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What Obama got wrong about drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 20, 2020



Although President Obama's views on drug law were a great improvement over those of his Stalinist predecessors (Reagan and the two Bushes who shamefully called on kids to "turn in" their parents for using substances of which politicians disapprove) his desire to be "scientific" about drugs raises at least three major problems of its own.

April 2025 Update

1) Why need we turn to science to justify the legalization 1 of plant medicines that were unconstitutionally criminalized in the first place? Surely, a country founded on natural law cannot justifiably deny its citizens the right to access the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet. To turn the discussion to science is to yield unnecessary ground to the Drug Warrior, saying in effect: "Yes, of course, citizens cannot be trusted with free access to all of Mother Nature's bounty, but let's decide which plants can be legal on a scientific basis." That's as much as to say, "Yes, Drug Warrior, we agree on one thing: that common law must now triumph over natural law, given the prevalence of all these nasty drugs out there in Mother Nature."

2) Natural law aside, the subject of drugs is not merely a scientific issue. It is also an aesthetic, spiritual and political one. This is because illegal substances can endow the user with a whole new view of life, especially viewpoints that are thought to be left-leaning, including a love for nature and a feeling of unity with all of humankind. It is therefore tyrannical and partisan to render such new outlooks criminal. It is an attempt on the part of government to discourage certain ways of thinking about the world. It is thus the ultimate form of governmental mind control. And that is not a tyranny that science is going to solve for us: it is a question of fundamental freedom in a modern democracy: either we have the freedom to entertain new outlooks that these substances can facilitate or we don't.

Consider how the eccentric character Augustus Bedloe saw the natural world around him with the help of morphine in the Edgar Allan Poe story entitled "Tale of the Ragged Mountains":

"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."

I don't know about you, but I want that kind of wide-awake life, rather than to drowsily trudge through God's scenery with dull eyes and shuffling step, and science's view on my desires is irrelevant. Science may play an advisory role in telling me the downsides of morphine use as a means to living such a lifestyle (no doubt there are safer means through, say, the guided use of certain psychedelics), but their advice will be laughably hypocritical to me until the day when they are free to tell me both the subjective good sides and the objective bad sides of ALL psychoactive substances, including Big Pharma pills and alcohol. Instead, most "drug information" focuses on the negative properties of illegal substances alone, thereby reinforcing Drug War propaganda which says that substances can only bring about evil once they have been criminalized by American politicians.

Which brings up the final problem with the "scientific" approach to drugs:

3) Even science is political when it focuses only on specific aspects of a supposed problem. That's why science today has zero street cred in lecturing me on drug misuse. This is because it completely ignores the fact that 1 in 8 American men and 1 in 4 American women are addicted to Big Pharma meds. If 1 in 4 American women were addicted to morphine , conservative politicians would be screaming for martial law to be put in place, allowing the government to do constitutionally shady things to quash the scourge of drug abuse. The last thing they want is a drug being popularized which gives the user a "touchy-feely" outlook on life: it might cause them to vote for Democrats, after all.

But what is the difference between me being addicted to the daily use of morphine and me being addicted to the daily use of Big Pharma meds? There's no doubt which I would personally choose if I had to be addicted to SOMETHING. It's really a no-brainer: do I want morphine to facilitate deep insights into the world around me, or do I want my emotional life to be "tamped down" by Big Pharma meds? Um, I'll take the morphine , please, hold the moralizing. Why? Because addiction itself is not necessarily a problem if a safe supply of one's chosen poison is reliably available to the user: the problem is being addicted to a substance that keeps you from attaining self-actualization in life.

Relax, Drug Warriors: I'm not advocating morphine use: rather I'm advocating free but informed decision making regarding all substance use, which is nothing more radical than the status quo that existed in the American Republic until 1914, when racist politician Francis Burton Harrison first outlawed a plant in violation of the natural law upon which America was founded.

