Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 18, 2025
Well, pull up a chair and sit down, pardna! Let me tell you what this here website is all about. But first, let me tell you a little about yours truly. I am the Drug War Philosopher and founder of abolishthedea.com, one Brian Ballard Quass by name. I am not a board-certified philosopher, but I am a lover of wisdom and so I make so bold as to use the appellation. Last time I checked, it had not been trademarked. If it makes you feel any better, though, I was offered a job as a TA in the philosophy department of Virginia Commonwealth University back in 1989, but I turned it down. I did not realize at the time that by so doing, I was giving my ideological opponents of the future an excuse to pretend that I did not exist.
Truth be told, however, my lack of tenure actually makes me MORE of a philosopher than my board-certified counterparts. Why? Because I am able to speak truths that they could only speak on pain of losing their jobs!
Take the subject of laughing gas , for instance. The FDA recently decided that they were going to regulate that substance as a 'drug.'1 Now, as a philosopher, I knew that it was the use of laughing gas , nitrous oxide, that had inspired the ontology of William James. I knew, moreover, that James had conjured us as philosophers to study the effects of such substances in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'
'No account of the universe in its totality can be final,' wrote James, 'which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.2'
So I was appalled at the FDA's efforts to treat N2O as a drug and so make it even less available to the public than it already was.
But guess what happened when I tried to alert board-certified philosophers to this pending injustice? Not one of them responded. Not one. You would have thought that at least the Harvard philosophers would have been up in arms, since James founded the Harvard Psychology Department. But not a bit of it. In fact, James's use of laughing gas and related substances is not even mentioned in Harvard's online biography for James. They have censored James's life and philosophy in deference to the sensibilities of the Drug War. And so they dishonor William James in the same way that the Jefferson Foundation dishonored Thomas Jefferson. It will be remembered that the latter organization invited the DEA onto Monticello 3 in 1987 to confiscate the founding father's poppy plants, in violation of everything that he stood for, politically speaking. Actually, it probably will NOT be remembered, because the Drug War is all about censorship -- the selective censorship of facts whose publication might encourage Americans to rise up against the War on Drugs.
So I tried my luck 'across the pond' and wrote individual letters on this subject to every single philosopher at Oxford University -- every single one of them -- and not one of them responded4. Not one.
Americans are childish about drugs. We blame our problems on inanimate objects and burn other countries' plants so that we can feel safe at home. We need to grow up and learn to use nature's bounty wisely for human benefit.
And so when the FDA called for public comment on their attempts to demonize laughing gas , I was the only philosopher in the entire world who wrote in to protest the proposed action in the name of academic liberty.
And so it seems to me that my outsider status is a plus, not a negative.
But why do I even care, you probably ask? What does it have to do with ME, you probably wonder?
Well, I'm glad that you probably asked those questions, because guess what? I have skin in this game. Drug prohibition has affected me personally.
But soft, you shall hear!
You see, I am a 66-year-old chronic depressive who realized five years ago that the Drug War had been depriving me of godsend medicine for a lifetime and that it had shunted me off instead onto dependence-causing Big Pharma drugs, drugs for which dependence, indeed, was a feature, not a bug5. So I determined to track down the premises upon which such an inhumane policy was based and to expose the false assumptions that seemed to justify it in the minds of the masses. In other words, I decided to approach the subject of the Drug War and substance prohibition from a philosophical point of view.
I soon realized that the injustices of the Drug War were hidden in plain sight everywhere, but that I had been brainwashed by drug-war ideology not to see them. Take laughing gas again, for instance. In a sane world, nitrous oxide would be made available to the suicidal in portable kits, in the same way that we give epi pens to those with severe allergies. In fact, I soon realized that any 'pick-me-up' substance could be used as an antidepressant, or at least as one part of a mood-elevating protocol. And yet the DEA scheduling system tells me that such drugs have no positive uses whatsoever, this despite the fact that some of these substances had inspired entire religions in the past and were considered panaceas by all ancient physicians. Clearly, some false assumptions were at play here that no one was acknowledging, and that is where philosophers should come in. It is their job to identify false assumptions. Sadly, however, most board-certified philosophers are asleep on the job when it comes to the Drug War. It is clearly more than their jobs are worth to speak up on this subject. This explains why 100 of America's most well-known philosophers ghosted me when I sent them a 16-page thesis on these topics: not one of them even acknowledged receipt6.
