An open letter to Bryan Walsh, author of End Times
by 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 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.
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 One Nation by concert organizer Terry 'Turbo' 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 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,'2 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 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 depressed3. 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 Shulgin4 or the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide by James Fadiman5 -- or even the Varieties of Religious Experience by William James6. 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 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. 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.7" Then there was the Titan II fiasco in Arkansas in 1980, and the Stanislav Petrov incident of 19838.
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 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 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.
Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths
In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.
This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.
How do I know this?
Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.
More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?
This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."
Drug warriors have taught us that honest 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.
Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.
Even fans of sacred medicine have been brainwashed to believe that we do not know if such drugs "really" work: they want microscopic proof. But that's a western bias, used strategically by drug warriors to make the psychotropic drug approval process as glacial as possible.
Even if the FDA approved MDMA today, it would only be available for folks specifically pronounced to have PTSD by materialist doctors, as if all other emotional issues are different problems and have to be studied separately. That's just ideological foot-dragging.
It's amazing. Drug law is outlawing science -- and yet so few complain. Drug law tells us what mushrooms we can collect, for God's sake. Is that not straight-up insane? Or are Americans so used to being treated as children that they accept this corrupt status quo?
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
In the 19th century, author Richard Middleton wrote how poets would get together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses."
We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.
The FDA should have no role in approving psychoactive medicine. They evaluate them based on materialist standards rather than holistic ones. In practice, this means the FDA ignores all glaringly obvious benefits.
Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, The Drug War and Armageddon: An open letter to Bryan Walsh, author of End Times, published on July 23, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
You have been reading an article entitled, The Drug War and Armageddon: An open letter to Bryan Walsh, author of End Times, published on July 23, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
