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 Grob1. 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's dependence-causing meds, but I could get off them in a trice if laughing gas 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.
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 Fallacy2.
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. 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.
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.
"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary
Almost every mainstream article about psychology and consciousness is nonsense these days because it ignores the way that drug prohibition has stymied our investigation of such subjects.
The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.
A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Why understandable? Because performers can lose their livelihood should they become too self-conscious. We call that use "recreational" only because we ignore common sense psychology.
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!
The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.
At best, antidepressants make depression bearable. We need not settle for such drugs, especially when they are notorious for causing dependence. There are many drugs that elate and inspire. It is both cruel and criminal to outlaw them.
If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.
Amphetamines are "meds" when they help kids think more clearly but they are "drugs" when they help adults think more clearly. That shows you just how bewildered Americans are when it comes to drugs.
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, 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, published on June 26, 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, 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, published on June 26, 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)
