f an American has a negative response to an anti-depressant, we sigh and say, "Oh, dear, they had a bad reaction." We ascribe no blame to the Big Pharma anti-depressant. The bad reaction is the fault of the user: their system simply fails to respond appropriately to the drug in question.
If an American has a negative response to a psychoactive plant medicine, we snarl and say, "Oh, dear, that is an evil drug!"
It's this kind of muddled thinking about substances that makes the Drug War the great philosophical problem of our time, because the Drug War is propped up and supported on a framework of bogus hypocritical assumptions like this.
Take the old canard of the "crutch," the idea that we should not use mother nature's psychoactive plant medicines because they are crutches.
Was coca a crutch when it helped HG Wells and Jules Verne write great stories? Was opium a crutch when it increased Benjamin Franklin's creativity and friendliness? Were psychedelics a crutch when they provided Plato with metaphysical insights at the Eleusinian mysteries? Was the natural substance called Soma a crutch when it single-handedly (or single-plantedly) inspired the Vedic religion?
If any substances are "crutches," they are the tranquilizing meds of Big Pharma, which, since the introduction of lithium, have been designed, not to help folks achieve self-actualization in life, but to render them more docile and accepting of the status quo. (When Antonio Moniz won the Nobel Prize for lobotomy, it was the nurses who were cheering, not the patients.) In this way, Big Pharma meds are crutches designed to make the patient forget about the need to walk on their own two feet.
Author's Follow-up:
May 17, 2025
The Drug War is the great philosophical problem of our time. And yet most philosophers are in denial. I am the only philosopher on the planet who formally protested to the FDA about its plans to treat laughing gas as a "drug."1 The use of nitrous oxide inspired the ontology of William James. He conjured philosophers to use the substance to investigate the nature of reality. And yet our government has outlawed such research by making the gas in question harder to use than ever. Laughing gas was already shamefully unavailable to the depressed as a practical matter. In a sane and compassionate world, we would provide laughing-gas kits to the severely depressed just as we provide epi pens to those with severe allergies -- but Americans actually prefer that the depressed kill themselves rather than use substances that have been outlawed by racist politicians.
And what is the "justification" for outlawing such substances? The fact that white American young people have found ways to use the substances dangerously. These are the same white American young people whom the prohibitionists refuse to teach about safe drug use! And now they are going to tell all demographics in the world that they cannot use these substances because said substances might harm the local white kids whom America refuses to educate.
Americans are so outrageously presumptuous -- and so blind to all the stakeholders in their drug debates. They have no interest in the needs of those suffering silently behind closed doors. They have no interest in academic freedom. They have no interest in the drive-by shootings that drug prohibition has brought to inner city neighborhoods. They have no interest in the fact that drug prohibition has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America. They just want to crack down on the drug-related incidents that are highlighted in our financially suborned media -- the problems that they themselves have caused by refusing to educate our children about the fact that they live in a world full of psychoactive substances, not thanks to drug dealers, but rather thanks to God himself, or to Mother Nature, or to evolution, etc. That's a fact of life. It behooves us as free and supposedly scientific individuals to learn about these substances and to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity rather than to demonize and fear them. Meanwhile, we must understand that shouting phrases like "Fentanyl kills" is exactly like shouting "Fire bad!" -- all such statements promote the idea that we should fear potentially dangerous substances rather than learning how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.
William James
William James (1842-1910) is considered the founder of American psychology. He urged philosophers to study the effects of substances like laughing gas for what they could tell us about reality writ large. And yet the bio of the man on the website of the Harvard Psychology Department fails to even mention this 'call to arms.' And so Harvard rewrites history to jibe with drug war prejudices, just as the Thomas Jefferson Foundation refuses to discuss the fact that it helped federal agents confiscate the founding father's poppy plants in a 1987 raid by Ronald Reagan's DEA. Existing institutions are all about normalizing the drug war by pretending that it does not exist. This saves our materialist psychologists and philosophers at Harvard from having to confront James' unpopular holistic views with rational arguments of their own. Instead, they can simply declare a victory for materialism by pretending that those views of his do not even exist! This is just one of the many reasons why I say that we live in a make-believe world today thanks to drug prohibition, one in which all of our major institutions ignore the role that prohibition has played -- and continues to play -- in skewing our views of reality.
Saying "Fentanyl kills!" makes just as much sense as saying "Fire bad!" Both are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.
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."
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.
The idea that drug use has to be drug abuse is a warped idea of modern times, one that promotes a dark ages when it comes to mind and mood medicine.
Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.
The drug war tells us that certain drugs have no potential uses and then turns that into a self-fulfilling prophecy by outlawing these drugs. This is insanely anti-scientific and anti-progress. We should never give up on looking for positive uses for ANY substance.
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.
For those who want to understand what's going on with the drug war from a philosophical point of view, I recommend chapter six of "Eugenics and Other Evils" by GK Chesterton.
If we let "science" decide about drugs, i.e. base freedom on health concerns, then tea can be as easily outlawed as beer. The fact that horses are not illegal shows that prohibition is not about health. It's about the power to outlaw certain "ways of being in the world."
The best step we could take in harm reduction is re-legalizing everything and starting to teach safe use. Spend the DEA's billions on "go" teams that would descend on locations where drugs are being used stupidly -- not to arrest, but to educate.
An Englishman's home is his castle.
An American's home is a bouncy castle for the DEA.
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 Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War published on February 2, 2021 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)
f an American has a negative response to an anti-depressant, we sigh and say, "Oh, dear, they had a bad reaction." We ascribe no blame to the Big Pharma anti-depressant. The bad reaction is the fault of the user: their system simply fails to respond appropriately to the drug in question.
You have been reading an article entitled, The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War published on February 2, 2021 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)
