Want to end freedom in America? Just terrify philosophically clueless parents about the boogieman called drugs

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Want to end freedom in America? Just terrify philosophically clueless parents about the boogieman called drugs

a review of essay number 7 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 26, 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 Grob ¹. The comments below are in response to essay number 7: "Drugs and Jewish Spirituality" by Lawrence Bush

Lawrence Bush fails to recognize the extent to which his fears of drugs have been brought about by drug-war propaganda and above all censorship: censorship of all positive uses of drugs. He writes about the "scourge" of "addiction," not fully recognizing that the Drug War mandates addiction by outlawing all the drugs that could help us to get off a substance. Addiction was not a huge "thing" until the Drug War came along and made it so. I have been made a ward of the healthcare state by Big Pharma ² ³ 's dependence-causing meds, but I could get off them in a trice if laughing gas ⁴ and coca and phenethylamines and opium were re-legalized. This is just one of the endless upsides of drug use that Bush fails to notice. He fails to realize the Drug War's role in creating addiction -- and turning it into a lucrative industry. The Drug War outlaws everything that works and then pathologizes the mind and mood problems that result from such an unprecedented and wholesale denial of access to godsend medicines.

Author's follow-up for September 10, 2025

Why does it do so? So that worried parents like Bush can be persuaded to support the War on Drugs and its many anti-democratic provisions.

And so Bush, like the Drug Warriors themselves, wants to hold drug use to safety standards that we apply to no other risky activity on earth: not to mountain climbing, not to free diving, and certainly not to alcohol drinking or gun firing. He fails to see that his proactive outrage and a priori demonization of drugs has been strategically orchestrated and brought about by Drug War propaganda and censorship.

If the fearmongers that have frightened Bush were really interested in the well-being of his children, they would point out inconvenient truths, like the fact that Thorazine can reverse a "bad" psilocybin trip in real-time -- but the Drug Warriors do not want to encourage wise use of drugs, they want to demonize drugs instead.

Here is the statement by Bush that really bothered me, however:

"Uncertainty about such existential fundamentals eventually drove me to abandon LSD and all other drugs."

I will never understand how someone can renounce drugs in the abstract. Is he renouncing alcohol? Is he renouncing caffeine? Is he renouncing the kinds of phenethylamines that have inspired rapture and insight as described in the book "Pihkal" by Alexander Shulgin? Is he renouncing the Soma whose use inspired the creation of the Hindu religion? Is he renouncing the occasional use of morphine that can provide the informed user with a surreal appreciation of Mother Nature? Is he renouncing the DMT and the opiates manufactured by his own body?

Renouncing drugs in general is bizarre in the age of drug prohibition. We have no idea what drugs exist out there, let alone those which could be synthesized, nor the ways in which they could help human beings, not based on materialist ideology but based on mere common sense. No one has ever set forth with the freedom, time, money, resources and inclination to study all drugs in the world in the manner of Alexander Shulgin, with a view toward learning how they can help various people in specific situations. In light of this almost total absence of research and this censorship of all drug-friendly news, Bush is hasty, to put it mildly, in renouncing drugs. Bush may as well tell us that he despises all creatures from another planet. Really? Surely, Bush should wait and see what creatures might actually exist "out there" before claiming that he wanted to have nothing to do with them. Meanwhile, how can Bush NOT be interested in drugs like phenethylamines that inspired the following user reports in "Pihkal":

"Intense intellectual stimulation, one that inspired the scribbling of some 14 pages of handwritten notes."

"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."

"I now know that the mind has a remarkable ability to control the
particular place the psyche is in."

And yet Bush talks of drugs as if they were a single thing about which he can make a single morally tinged decision. Bush is a puppet in the hands of the prohibitionists who have controlled the dialogue about drugs such that we are all tempted to judge "drugs" up or down, failing to realize that "drugs" is simply a pejorative term for that subset of psychoactive medicines of which racist and xenophobic politicians disapprove.

Although I appreciate Bush's pushback against drug criminalization, I sense in reading his essay that he has fallen victim to the following long-standing lie and racist algorithm of the drug-warrior:

namely, that if a drug can be misused by a white American young person at one dose when used for one reason in one context, then that drug must not be used by anyone at any dose for any reason in any context -- nor even INVESTIGATED for any such potential uses! For more on the folly of this mindset, see my essay entitled the Bill Clinton Fallacy ⁵.

It is impossible to imagine a more anti-scientific and inhumane drug policy. Millions must go without godsend medicines, they must suffer in silence, so that Lawrence and other bamboozled Americans can protect their kids from the drugs about which we refuse to educate them!

Nothing makes me worry more than when drug pundits start to talk about their children. Then I know they are totally bamboozled: for they fail to understand that their generally white American young children are just one of many sets of stakeholders in the drugs debate. Because we refuse to educate their children about safe use, folks like myself must go without godsend medicine for a lifetime -- and we must outlaw the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions.