I soon found that the problematic assumptions of the Drug War did not just come from 'the great unwashed,' however, but that the assumptions of materialists were giving a veneer of 'science' to Drug War lies7. Take the lie, for instance, that most psychoactive drugs have no positive uses whatsoever. This is clearly just a prejudiced belief based on the unspoken Christian Science assumptions of the poorly educated, but the materialists find themselves agreeing with this absurd statement, albeit for their own unique reasons. They believe that the true causes of human behavior are to be found under a microscope, and so it is okay to ignore both anecdotes and history when it comes to drug use. They are dedicated to the inhumane philosophy of Behaviorism. And so the fact that a drug cheers you up and gives you something to look forward to means nothing to them. The fact that you laugh under the influence of laughing gas means nothing to them8. They are after the Holy Grail of a materialist 'cure' for your depression. They do not want to simply make you laugh and feel good. They have a much higher metaphysical ambition in mind: they want to create a 'REAL' cure for you.
And what is the result of this materialist hubris? One in four American women are dependent upon Big Pharma drugs for life - while we yet outlaw drugs that have inspired entire religions.
In 'The Concept of Nature,' Alfred North Whitehead tells us that:
'The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us.'9
Here is a billboard you might see in a free country in which the narrative is not controlled by conglomerate media.
The absurd consequences just noted clearly show us then that it was a category error to have placed materialists in charge of American drug policy and research in the first place. The true experts in these fields are what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, those shaman-like individuals who have used the drugs in question and who know something about human motivation and aspirations in the vocational, psychological, and spiritual realms. Materialist scientists may tell us of physical dangers associated with specific dosages of specific substances, but they have no expertise whatsoever in deciding if drug use passes a risk/benefit test for a given person. Such judgment calls must be made by the potential users themselves in light of their goals in life, their philosophy of life, and their risk tolerance given their own particular circumstances.
And so we see that materialists and Drug Warriors conspire to keep us from any obvious treatments for our depression and anxiety. As a lifelong victim of this absurd mindset, I can only say, 'Thanks for nothing, guys!!!'
Nor is it just the anxious and depressed who suffer. Many of the drugs that we have outlawed can inspire spiritual states, as William James well knew. So the fact that we have outlawed drugs means we are outlawing religions - and not just a specific religion, either, but the religious impulse itself. Drug prohibition is thus unconscionably evil. It not only controls what we can think, but how and how much we can think. It is the greatest and most intimate degree of totalitarianism imaginable. The outlawing of opium, in particular, was an enormous power grab by government. It put government in charge of doling out pain relief.
As Jim Hogshire wrote in 'Opium for the Masses':
'The poppy's central and indispensable position in our civilization makes access to it important, and thus forbidding public access to the poppy is staggeringly cruel.'10
And then there's the racial angle of substance prohibition. Racist politicians have passed bills to remove minorities from subsidized housing if they fail to pass drug tests. This is racist in the extreme. To see this clearly, do a little thought experiment. Imagine that Congress had passed a law to give drug-tests to middle-class white women and planned to deny them Social Security payments if they tested positive for oxy or valium. One cannot imagine such a thing. Congress would never pass such a law because the Drug War is all about punishing minorities, not 'respectable' white women. If that latter population misuses a drug, they are thought to demand our compassion and help - whereas we kick minority 'substance abusers' out of their houses. This is horrific racism, and yet Americans are blinded to the injustice thanks to the immensely hypocritical fearmongering and substance demonization of the War on Drugs. It could not be clearer, however, that substance prohibition is ultimately just an excuse to disempower minorities, in a world in which more overt forms of racism are still considered more or less unacceptable11.
This should not come as a surprise, however. Drug prohibition has always been about cracking down on minorities. Opium was outlawed thanks to fearmongering about Chinese influence in America, cocaine thanks to fearmongering about Blacks, and marijuana thanks to fearmongering about Hispanics. Harry Anslinger helped bring about the death of Billie Holiday by harassing her over her use of heroin 12, not because Harry was interested in her well-being but because he wanted her to stop singing songs that made white America uncomfortable.
