The Kangaroo Courts of Modern Science

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The Kangaroo Courts of Modern Science

an open letter to Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 27, 2025

Dear Mike ¹,

On pages 83 and 84 of your excellent book entitled "Emperors of Dreams,²" the 2005 edition, you refer to the whitewashing of opium by the Royal Commission on opium smoking in India. While I do not dispute the charge, I think it's worth remembering that there was plenty of "blackwashing" of the drug going on at the same time by the adversaries of opium in the west. The Commission was not created in order to discover the truth about opium use in India, in any case, but rather to confirm what the British medical community and its missionaries had already concluded: namely, that the use was medically and morally wrong. Yes, the Commission as ultimately constituted may have had biases of their own in favor of opium for economic reasons, but the whole "investigation" was a sham to begin with. It was set up, as you say "to examine the use of opium in India and to assess the damage it was causing." That is like setting up a commission to find out what damage Big Foot is causing in his neighborhood: it is front-loaded with an obvious presupposition: in this case, the highly problematic notion that Sasquatch actually exists.

In "The Truth About Opium," published in 1822, William Brereton argues that the Anti-Opium Society obtained its meager information about opium use in China from the on-site missionaries who considered such use to be an obstacle to their attempts to convert the Chinese to Christianity. The Society, moreover, was founded on a Big Lie. "The career of the Anti-Opium Society," writes Brereton, began "with the monstrous figment (the invention of an American missionary) that there were twenty millions of opium smokers in China supplied by the Indian drug, and that two millions of these smokers died annually from the practice." Such reports were radically at odds with the reality of opium use in China, as described not simply by Brereton himself, a long-time Hong Kong resident, but by Dr. Ayres, the Surgeon-General of Hong Kong, whom Brereton quotes as follows:

"No China resident believes in the terrible frequency of the dull, sodden-witted, debilitated opium smoker met with in print."

Brereton also claims support for such conclusions from contemporary doctors Eatwell and Birdwood "and a host of other eminent medical men standing in the front rank of their profession, Sir Rutherford Alcock, Mr. Colborne Baber, Mr. W. Donald Spence."

Brereton's various medical sources credited opium smoking with positive benefits. They claimed that its use cut down on alcohol consumption (and eliminated tobacco smoking) and rendered the male users uninterested in beating their wives. Some British doctors even saw a new and improved world of medicine ahead of them thanks to the west's rediscovery of opium in the 19th century.

Brereton cites Dr. JLW Thudichum, lecturer to St. George's Hospital, as follows:

"The medical uses of opium have been so well known through all historical times that it is a matter for surprise to find that they are not better appreciated in the present day. In this, as in many other matters, we are in fact only gradually emerging from the condition of those dark times during which, amongst many good things, the knowledge of opium, for example, was lost.³"

Little did Thudichum suspect that the world of the early 19th century was just beginning a descent into pharmacological darkness, a world in which not only opium would be outlawed worldwide but in which almost all drugs with promising psychoactive effects would be outlawed as well.

Finally, if the medical establishment was starting to embrace the missionaries' jaundiced view of opium during this time, that is hardly a surprise. By 1895, the professionalization of medicine was proceeding apace, and the profession had enormous interest in outlawing opium lest the sensible free use of the time-honored panacea should destroy their ambition of becoming the established gateway for access to mind-and-mood medicine. What better way to support one's financial interests than by professing to have a sudden concern for the health of strangers living thousands of miles away. (Of course, it never occurred to them to ask the actual opium users for their opinions about opium use. The propriety and utility of opium smoking was to be decided by Britishers from the comfort of their armchairs over a glass of port.)

If the Royal Commission was biased, so were the missionaries. They had a vested interest in cultivating a negative image of opium, as much, arguably even more so, than drug merchants had an interest in promoting a harmless image of the drug. Besides, all such "investigations" about drugs are political by nature in the age of the prohibitionist mindset. There is no noble search for some great objective truth here - there is rather an attempt on both sides of the issue to "brand" opium use in ways that would prove to be of personal profit for those doing the branding. This is a public-relations fight, not an objective, scientific one.

