An open letter to Bryan Walsh, author of End Times
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
July 23, 2022
'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.' - Alexander Shulgin in 'Pihkal,'1 writing of the insights that he obtained after ingesting one of the many phenethylamines that he synthesized during his lifetime.
In End Times, science reporter Bryan Walsh never mentions the Drug War's role in keeping us from using empathogens, drugs that can help bring human beings together.
Dear Mr. Walsh,
I enjoyed your book on End Times, however I believe you omitted to mention the single best hope that humanity has for avoiding nuclear or biological Armageddon in the first place, and that is to make our species more loving with the help of psychoactive medicines that we call empathogens - i.e., substances that help the user feel compassion and love for their fellow human being. Before we go tweaking the human genome a la your Oxford philosopher to favor empathy (or implanting neuro robots in our brain a la Elon Musk 23 to make us behave civilly) we should first consider the much simpler and more obvious expedient of ending the anti-scientific Drug War, which teaches us to fear and hate psychoactive substances rather than to learn how to use them safely for the profit of humanity at large.
The world is on the brink of nuclear annihilation, yet none of our politicians see any benefits in drugs that help people like each other.
There are two empathogens in particular that have demonstrated their ability to change minds for the better thus far in the 21st century. These are psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA , aka Ecstasy. With regard to the former empathogen, more than half of those who used shroom medicine in Roland Griffiths studies called it one of the most important experiences of their lives. With regard to the latter empathogen, Ecstasy brought unprecedented peace and love to the British dance floor in the 1990s. Here are some comments from DJs of that time as recorded in the documentary United Nation by concert organizer 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.
Imagine if the use of E were actually encouraged in society -- and actually required by those who have been diagnosed as hot heads and loose cannons, like potential school shooters and curmudgeonly political leaders with their fingers on the nuclear trigger.
Of course we assume that governments want peace, love and understanding like this, but not so, Bryan. The British preferred to have a Drug War. And so they cracked down on 'E,' merely because of a few deaths that were caused, not by E, but by a lack of 'safe use' info about E that was a natural result of a government policy of demonizing substances rather than teaching about them. And so the unprecedentedly peaceful dance floor became ultra-violent overnight, as dancers switched from Ecstasy to anger-facilitating alcohol, and concert promoters had to hire special forces troops to keep the peace. Another 'victory' for America's War on Drugs.
Like all nonfiction authors these days, you write as if the Drug War is an issue unto itself, without any relation to other crucial topics like human survival. But a drug-war society does not provide a natural baseline for scientific reporting. It is rather an anti-scientific society in which we are obliged to completely ignore the power of psychoactive medicine to make positive differences in the lives of humans or humanity, whether we're writing about depression, anxiety, Alzheimer's 4 disease, or the threat of nuclear annihilation caused by hot-headed human beings.
In short, in my opinion, America has got to decide: which do we prefer? fighting a Drug War or avoiding nuclear annihilation?
So far, the evidence is that we'd prefer nuclear annihilation.
Shortly after the Rogue Star incident that almost blew up Pearl Harbor with a nuclear bomb, Nixon launched a Drug War to combat just the sort of peace-making medicines as those mentioned above
Shortly after the Damascus incident nearly blew up Arkansas, Reagan cracked down again on psychoactive medicines, urging kids to turn in their parents should they partake.
Americans, in short, behave like arch Christian Scientists: they would much rather hate their fellows -- than to love them thanks to the use of a 'drug.'
Sincerely Yours,
Brian
PS I hope you will do your part as a science author to spread the word that the Drug War is censoring your work, by discouraging and otherwise prohibiting the research of certain psychoactive substances. Galileo realized he was censored by the Church. I think it's long past time for scientists to admit that they're being censored by the Drug War.
'A remarkable effect of this drug is the extreme empathy felt for all small things; a stone, a flower, an insect. I believe that it would be impossible to harm anything. To commit an overt harmful or painful act on anyone or anything is beyond one's capabilities.' Alexander Shulgin in 'Pihkal,'5 writing of the insights that he obtained after ingesting one of the many phenethylamines that he synthesized during his lifetime.
Author's Follow-up: January 17, 2024
Like almost all non-fiction authors these days, Bryan Walsh reckons without the Drug War. If humankind is going to be annihilated by nuclear war , it is going to be because we have demonized the drugs that inspire peace. Ecstasy brought unprecedented peace, love and understanding to the British dance floor in the late '80s and early '90s, but British politicians did not want peace, they wanted a Drug War. When they cracked down on ecstasy, the ravers switched to hate-facilitating drugs like alcohol, creating so much violence that concert organizers had to hire special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces!