Note to Lawrence:

Our children were getting along fine without drug prohibition for millennia. The Drug Warrior seeks to scare us about drugs for political reasons: to arrest minorities and put the kibosh on movements that promote peace, love and understanding. And Bush is dangerously close to signing off on any anti-democratic injustice (in the name of his children, of course) provided that it cuts back on the pretend "scourge" called drug use. The only scourge, however, is prohibition. We recognized this in the case of liquor, but somehow we refuse to recognize this truth with respect to the prohibition of drugs other than liquor. Prohibition first brought machine-gun-fire to American streets -- but Americans have short attention spans and are apparently incapable of seeing the principle involved here: that prohibition kills ⁶. This is because the whole Drug War is just one big branding operation designed to make certain drugs seem beyond the pale -- an attempt that unfortunately seems to have succeeded in the case of Lawrence Bush.

How bizarre, that America's century-long attempt to outlaw liquor should end in the utter privileging of liquor in daily life and the outlawing of almost every single one of liquor's less dangerous competitors. How bizarre, that the gunfire and death brought about by liquor prohibition has taught us nothing.

Author's Follow-up:

September 10, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

With respect, it is childish to say that one is going to refrain from using drugs based on their experience with a specific subset of the vast array of unique psychoactive substances that exist in the world -- in tree bark, in lichen, in fungi, in animals, etc. It is as if I were to be bitten by a dog and then tell my friends that I was no longer going to have anything to do with mammals! There are all sorts of mammals, after all. Moreover, our sober bodies are full of drugs. It's called our "biochemistry" for a reason.

When one denounces drugs in the abstract, they are saying the following:

1) I would rather that young people kill themselves than to use substances that inspire and elate.
2) We can do without any new religions that drug use might inspire, as, for instance, the Soma ⁷ juice inspired the creation of the Vedic -- and hence the Hindu -- religion.
3) I would rather that a hate-filled world undergo nuclear annihilation than to have people use drugs to render them more understanding of their neighbors.

When one proposes outlawing drugs, they are saying the following:

1) I do not care about the thousands of minorities who are killed every year thanks to the gunfire that prohibition has brought to city streets.
2) I do not care about the thousands of opiate deaths brought about by our failure to teach safe use and to regulate product. (There was no opiate crisis when opiates were legal in America.)
3) I would rather that potential school shooters not have access to entheogenic substances that could make them care about others.
4) I am happy to let the suicidal go without medicines that could make them want to live.

Before one adopts these jaundiced viewpoints, they should remember that they have been shielded for a lifetime from all positive reports about drug use. In reality, drug use can greatly increase our appreciation of the world. Mike Jay writes how the use of certain beta carbolines can actually improve creative thinking; Freud told us how cocaine can beat depression; De Quincey told us how opium can focus the mind to an almost preternatural degree. And in the short story called "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains," Edgar Allan Poe told us how the informed use of morphine can give the prepared mind a surreal appreciation of Mother Nature:

"In the meantime the morphine had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf- in the hue of a blade of grass- in the shape of a trefoil- in the humming of a bee- in the gleaming of a dew-drop- in the breathing of the wind- in the faint odors that came from the forest- there came a whole universe of suggestion- a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought." --Edgar Allan Poe, A Tale of the Ragged Mountains ⁸

Of course, we have all been programmed to believe that all potentially addictive drugs can only be used addictively, but this is a self-interested lie designed to demonize the holistic medicines that have always been used by indigenous people worldwide. It is pharmacological colonialism and anti-scientific into the bargain. This mindset tells us that we must judge drugs based on their worst imaginable use, that education is wrong when it comes to drugs, and that it is better to destroy our cities with unnecessary gunfire than to let human beings use the medicines that grow at their very feet.

And what is the result of this mindset of drug demonization, Larry? Kids in hospice in India go without morphine ⁹ because the drug has been so maligned that there are now insurmountable financial and bureaucratic hurdles to using that drug for pain relief.

This is the whole problem with Drug Warriors: they recognize only one stakeholder in the drugs debate: namely, the white American young people whom they refuse "on principle" to educate about drug use. The millions who suffer in silence behind closed doors for want of godsend medicines are ignored, as are the daily deaths of minorities around the world that are brought about by gun violence ¹⁰ -- the gun violence ¹¹ that was brought about by substance prohibition.

As Ann Heather Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014:

"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist." --Heather Ann Thompson, Inner-City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration ¹²

Hallucinogens: a Reader, edited by Charles Grob

Notes:

1: Hallucinogens: a reader Grob, M.D., editor, Charles, Penguin Putnam, 2002 (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: 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)
4: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
5: The Bill Clinton Fallacy DWP (up)
6: Prohibition's Death Toll: Alcohol's Deadly Legacy (up)
7: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
8: A Tale of the Ragged Mountains Poe, Edgar Allan (up)
9: Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Policies on Young People Barrett, Damon, IDEBATE Press, 2011 (up)
10: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
11: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
12: 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)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

"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.

This is the mentality for today's materialist researcher when it comes to "laughing gas." He does not care that it merely cheers folks up. He wants to see what is REALLY going on with the substance, using electrodes and brain scans.

The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.

Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.

The prohibitionist motto: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."

When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.

A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Performers can lose their livelihood if they become too self-conscious. We only call such use "recreational" because we are oblivious to the common-sense psychology.

Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.

How else will they scare us enough to convince us to give up all our freedoms for the purpose of fighting horrible awful evil DRUGS? DRUGS is the sledgehammer with which they are destroying American democracy.

There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill.

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