I hope you are starting to get a sense of why I am devoting my 'twilight years' to attacking the War on Drugs. It is a hydra-headed injustice that causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some. It is the reason why America is now a dictatorship of the ignorant - because the Drug War has thrown millions of liberal minorities into jail, thus removing them from the voting rolls and ensuring the election of card-carrying Drug Warriors.
Let's think about movies , for a minute. Think of all the most violent films and scenes of torture. Most of them involve drug dealing. Sadly, these movies 13 only reflect reality, and yet no one realizes that it is substance prohibition which brought this vicious dystopia to life! Prohibition incentivizes hugely profitable illicit drug dealing, and this empowers the amoral to be as evil as they want to be14. 60,000 have been 'disappeared' in Mexico since 2006, and yet that astounding fact is never blamed on the War on Drugs, which created all that violence and death out of whole cloth! No one is willing to connect the dots15.
The Drug War and prohibition will never end, however, as long as we fail to hold it responsible for the deaths and heartache that it causes, like the drive-by shootings in America's inner cities. Today's clueless reporters attribute such violence to things like global warming and lack of jobs - to anything, in fact, but to drug prohibition, which armed the hood to the teeth in the first place.
As Anne Heather Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014:
'Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 16 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist.'
And yet Lisa Ling produced an hour-long special on violence in Chicago, without even MENTIONING the War on Drugs17.
Do you see now why I created this website? Someone's got to say this stuff.
In a sane world, there would be Drug War programs at major universities where the assumptions and injustices of the prohibitionists would be held up to educated scorn18. One class would discuss the outlawing of religion implicit in drug criminalization, another would trace the psychiatric pill mill 19 to the monopoly that Big Pharma 2021 received from substance prohibition, still another would show how reductive materialism 22 lends a veneer of 'science' to Drug War injustice, yet another would concentrate on the violence and hard feeling that substance prohibition has needlessly introduced into the world. There would also be courses covering the heretofore ignored fate of the millions who suffer in silence thanks to the under-prescription and/or outlawing of godsends and who are never considered as stakeholders in the drug-related debates sponsored by demagogue politicians. But for now, that's just a dream. The tide of willful ignorance has not yet turned. And so in the meantime, all I can do is set a principled example for a more educated and less brainwashed posterity.
Witches played with consciousness in medieval Europe and were persecuted for it. Drug dealers are the witches of our time.
This leads us to another unrecognized problem of the Drug War: it has censored both science and academia in general23. The scientific censorship can be seen in magazines like 'Scientific American' and 'Psychology Today,' where they write supposedly definitive articles about emotions and consciousness while ignoring the insights that drug use provides us on such subjects. 'Science News' magazine recently promoted a new kind of shock therapy for depression, which they told us was a difficult condition to treat24. But depression is difficult to treat only if we assume that psychoactive drugs do not exist. There are hundreds of drugs that could end depression for a user in a heartbeat - most notably, perhaps, the many phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin25, but also opium26 and coca27. And none of these drugs force us to risk damaging the brain to attain our ends.
I have frequently written to magazines that dogmatically ignore references to 'drugs,' asking them to end their censored articles with a disclaimer, such as: 'The author has written in fealty to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization and has thus ignored the insights that drug use might provide on this topic.' The author's conclusions are often just wrong unless one assumes such a disclaimer. But, as with most of my drug-related correspondence, I never receive a response. I guess that the editors assume that their readers are just as brainwashed by Drug War ideology as are their writers, and so no one is likely to hold the magazine responsible for their self-censorship when it comes to drugs.
And it's not just scientists who censor themselves in the age of the Drug War. Almost every non-fiction book either ignores drugs or speaks of them disparagingly - as if it makes sense to subsume a vast array of completely unique substances under the dismissive classification of 'drugs.'
Take the book by historian Ronald Hutton entitled 'The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present.28' Like most academics, Ronald has nothing good to say about drugs. He only mentions them once in his book, when he likens them to the fatal brews created by so-called service magicians on behalf of murderers. What he does not realize, however, is that the 'herbs' that he's forever referencing in his book are drugs! The word may sound gentler and more homey than 'drugs,' but clearly the 'herbs' he mentioned were used as psychoactive agents. To claim that herbs are different than drugs, at least in this context, is like claiming that 'meds' are different than 'drugs.' The only substantive difference, however, is that the former are promoted as good by the Drug Warrior and the latter are demonized as evil. The distinction is an irrational one based on fearmongering.