Ecstasy is one of the safest drugs on the planet. It is only dangerous to those with whom we have refused on principle to discuss 'safe use.' Meanwhile Big Pharma 67 drugs like Rinvoq have side effects that include cancer and death, and yet they are advertised openly on prime-time television.
The Drug War has already given a victory to Trump by arresting millions of his opponents and removing them from the voting rolls, Trump, the guy who now wants to kill the minorities that we were formerly happy with merely arresting.
The anti-democratic trend continues. The Fourth Amendment was long ago suspended on behalf of the Drug War. Until authors like Walsh stop pretending that there is no Drug War, nothing is going to change -- except for the worse. To the extent that we are approaching 'end times,' it is because of the Drug War and the militaristic anti-democratic mindset that it represents.
Author's Follow-up: March 17, 2025
The western world is all screwed up about drugs. They have it all backwards. Drugs are LOADED with benefits -- including the power to facilitate creativity, boost sensitivity to Mother Nature's marvels, enormously increase musical appreciation, enormously increase spirituality -- and I need hardly add, enhance sexuality and defeat psychological impotence and performance anxiety of all kinds. Speaking of the sexual bit, consider this user report from the study of phenethylamines conducted by the Shulgins of pharmacological fame:
'My body was flooded with orgasms practically from just breathing.'
It's quite amusing to think how science looks at such drugs. They'd be dogmatically obliged to say:
'That is simply one man's opinion. We have to look under microscopes and do chemical analyses to see if such drugs are REALLY helping anyone on the sexual front.'
The hilarity illustrates the absurdity of placing the passionless Dr. Spock of Star Trek in charge of mind and mood medicine. For it's just as silly for our scientists to tell us that THEY are the judges of whether laughing gas can help the depressed8. Nonsense! Laughter is the best medicine for a whole lot of common sense reasons -- the common sense that modern scientists are dogmatically obliged to ignore thanks to their adherence to the tenets of the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism, which tells them to ignore all but quantifiable data.
And, of course, one of the first things that they will ignore -- to the point now of not even being aware of it -- is the ability of drug use to instill compassion and so pull the world back from nuclear annihilation.
For those readers who doubt the power of drugs, I invite them to read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin9 or the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide by James Fadiman10 -- or even the Varieties of Religious Experience by William James11. James's experience 'on' laughing gas dramatically expanded his view of reality -- though, of course, modern philosophers ignore that essential part of James's legacy, to the point that his alma mater, Harvard University, does not even mention laughing gas 12 in his online biography.
I recently wrote a letter to the Psychology Chair at Harvard, Professor Matthew K. Nock, asking him to please rectify this insult to James's legacy, but I have yet to hear back, which, alas, is no particular surprise. There is no surer way to get ghosted these days than to bring up the inconvenient topic of drugs in academia.
I sometimes think that philosophers should get real and start writing detailed instructions for the psychological rebooting of society after a thermonuclear war 1314 . Unless a deity of some kind is working behind the scenes on our behalf, it seems that the chances of civilization surviving the 21st century are slim indeed. True, the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States have been reduced dramatically since the 1980s, but there are still thousands of region-destroying missiles on each side, and the number of nuke-possessing countries continues to grow. I like to think that the intentional use of such weapons is unlikely, at least in the short- to medium-run, even in the case of North Korea, but misunderstandings and accidents have occurred and continue to occur. In the early '60s, a Soviet submarine crew voted 2-1 in favor of attacking the United States with nuclear weapons, from which we were saved only by the fact that the vote in question had to be unanimous according to our adversary's rules of engagement. This was less than two years after the crash of an Air Force plane over North Carolina dropped two hydrogen bombs, one of which "came dangerously close to detonating.15" Then there was the Titan II fiasco in Arkansas in 1980, and the Stanislav Petrov incident of 198316.
With such near-misses in mind, I present the following survival guide for nuclear armageddon . Ideally, these instructions would be printed in pamphlet form and included in a sort of sampler box containing a wide variety of psychoactive medicines to help one live in a Mad Max world without going mad oneself.
"So, you suddenly find yourself living in a post-apocalyptic world! That's bad news, to put it mildly, and we at the Acme Mindset Corp. extend our heartfelt condolences to you and your surviving friends and loved ones. Believe it or not, however, there is an upside to your grievous situation. It consists in the fact that your government no longer has the time or money to control how you think and feel in this life, and so you are now free to bring about uplifting mindsets in yourself and others through the strategic use of any substance on planet earth -- beginning with the time-tested substances in this sampler kit of phenethylamines. The enclosed be-ribboned package contains drugs proven to inspire and elate in actual common-sense drug trials. Each has been tested by real people and been shown to inspire compassion, love, appreciation of Mother Nature, and a firm desire to remain positive in the face of adversity: in short, all the qualities that you will need to fend off the jackals of despair in that bestial environment to which you have been consigned of late by human hatred.