Such political battles are inevitable because, as GK Chesterton wrote, once you place the government in charge of safeguarding health, "there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea.⁴" The supposed goodness or badness of any particular substance is henceforth a political decision: one to be made at first for financial, professional and political reasons - and only then to be retroactively justified on an ad hoc basis by the cherry-picking of facts that would seem to support one's own prejudices on the subject - or, as in the case of Rev. Mr. Storrs Turner and his Anti-Opium league, by making up facts that would tug at the heartstrings of well-heeled westerners whom one wishes to interest in one's cause - or even to send those aristocrats into a xenophobic panic about pharmacological menaces that are deemed to be emanating from abroad. This is why countries around the world have outlawed their own private set of drugs. The moment that we put the government in charge of safeguarding health, we must expect to see a wide variety of ham-fisted attempts to safeguard health throughout the world - resulting in a variety of mutually exclusive lists of outlawed drugs, different from country to country, each inspired, not by some imagined objective viewpoint about drugs (as if one could even have such a viewpoint about drugs in the abstract, outside of all context), but by political expediency and personal and country-specific prejudices.

The idea that we have an objective way of evaluating drugs in America is demonstrably false - therefore, I find it hard to blame those who do not play ball with the kangaroo courts of materialist science and the FDA, whose goal is to prove that psychoactive substances are harmful - or at least problematic enough to justify glacial incremental progress in restoring their availability to the public at large.

In "The Psychedelic Handbook," Rick Strassman refers dismissively to psychedelic cheerleaders and praises freelance author Katie MacBride for exposing them online ⁵. Katie published an article in 2024 in Slate entitled, " No, the FDA Didn't Reject MDMA Therapy Because of Big Pharma —It Was Because of Shoddy Science.⁶" I would respond to Katie by saying: "No, the FDA didn't reject MDMA Therapy because of shoddy science - it was because of shoddy philosophy," namely, the prohibitionist philosophy which dogmatically ignores both all obvious upsides to drug use and all obvious downsides to prohibition ⁷.

Rick hails Katie as one of the few observant reporters who recognizes drug cheerleading when she sees it. But Katie is not really observant. Like almost all reporters, Katie is 100% blind to the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room, the fact that the FDA never does a true cost/benefit analysis of any psychoactive drug - first, because they ignore all reports of positive drug use in anecdote, history and psychological common sense and insist instead that efficacy be proven in quantitative terms, under a microscope; second, because they completely ignore all the risks of NOT re-legalizing drugs, like the creation of a violence-causing black market that provides users with drugs that are uncertain as to quality and quantity. There were no kids dying in the streets from opiates when opiates were legal in America. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that. How? By refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate product as to quantity and quality, and refusing to re-legalize an ever-growing list of alternatives to opiates and thereby decreasing the likelihood of unwanted addictions.

To repeat: the FDA never performs a risk/benefit analysis of drugs - they rather seek for ways to prove that psychoactive drugs are harmful. If they were really interested in risks and benefits, they would recognize that there are huge risks in outlawing drugs; indeed, there are guaranteed downsides from doing so, including:

1) The outlawing of academic freedom ⁸ (that occurs, for instance, when we outlaw substances that can give us non-materialist insights into the mind-body problem)
2) The increase in suicide ⁹ (that occurs when we outlaw everything that could cheer up the severely depressed)
3) The increase in brain-damaging shock therapy (that occurs when we outlaw everything that could cheer up the severely depressed)
4) The decrease in imaginative literature (that results from outlawing drugs that inspire creativity)
5) The outlawing of new musical genres (when we outlaw drugs that inspire musicians)
6) The decrease in religious inspiration (that occurs when we outlaw drugs that inspire and elate - or in other words, the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions)
7) The destruction of the rule of law in South America (that occurs when we outlaw local plants and the ability to make a living from growing them)
8) The end of constitutional freedoms (in the name of fighting a "war" against drugs)
9) The end of free elections (thanks to the mass incarceration ¹⁰ of minorities brought about by drug prohibition)

The FDA does not even consider the end of democracy itself to be a downside of prohibition!

Of course, it is no wonder that the FDA ignores these downsides, because these downsides broach topics about which scientists have no expertise whatever. Scientists as such have no expertise in deciding about the value of academic and religious freedom or the benefits of human creativity. This, of course, is why it was folly to outlaw drugs in the first place. For, when we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than just drugs: we are outlawing jazz, we are outlawing the stories of Poe, we are outlawing the music and the religions that might have been inspired by drug use, etc. etc. etc.