Inconvenient Truths



Dr. William Stewart Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins medical school, was a lifelong morphine addict. Sound shocking? Well, check your hypocritical astonishment at the door, because thousands of famous and worthy men today are addicted to Big Pharma 2 3 meds and use them every single day of their life. As Thomas Szasz reports in "Ceremonial Chemistry," Halsted was able to adjust his dosage so that he appeared eminently sober while yet having the increased energy and focus that the drug facilitated in him. Interviewed late in life, his colleagues professed astonishment that he could have done so much IN SPITE OF his morphine use, never stopping to think that he may have done so much BECAUSE OF his morphine use. If Americans thought rationally about drugs, they would reserve their astonishment for folks who achieve a great deal in life while yet taking modern-day anti-depressants, since those latter drugs have been shown to conduce to emotional flat-lining in long-term users.

Author's Follow-up: July 21, 2022





I feel compelled to add that the ideal pharmacological world for me would be a non-addictive one. Such a stand, however, does not rule out the use of morphine 4 or opium , because Drug War propaganda aside, a potentially addictive substance can be used non-addictively. You'd know that if the government spent its time and money teaching folks how to be safe rather than demonizing substances like so many Christian Science cavepersons. Moreover, even if I did err on the addictive side, the world is still my pharmacological oyster when all psychoactive medicines are legal and I have a pharmacologically savvy empath 5 for a friend. I look forward to the day when pharmacologically savvy empaths will have the green light to leverage psychoactive substances of all kinds in order to provide a seeker, as opposed to a "patient," with insight, guidance and focus for the human mind. Indeed, I see such interventions as getting rid of the whole concept of "patients" when it comes to mental conditions, since we only think of them as patients because the healthcare business wants to claim mood and mind as their bailiwick, for obvious financial reasons.

Of course, this will be hard to understand for many brainwashed readers -- those of you who received teddy bears as kids for just saying no to Mother Nature's godsend meds -- especially since you then went on to watch TV shows 6 in which coca and opium 7 users were only ever depicted as fiends -- and in which even scientists only ever focused on the downsides of substance use. And then you discover that drugs are so evil that you'll be removed from the American workforce if you use even a trace of the government's official list of despised substances (notwithstanding that some of them have inspired the creation of entire religions). Moreover, the US Office of National Drug Control Policy has actually been forbidding its employees for decades now to even consider possible safe uses of "drugs" -- in other words, they are all about spreading propaganda and fearmongering. So it's amazing that anyone sees through the mist of Drug War lies considering how politicians have run a full-court press against the truth for the past century, starting with their Sinophobic demonizing of the poppy plant.

That's why I maintain that the Drug War is a cult. Indeed, I believe it meets the 8 conditions for being a cult as defined by psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton. But that's a subject for another essay.

Author's Follow-up: December 3, 2022





Obama launched his so-called BRAIN Initiative in 2013, at the same time that he was supporting a Drug War which outlawed all the substances that reveal the power of said brain. Psychedelics reveal whole new worlds in the mind. Opium allows one to metaphorically parse their negative experiences (including physical pain) so that one is not bothered by them. The problems do not go away: rather they are seen as separate from one's true self. Such drugs imply all sorts of wonderful things about the role of the brain and of consciousness itself, yet the BRAIN Initiative will not investigate these angles, since it will be censored from doing so by Drug War superstition, which says that such substances are without any value whatsoever. And so the "scientific" BRAIN Initiative is completely unscientific. The fix is in. By outlawing the study of such experiential wonders, Obama invites consciousness-scorning materialists to declare premature victory in the field of neuroscience.



Author's Follow-up:

April 07, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




The more one actually thinks about the issues involved, the more outrageous the Drug War appears: this, at any rate, is the takeaway message for myself as a philosopher after six years of methodically contemplating all things drug-related.

Indeed, I have found that the dogmatic roots behind substance prohibition have borne poisonous fruit in almost all areas of academic and political life. I have found, moreover, that almost all Americans are blind to the roots of this dystopia. To be sure, many can see the fruits of this poisoned harvest -- police brutality, the prevalence of suicide 8 and depression, the unnecessary use of brain-damaging shock therapy, the unnecessary existence of mafias and drug cartels, the unnecessary disappearance of the rule of law in Latin America, the unnecessary shootings in inner cities, the unnecessary provincial hatred that leads to school shootings, the unnecessary global hatred that has us living under a nuclear sword of Damocles-- and yet almost no one sees how the Drug War has poisoned the soil to produce just such a crop of deformed outcomes. To extend the horticultural metaphor, the pundits of our times are blaming our sickly harvest on global warming, El Nino, pesticides, a lack of education, even on alien globules from outer space... on anything, in fact, except the War on Drugs, convinced as we are of the twofold lie of the Drug War: first, that drug use can have no upsides, and second, that prohibition can have no downsides.