Of course, you yourself will last longer than the drugs with which we have supplied you -- or at least such is our fervent wish here at Acme Mindset Corp. That's why we advise you to keep an eye out for naturally occurring godsend medicine over the coming months, so that you can supplement the contents of our "Elation and Inspiration" kits with drugs of your own. For remember, attitude matters -- and nowhere is that truer than in the kind of post-apocalyptic world in which you now find yourself, one which, considered soberly, can only perplex, frighten and depress. You can't do much about that outside world, perhaps, but you can do a lot about how you perceive it. Just remember that you always have the wherewithal to turn your post-apocalyptic lemons into lemonade with the help of the godsend medicines enclosed!"
I continue to hope, however, that the world will take the hint without being forced to take it: that the world will see that peace-facilitating drugs like MDMA 17 and a wide variety of related phenethylamines are part of the answer rather than part of the problem. I hope that the world will recognize that peace, love and understanding is actually a good thing, yes, even if such states are facilitated by chemical means. The Hindu religion was inspired by chemical means, after all, namely, the inspiring qualities of Soma. Surely such substances have the power to change minds and hearts -- and so ratchet back the hatred between countries and peoples, thereby placing nuclear armageddon 1819 on hold indefinitely. "We can still choose to act," he cried, silently fearing that his posts were not reaching anybody in any case, such is the algorithmic bias against the positive discussion of "drugs" on the Worldwide Web.
Author's Follow-up:
October 24, 2025
I should remind the reader that Freud considered cocaine to be a virtual cure for depression. We would not have even heard of Freud today had he not successfully used cocaine to transcend his tendency to procrastinate and so to publish prolifically. Unfortunately, self-interested doctors of his time claimed to know better. Their very careers were threatened by the existence of such a panacea and so they refused to acknowledge anything but the rare downsides of use. It was exactly as if they were to evaluate alcohol by constantly talking about alcoholics. And so they mounted a scare campaign that continues to this day, completely ignoring the interests of the hundreds of millions of the depressed in America and around the world. No one asked the depressed what they thought about the drug. They were not considered stakeholders in the cocaine 2021 debate. To this day, they have to live lives of quiet desperation, without any help from the sacred plant of the Incas 22 . Instead, they have been shunted off onto Big Pharma meds that are far harder to kick than heroin 23 , some of which can never be kicked at all.
On our last and final visit, my previous psychiatrist told me that Effexor 24 has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users -- a frankness for which he seems to have been subsequently fired. And those few who get off the drug discover that they have cognitive impairment, as I have subsequently learned to my cost. I was off the drug for six months recently, but was forced to resume use after I realized that I could no longer think straight. The drug had apparently mucked about with my brain chemistry in a seemingly irreversible way!
And what about heroin?
34% of American soldiers made generous use of heroin in Vietnam, and yet only 5% needed help kicking the drug upon their return to the Prohibitionist Republic of America. Only 5%. Contrast this with the absolute impossibility of getting off Effexor, and the moral of this story becomes clear: you must think for yourselves about godsend medicine because your government has been feeding you one-sided propaganda. This is why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse in America rather than a National Institute on Drug Use: the government's job is not to study drugs in a bias-free fashion (least of all from the point of view of a user) but rather to publicize any and all potential downsides of drug use in order to support the government's propaganda campaign to demonize psychoactive medicines.
An Englishman's home is his castle.
An American's home is a bouncy castle for the DEA.
What is the end game of the drug warrior? A world in which no one wants drugs? That's not science. It's the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. You know, the American religion that outsources its Inquisition to drug-testing labs.
Timothy Leary's wife wrote: "We went to Puerto Rico and all we did was take cocaine and read Faust to one another." And there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with that!!! The drug war is all about scaring us and making illegal drug use as dangerous as possible.
The drug war is a scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.
The UN of today is in an odd position regarding drugs: they want to praise indigenous societies while yet outlawing the drugs that helped create them.
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
Drug warriors have taught us that honesty about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.
We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).
The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.
The outlawing of opium eventually resulted in an "opioid crisis"? The message is clear: people want self-transcendence. If we don't let them find it safely, they will find it dangerously.
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