Meanwhile, the FDA is blind to all glaringly obvious benefits of drugs, like the power of laughing gas ¹¹ to, well, cause laughter. Many of the drugs of which the FDA disapproves would be obvious replacements for alcohol, which kills 178,000 Americans a year ¹² - and yet the FDA does not consider this to be a benefit associated with such drugs. To the contrary, one can only assume that such market-disrupting potential is considered by the agency to be a downside of drug use, since it would negatively impact Big Liquor and Big Prisons in our pay-to-play political system.

So whether we are talking about the 19th-century proponents of opium or the 21st-century proponents of psychedelics, we should perhaps think twice before charging them with being anti-scientific and biased, given that the whole enterprise of judging drugs in the west is itself as anti-scientific and biased as it can be: depending as it does on dogmatic blindness, both to the positive uses of drugs and to the negative effects of drug prohibition.

As I have argued in other essays, Katie MacBride may have noticed a mote in the eye of the MAPS organization, but she is blind to the enormous BEAM in the eye of the drug-hating FDA.

This is an organization that disapproves of MDMA (a drug which, properly speaking, has killed nobody ¹³) and yet approves of Big Pharma "meds" whose side effects as advertised on prime-time television include death itself ¹⁴ .

This is an organization that disapproves of psilocybin mushrooms that grow at our very feet while approving of (and even encouraging) the use of brain-damaging shock therapy.

This is an organization that fully approves of the psychoactive pill mill ¹⁵ , thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma ¹⁶ ¹⁷ "meds" for life.

CONCLUSION

Groups like MAPS ¹⁸ and the British merchants of yore are not going up against some impartial tribunal to which they must make their scientific case; they are going up against a political agency that decides about drugs based on a host of philosophically flawed and politically motivated assumptions. Knowing this to be true, it is little wonder that the proponents of liberty would seek to downplay negative accounts of drug use, because they know that the agenda-driven western mainstream will use all reported downsides of drugs as justification for reaching the conclusion that it had in mind in the first place, long before ever seeking data on the subject: namely, to outlaw all psychoactive drugs, or at least to keep drug re-legalization ¹⁹ proceeding as glacially as possible. In modern times, this is accomplished by requiring drugs to be approved for only one board-certified "illness" at a time, thereby ignoring all the obvious holistic benefits of drug use and so rendering drugs legally unavailable or at least financially unaffordable for almost all but the rich.

Opium

Notes for essay entitled The Kangaroo Courts of Modern Science: an open letter to Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century:

1: Mike Jay https://mikejay.net/books/ (up)
2: “Emperors of Dreams : Drugs in the Nineteenth Century : Jay, Mike, 1959 December 14- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/emperorsofdreams0000jaym/page/n3/mode/2up. (up)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
4: “The Project Gutenberg eBook of Eugenics and Other Evils, by G.K. Chesterton..” 2019. Gutenberg.Org. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25308/25308-h/25308-h.htm. (up)
5: The Psychedelic Handbook: A Practical Guide to Psilocybin, LSD, Ketamine, MDMA, and Ayahuasca Strassman, Rick, Ulysses Press, 2022 (up)
6: No, the FDA Didn’t Reject MDMA Therapy Because of Big Pharma—It Was Because of Shoddy Science MacBride, Katie, Slate, 2024 (up)
7: What Rick Strassman Got Wrong DWP (up)
8: Coverup on Campus DWP (up)
9: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
10: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
11: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
12: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
13: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
14: RINVOQ RX List (up)
15: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
16: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
17: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
18: Three Problems With Rick Doblin's MAPS DWP (up)
19: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)

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The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.

I have dissed MindMed's new LSD "breakthrough drug" for philosophical reasons. But we can at least hope that the approval of such a "de-fanged" LSD will prove to be a step in the slow, zigzag path toward re-legalization.

I knew democracy was in trouble when most Americans in the '80s saw no problem with allowing drug testers to go on a fishing expedition in their bodily fluids for substances of which politicians disapprove.

It is folly to put bureaucrats in charge of second-guessing drug prescriptions: what such bureaucrats are really doing is second-guessing the various philosophies of life which are presupposed by the way we use psychoactive drugs.

@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?

Some outlawed drugs grow new neurons in the brain. To refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!

We should not be talking about the potential harm of drugs -- we should be talking about the well-established harm of drug PROHIBITION.

John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!

Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.

We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.

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The Kangaroo Courts of Modern Science

an open letter to Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century

Opium

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend