The thin line between honesty and fearmongering in the age of the War on Drugs
a review of essay number 11 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 28, 2025
The following remarks are part of a series of responses to the essays contained in the 2001 book "Hallucinogens: A Reader," edited by Charles Grob1. The comments below are in response to essay number 11: "The Psychedelic Vision at the Turn of the Millennium: A Discussion with Andrew Weil, M.D."
During the chat session that constitutes this essay, Grob says:
"I wonder at what point might our profession start to open up to the potentials that psychedelics might have in terms of helping us understand health, understand illness and understand new methods to intervene."
The more important question is: when is his profession going to open up to the potentials that ALL psychoactive drugs have for helping humanity?
If one were pessimistic, the question might even be: Will the profession EVER open up to the potentials that ALL psychoactive drugs have for helping humanity?
I know at least three close relations who are on the brink of suicide at this moment because of severe depression -- and yet the medical profession would never think of using drugs that inspire and elate in order to cheer them up, this despite the fact that entire religions have been founded based on the effects of such drugs. This is the real problem with American healthcare: not just the outlawing of psychedelics, but the outlawing of drugs in general.
This total lack of real treatment of depression has all been brought about by fearmongering about drugs. This is why I am very wary of statements by Weil that seem to give comfort to the prohibitionist enemy. He speculates that he might have prematurely dropped out of the medical profession had he used mescaline earlier in his life, and he blames this on the mescaline itself, implying that there is a one-size-fits-all thing known as the "mescaline experience." But how can this be when mescaline gave Sartre visions of hell while it gave Huxley visions of heaven? Moreover, there are endless details that inspire action or inaction in life -- and as powerful as mescaline might be, it works in conjunction with other givens in the user's life, not in spite of them.
I get it, though: these substances can have profound psychological effects and one must be prepared for that. But in the age of the drug-demonizing Drug War, we should never make such admissions without explicitly specifying that education is the answer, not prohibition -- education and the promulgation of best use practices for users based on their circumstances in life. We should also explicitly acknowledge that all risky activities will have victims. If we want mental freedom, we have to accept the occasional drug-using "waster" as a fact of life -- just as we do the occasional alcoholic and the occasional pathological gambler. Only when we talk about drug use do we adopt the absurd notion that it's "one strike, you're out" when it comes to downsides. These implicit prejudices must be "outed" and rebutted, not naively ignored in the false belief that the drug debate is rational in nature. It is rather all about power politics designed to brand certain substances as evil for the purposes of disempowering one's political enemies.
Meanwhile, Weil is not the only pundit who can imagine use scenarios. I can see the informed and strategic use of mescaline preventing suicide, I can see it helping to get a life on course. In fact, I could guarantee Weil right now that I could successfully get off the Effexor that I am trying to kick with the help of such drugs. There is no doubt about it. This is psychological common sense and does not need to be verified by a behaviorist looking at my biochemistry under a microscope.
When presented without such qualifications, Weil's fearful musings give comfort and support to drug prohibitionists, who need only find one merely potential downside to drug use (such as the highly fraught and speculative one with which Weil provides them) in order to justify (in their own eyes, at least) the demonstrably deadly policy of drug prohibition.
CONCLUSION
Grob and Weil should be fretting about the unnecessary depression and suicides brought about by drug prohibition in general. The crack down on psychedelics is just one result of that flawed approach to mind and mood medicine and cannot be meaningfully addressed outside of that broader context.
MENTAL AND PHYSICAL HEALING
On a positive note, Weil makes the completely overlooked point that the use of psychedelics can help change things in the real world, it can help us unlearn physical illness. (Psychoactive drugs in general can accomplish this, by the way, and for a wide variety of psychological reasons that modern behaviorists are loathe to acknowledge --as the smoking of opium, for instance, can "cure" the common cold -- but this is a topic for another essay.) Weil claims to have overcome his allergy to cats with the help of psychedelics and tells us that such use eventually rectified his body's inability to tan. These stories are quite credible. As Paul Stamets reports in "Fantastic Fungi," his consumption of psilocybin mushrooms as a teenager put an end to his problem stuttering as a child. Even materialist science is learning the value of psilocybin use in fighting diabetes. The outcome of Stamets' drug use is especially significant here. Imagine if we had outlawed psychedelics based on Weil's own fears. Stamets would be stuttering to this day -- and probably also be using a daily antidepressant under the psychiatrist's purely metaphysical claim that he was thereby treating "the real problem."
Prohibitionists tell themselves that their laws are keeping vulnerable white young people off of potentially dangerous substances. This is a dubious claim, however, since the outlawing of drugs does not prevent use but rather makes that use far more problematic than it need otherwise have been, especially when we refuse "on principle" to teach safe use. Even if Drug Warriors do prevent a white American young person from using mescaline in response to the fearful speculations of Andrew Weil, the Drug Warrior has done far more than that with drug prohibition. They have brought about suicide and the unnecessary use of brain-damaging shock therapy for the depressed. This is what happens when we outlaw all substances that inspire and elate -- even though the prohibitionist never takes credit for the downsides of prohibition -- least of all for the fact that drug prohibition has ended American democracy by throwing hundreds of thousands of minorities in jail and so handing otherwise close elections to fascists.
CONCLUSION
Weil does not sufficiently realize that there is a war underway in the western world to brand words like "drugs" and "psychedelics" as evil. In the midst of such a war," we must be more circumspect and precise in the way that we criticize drug use -- lest we yield ground to our adversaries thanks to our inability to imagine a wide range of positive drug uses that would be obvious to others. Weil can clearly envision a young person making a supposedly wrong decision after mescaline use -- but he is blind to the needs of the depressed individuals who are on the brink of suicide because fearmongering about drugs like mescaline has deprived them of everything that would actually lift their mood.
Drug prohibition is the root problem here. It is based on branding drugs a priori as good or bad -- which is a blatantly anti-scientific temptation that should be resisted in the name of human progress.
And so if Weil is going to fret about his future Mini Me's who might prematurely use mescaline, he should be an equal opportunity worrywart: he should also worry about those who will commit suicide or undergo brain-damaging shock therapy because of drug prohibition, or who, at very least, will be made a ward of the healthcare state by being placed on dependence-causing Big Pharma drugs for a lifetime. These are the invisible stakeholders in the drug prohibition debate to which Weil pays short shrift, or rather pays no shrift at all. I could also mention those stakeholders who wish to use drugs like mescaline for religious inspiration, mental rejuvenation, relaxation, and philosophical study a la William James. But the liberty to do so will follow naturally once we accept the notion that the suicidally depressed have rights too!
Finally, it might be instructive for me to answer the following question in closing:
Q. Why do I see these matters in a different light from Weil and Grob?
A. Because I have skin in the game. I know close relatives who could be lifted AT THIS VERY INSTANT from profound gloom with the help of outlawed medicine -- and so I cannot bring myself to diplomatically play along with the go-slow, lukewarm approach to drug re-legalization implicit in the musing of otherwise sensible people like Weil.
AFTERWORD
What's more, in a free world -- one which viewed drugs as tools for human progress -- human beings would have a degree of pharmacological choice that we cannot imagine right now in the age of substance prohibition. If a mescaline user feared they were being inordinately influenced by the effects of one single drug, they could use other mind-clarifying and mind-influencing drugs to correct for that perceived imbalance. This is a common sense caveat which should go without saying, but it is worth stating explicitly here because it is one of the many benefits of drug-related freedom that Drug Warriors cannot bring themselves to imagine -- one which unfortunately is invisible to most Drug War critics as well.
Hallucinogens: A Reader
In 2001, Charles Grob published 'Hallucinogens: A Reader," containing interviews and essays on the subject of drugs. Watch this space for philosophical essays on each essay in the book.
That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.
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.
The Hindu religion was inspired by drug use.
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.
Drug dealers are not the bad guys -- the bad guys are the racist pols who incentivized unregulated drug-dealing in the first place by outlawing a whole pharmacopoeia's worth of godsend medicines.
Lying billboards in Philadelphia say that "Fentanyl Kills." NONSENSE! If Fentanyl kills, then so do cars, horses and alcohol. PROHIBITION IS THE REAL KILLLER.
The sad fact is that America regularly arrests people whose only crime is that they are keeping performance anxiety at bay... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.
America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.
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 thin line between honesty and fearmongering in the age of the War on Drugs: a review of essay number 11 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob, published on June 28, 2025 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 thin line between honesty and fearmongering in the age of the War on Drugs: a review of essay number 11 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob, published on June 28, 2025 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)