Speaking of mutant crops, drug prohibition has led to the censoring of science itself. The authors of almost all magazine articles about subjects related to psychology and consciousness reckon without the Drug War: that is, they ignore what drug use might tell us about the topics under discussion.

This is why I cannot get excited about a materialist study of the human brain: we do not need to study the brain in the abstract, the brain, as it were, in a vat. We need to study the human mind in conjunction with that brain. Philosophers of all people should realize this. America's greatest philosopher, William James, called for just such a study in "The Varieties of Religious Experience.9" But today's philosophers have ignored that plea, so much so that it does not appear in James's online biography at Harvard University, his alma mater, where he founded the psychology department10. Why such censorship? Because the study in question would require the informed use of psychoactive substances. And in Drug War America, almost all academics have a prior commitment to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization, to the idea that drugs can have no positive uses for anybody: for any reason, at any dose, in any circumstances, ever.

And so the Drug War stops philosophers from studying the mind-body problem in a way that could actually produce answers. The Holy Grail of philosophy is right before our eyes but it is invisible to us thanks to our western world's previous commitment to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.

The intentional and methodical use of psychoactive substances as championed by James could help us get real answers about the so-called mind-body problem. It could show us to what extent mind can influence matter and vice versa -- and the extent to which those very categories may be misleading. Prior to relativity theory, scientists thought of space and time as separate entities. After that theory, we thought instead of space-time. After the study of drug-expanded consciousness, we may very well begin thinking of mind and matter as mind-matter, that is, as two apparent entities which are actually ineluctably intertwined, such that one cannot be meaningfully comprehended without the other. This outlook would jibe with the findings of modern physics, for as physicist David Bohm points out in his 1980 book "Wholeness and the Implicate Order,11" Einstein's relativity theory and quantum science have at least one thing in common, even in the ongoing absence of a unifying theory: they both show that reality depends on context, that reality must be viewed holistically rather than with a myopic focus on parts.

By thinking in terms of mind-matter, we may also make progress in understanding the limits of human knowledge as understood by Kant and Schopenhauer, an understanding that has hitherto been limited by the duos' kneejerk assumption that valid perception comes only from the "sober" mind -- as that term "sober" is understood by intoxiphobic westerners like themselves.









Notes:

1: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (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: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
5: pharmacologically-savvy empath: this is an empathic individual with an ethnobotanical knowledge of safe and beneficial drug use worldwide, someone who recognizes psychological common sense and can advise on protocols that meet user needs while avoiding unwanted dependency. (up)
6: The Dead Man DWP (up)
7: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
8: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
9: The Varieties of Religious Experience James, William, Goodreads, New York, 1902 (up)
10: How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James DWP (up)
11: Wholeness and the Implicate Order Bohm, David, 1980 (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.

They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."

When people tell us there's nothing to be gained from using mind-improving drugs, they are embarrassing themselves. Users benefit from such drugs precisely to the extent that they are educated and open-minded. Loudmouth abstainers are telling us that they lack these traits.

Some fat cat should treat the entire Supreme Court to a vacation at San Jose del Pacifico in Mexico, where they can partake of the magic mushroom in a ceremony led by a Zapotec guide.

Researchers say that the New York Times has been flooding the world with Drug War agitprop.

If I should die of some unusual concatenation of circumstances, I want my survivors to pass "Brian's Law," a law stating that we will no longer pass laws based on hard cases and so needlessly fill our prisons by taking common-sense discretion out of the hands of judges.

I personally hate beets and I could make a health argument against their legality. Beets can kill for those allergic to them. Sure, it's a rare condition, but since when has that stopped a prohibitionist from screaming bloody murder?

The UN of today is in an odd position regarding drugs: they want to praise indigenous societies while yet outlawing the drugs that helped create them.

Drug warriors think only about young people misusing drugs. They never think about the millions of the depressed whom they're condemning to a lifetime of totally unnecessary misery by outlawing drugs.

There are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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