Hutton's failure to see this is unfortunate, because his whole book is about strategic fearmongering by the powers-that-be, and the Drug War is the most notorious example of strategic fearmongering in the history of the world29.
But you see what I'm up against, right? The whole world has gone mad with the prohibitionist mindset - with the possible exception of a few indigenous tribes that we westerners have not yet dispossessed and killed for failing to embrace a drug-free Christianity.
And believe me, I have only begun to list the downsides of the War on Drugs and substance prohibition. I have written hundreds of essays on drug-related topics over the last five years and I am still spoiled for choice when it comes to new angles to pursue in demonstrating the inhumanity and imbecility of the prohibitionist mindset.
The Drug Warrior has taught us to fear drug use in a way that we fear no other potentially dangerous activity on earth: not mountain climbing, not SCUBA diving, not tightrope walking, not drag-racing - not even car driving or beer drinking30. This is strategic fearmongering, however. Its goal is to deprive Americans of democratic freedoms by erecting the boogieman of 'drugs,' one which is nevertheless far less threatening in actuality than the many dangerous activities that we allow freely and even promote. We have the Drug War to thank for the destruction of our rights under the 4th amendment, for suppressing our freedom of religion 31, and for all but outlawing free and honest speech about drugs - something that is unconscionably suppressed these days by media of all kinds. We have, in fact, the Drug War to thank for Donald Trump and the end of American democracy.
And yet Americans slumber on.
It is easy to become depressed. The finish line keeps getting kicked further into the future, until one suspects that it will take a dose of armageddon 32 for the world to re-evaluate drugs from the indigenous point of view, to realize that they are our friends and that we should learn how to use them wisely for the benefit of individuals and communities, rather than superstitiously demonizing them a priori.
Strategic fearmongering is the enemy, and until that fact is realized, the Drug Warriors will continue destroying what's left of democracy around the world, leading to all sorts of unnecessary violence and suffering as they do so.
And Americans in particular should know better. Liquor prohibition created the Mafia, after all.
Meanwhile, any social policy that relies on ignorance rather than education should be abhorrent to freedom-loving people around the world. These are just a few of the reasons why I say that the Drug War is not just bad policy, but that it represents a wrong way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve and then some.
Conclusion
The list of problems with the Drug War mindset goes on and on and so I have to end this introduction somewhat arbitrarily. To simplify matters for the reader, however, let me close with an apothegm that says it all:
The Drug War is based on two enormous lies: 1) that there are no upsides to drug use, and 2) that there are no downsides to prohibition.
Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity because it denies us the right to take care of our own health.
The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses.
Pain patients and the depressed are totally unrecognized victims of drug prohibition.
Drug prohibition outlaws the philosophical research that William James himself told us to undertake.
Drug prohibition has resulted in hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths thanks to totally preventable drug overdoses!
The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.
Drug prohibition has 'saved' Americans from opium and coca by shunting them off onto Big Pharma meds that are FAR HARDER TO KICK THAN HEROIN.
Drug prohibition destroyed the rule of law in Latin America.
American businesses judge people, not by the color of their skin but by the contents of their digestive systems.
Some outlawed drugs grow new neurons in the brain. To refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!
The Partnership for a Drug Free America should be put on trial for having blatantly lied to Americans in the 1980s about drugs, while using our taxpayer money to do so!
White American young people are NOT the only stakeholders in the drugs debate.
Drug prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world.
Doctors decided that cocaine was not good for the depressed. No one asked the depressed what they thought about the drug. (Follow the money!)
We give kids drugs to improve their concentration -- but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.
In a compassionate world, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.
If media were free in America, you'd see documentaries about people using drugs wisely for a wide variety of praiseworthy purposes.
Hundreds of millions suffer depression TOTALLY UNNECESSARILY today because racist and xenophobic puritans have outlawed all medicines that can improve people's mood.
It is a category error to place materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine.
If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.
Drug prohibition ended democracy in America by removing hundreds of thousands of minorities from the voting rolls.
The Mexican Drug War led to the 'disappearance' of 60,000 Mexicans in two decades.
The outlawing of coca and opium is a crime against humanity.
In the movie "Four Good Days," the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of Mother Nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.
