not stakeholders in drug policy debates. Explain.
Outlawing drugs is outlawing obvious therapies for Alzheimer's and autism patients, therapies based on common sense and not on the passion-free behaviorism of modern scientists.
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
Prohibitionists have the same M O they've had for the last 100+ years: blame drugs for everything. Being a drug warrior is never having the decency to say you're sorry -- not to Mexicans, not to inner-city crime victims, not to patients who go without adequate pain relief...
If I have no right to mother nature's bounty, then I surely have no right to manmade guns. If hysterical fearmongering justifies the eradication of the Fourth Amendment, then the Second Amendment should go as well.
Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.
Why don't those politicians understand what hateful colonialism they are practicing? Psychedelics have been used for millennia by the tribes that the west has conquered -- now we won't even let folks talk honestly about such indigenous medicines.
This pretend concern for the safety of young drug users is bizarre in a country that does not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.
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.
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.
This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.
(up)