Entire religions have been inspired by drugs that inspire and elate, which are exactly the kinds of drugs that 'Christian' Drug Warriors outlaw.
Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.
If opium and cocaine were re-legalized, hospital buildings would no longer be the secular cathedrals of our time. Some of that wealth would actually go to healthy people.
The Drug War is a scare campaign to teach us to distrust Mother Nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.
Big Pharma drugs have wrought disaster when used in psychotherapy, but it does not follow that the depressed should become Christian Scientists. The use of outlawed drugs can obviate the need for shock therapy.
Our government treats drugs as if they were uranium and spends hundreds of billions of dollars trying to scare us about them.
All drugs have positive uses. It's absurd to prohibit them because one demographic might misuse them.
You can get a Ph.D. in healthcare, and not learn a thing about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs, as demonstrated by history, anecdote and common sense.
For most drugs, dependency is a bug. For Big Pharma antidepressants, it is a feature.
If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol slaughters. Drug prohibition is the real killer.
The prohibitionist motto: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."
Self-medicating has always been the most basic of human rights, until the medical industry demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.
We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
Most addiction service providers assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.
America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own pain by making opium illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.
The police can confiscate entire estates if they find traces of a drug on the premises, regardless of who placed it there.
America arrests people whose only crime is that they are trying to be all that they can be in life... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
Drugs like opium and cocaine should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which Drug Warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.
America legalizes alcohol and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.
When it comes to "drugs," the government plays Polonius to our Ophelia:
OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
POLONIUS: Marry, I'll teach you; think yourself a baby!
Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing (or to alcohol-related deaths, for that matter).
The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for death-dealing prohibitionists instead?
The UN has adopted the childish and tyrannical goal of eradicating the Divine plant of the Inca from the face of the Earth because Americans blame all their social problems on drugs.
Scientists are practicing pharmacological colonialism when they hold holistic-working drugs to reductionist standards.
Suicide, depression and gun violence are all caused by drug prohibition -- but literally no one who fights these scourges will even acknowledge that fact.
The biggest drug pusher in world history is Big Pharma, thanks to whom one in four American women are hooked on drugs for life.
Self-medicating has always been the most basic of human rights, until the medical industry demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.
America outlaws the divine plant of the Inca on behalf of Latin America, then uses its own drug laws as an excuse to invade Latin American countries at will.
The final decision about how much pain relief you receive in hospital is made by bureaucrats in Washington D.C., not by your doctor.
Materialist researchers are gaslighting Americans about drugs, even daring to tell us that laughing gas could not help the seriously depressed!
Journalists should treat drug-related deaths like car-related deaths, as unfortunate accidents which, however, do not constitute a reason for outlawing drugs.
Drug law empowers police officers to confiscate entire estates if they find an illegal plant medicine on site, even if the owner knew nothing about it, and this in a country founded on the inviolability of private property?
Drug prohibition turns addiction into a 'thing' by outlawing all the substances that could help us get off unwanted substances without going through hell.
Scientists are not qualified to judge psychoactive substances because the efficacy of such drugs is determined by the user's actual feelings and experiences.
Reagan and Bush both encouraged American children to turn in their parents for using plant medicines of which politicians disapprove, precisely the kind of divisive tactic for which Josef Stalin was famous.
The medical industry has a vested interest in the continued outlawing of opium and coca. Their business model requires that Americans be disempowered with respect to their own healthcare!
Thanks to drug prohibition, depressed Americans are forced to see a doctor half their age every three damn months of their lives in order to be approved for buying an overpriced, underperforming and ENORMOUSLY DEPENDENCE-CAUSING BIG PHARMA MED!
Drug prohibition outlaws precisely the kinds of medicines that have inspired entire religions and so it is worse than the outlawing of religion: it is the outlawing of the religious impulse itself!
The FDA approves of brain-damaging shock therapy, but they will not approve of time-honored drugs that could cheer us up without damaging our brains.
The FDA approves of Big Pharma drugs whose side effects include death itself, but they do not approve of indigenous plant medicines.
Americans have been brainwashed about drugs since childhood by the media, with help from the White House itself, above all in the form of the TOTAL CENSORSHIP of all positive reports of drug use from movies, magazines and television shows!
Depression would not even be a 'thing' in America if cocaine were legal, but doctors judged it only by its worst possible use, exactly as if they were to judge alcohol by studying only alcoholics.
Drug prohibition has turned Americans into children when it comes to drugs.
Indiscriminate drug testing is the most egregious violation of the Fourth Amendment imaginable; it sends businesses on a fishing expedition into our bodily fluids.
Thanks to drug prohibition, one in four American women are dependent on Big Pharma drugs for life.
Drug warriors tell us that naturally occurring medicines are so dangerous that we have to lose our time-honored freedoms in order to protect ourselves from them; meanwhile they demand stock up on guns that kill over 45,000 a year in America alone!
American drug policy is based on two enormous lies: 1) that there are no upsides to drug use, and 2) that there are no downsides to drug prohibition.
In America, we are judged, not by the color of our skin but by the content of our digestive system.
Walmart will not even hire you if you have the slightest trace of time-honored medicines in your system, and yet their toy aisle is full of so-called 'hydration games' that encourage the irresponsible use of alcohol.
In 1987, the Jefferson Foundation invited the Reagan DEA onto Monticello to confiscate the Founding Father's poppy plants in violation of everything that he stood for as a politician.
Drug prohibition is based on the following anti-scientific algorithm: that a drug that can be misused by a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason, must not be used by anyone, anywhere, at any dose, for any reason.
We are told not to glorify drugs that improve the mind and promote spirituality -- yet Jim Beam liquor targets prime-time vodka ads at young people.
The Drug War is a massive branding campaign to demonize all psychoactive drugs except for liquor.
Drug prohibition is the worst form of tyranny on Earth: it does not seek merely to control what you think, but how and how much you can think -- and feel.
If we really want to end inner-city gunfire, we must end the drug prohibition that created it in the first place.
If we really want to end depression, we must end the drug prohibition that causes it by outlawing godsends like coca, cocaine, opium and laughing gas.
If we really want to end suicide, we must end the drug prohibition that causes it by outlawing godsends like coca, cocaine, opium and laughing gas.
The Drug War is one big branding operation to demonize all psychoactive substances except for alcohol.
When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw far more than drugs: we outlaw freedom of thought, creativity, mental focus, and the right to heal.
Drug prohibition is a make-work program for law enforcement.
Property ownership is the key principle of American freedom, yet drug law allows the confiscation of entire estates if a drug is present, even if the owner knew nothing about it.
Imagine if we removed Americans from the workforce and evicted them from public housing if we found a trace of alcohol in their system. Then Drug Warriors would get a taste of their own medicine.
When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions.
Almost all non-fiction authors censor themselves to never say anything positive about drugs, no matter how they have to distort their subject matter and render their findings counterintuitive.
Scientists tell us that depression is difficult to beat, but depression would scarcely be a 'thing' if we ended drug prohibition and used drugs for human benefit.
Following the science is crazy because drug efficacy is determined by how a given user feels, which is the one thing that scientists can't measure and quantify. Users are the experts on drug efficacy, not scientists.
The FDA never does a true cost/benefit analysis. Otherwise they'd consider the harm of NOT legalizing a drug, like the needless suffering of millions, the destruction of inner cities, and the end of the rule of law in Latin America.
Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.
Drug prohibition is the great philosophical problem of our time, censoring academia and outlawing the investigations of William James with regard to reality itself, yet philosophers are silent.
Whenever we outlaw recreational drugs, we outlaw therapeutic drugs as well.
The depressed are never considered stakeholders in the drugs debate, yet they suffer in silence when racist politicians outlaw panaceas.
Academics should be fighting to end drug prohibition on the grounds of academic freedom, but they are silent.
If nurses and doctors were really interested in their patients' health, they would be fighting on their behalf to end drug prohibition which outlaws their right to heal.
We should no more blame drugs for deaths than we blame cars for deaths. Both can be used wisely and for good reasons.
Americans were always free to take care of their own health -- until Drug Warriors handed doctors a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine.
There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.
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.
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.
Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.
In 2017 alone, 1,632,921 drug arrests were made with 85.5 percent of those solely for possession. -- War On Us
According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.
"The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.
This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.
We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.
I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.
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.
Hutton's failure to see this is unfortunate, because his whole book is about strategic fearmongering by the powers-that-be, and the Drug War is the most notorious example of strategic fearmongering in the history of the world29.
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