What do you do when the entire world has gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick?
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 2, 2025
In December of last year, I sent an essay to historian Richard Hutton, author of "The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present." I politely suggested that the Drug War is the ultimate case of strategic fearmongering by the powers-that-be and that it was therefore an oversight on his part to fail to mention drugs in his book -- the more so given the fact that the "herbs" that he continually mentions uncritically were actually drugs insofar as they manifested psychoactive properties. The difference was that, back then, the populace was in the habit of holding persons responsible for evil rather than focusing on the substances that they used to bring about evil. Today, of course, we blame substances themselves for evil -- first and foremost by demonizing them with the pejorative epithet of "drugs," which in modern parlance refers to a substance that is superstitiously supposed to have no positive uses for anybody, anywhere, at any dose and when used for any reason whatsoever. Unfortunately, Richard only mentions the word "drugs" once in his entire book, and only then in a pejorative fashion, by likening the poison-selling magician to a drug dealer -- as if the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions are all poisons. How ironic that a book meant to challenge fearmongers should itself contain such fearmongering about the time-honored substances that Drug Warriors have outlawed in defiance of common sense -- nay, in defiance of human progress itself.
The good news is, Mr. Hutton actually responded to the email containing my essay about his book. The bad news is, he merely thanked me for my comments and signed off. Too typical, I'm afraid. Amazing as it is, I have never yet known one single author or philosopher to respond to the substance of my comments, after having written literally hundreds of letters to the movers and shakers in various relevant fields over the last six years. It is as if it is considered bad manners these days merely to bring up the subject of drug prohibition. It really feels as if the smart people have concluded that the Drug War mentality is here to stay and that their best bet is to censor themselves accordingly. And so we have a kind of faux science these days, a world in which our conclusions in fields like psychology and consciousness only make sense if we assume that drug prohibition constitutes a natural baseline for research on all topics -- even political science, wherein pundits never consider the strategic use of empathogens to end hatred in the world and so stave off nuclear annihilation. Meanwhile, psychology mags publish monthly feel-good pieces about ending depression while yet completely ignoring the fact that drug law outlaws all substances that could do just that, and in real-time as well.
And so we live in a world of make-believe today, a world in which we are completely blind to the progress-preventing effects of our superstitious drug demonization. I say superstitious, for to say things like "Fentanyl 1 kills" makes no more sense than to say "Fire bad!" in the presumptuous manner of our paleolithic ancestors. The truth is that dangerous substances CAN be used wisely -- if we do not make a religion out of insisting otherwise.
This leaves a philosopher like myself in the position of Alfred North Whitehead. We both live in a world in which almost everybody has got ahold of the wrong end of the stick. In Whitehead's case, the vast majority of the world had a bifurcated conception of nature, according to which matter is matter and mind is mind and ne'er the twain shall meet. In my case, the vast majority of the world believes that drugs are drugs and meds are meds and ne'er the twain shall meet. The fact is, of course, that psychoactive substances are psychoactive substances, and that labels like "meds" and "drugs" and "herbs" are used (or rather misused) by Drug Warriors to make us think otherwise. Their obvious goal is to linguistically whitewash dependence-causing pills created by materialist chemists by referring to them by the gentle names of "meds" while harshly scorning as "drugs" the sort of time-honored holistic medicines championed historically by indigenous peoples around the world.
"The evolution of modern medicine gave us our current, bifurcated view of drugs: the good ones that treat illness and the bad ones that people use to change their minds and moods." --Jacob Sullum, from Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, p. 2512
And so I have the same problem as Whitehead in attempting to get my points across. Our arguments are just too novel to be persuasive without the inclusion of many qualifications designed to answer the many kneejerk objections that will naturally occur to a reader who has lived and breathed the fallacious status quo for their entire lifetime. As Whitehead himself phrased this problem in his preface to "The Concept of Nature":
"In the presentation of a novel outlook with wide ramifications, a single line of communications from premises to conclusions is not sufficient for intelligibility. Your audience will construe whatever you say into conformity with their pre-existing outlook."
Imagine if we held sports to the same safety standard as drugs. There would be no sports at all. And yet even free climbing is legal. Why? Because with sports, we recognize the benefits and not just the downsides.
Someone should stand outside Jefferson's estate and hand out leaflets describing the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello to confiscate poppy plants. That raid was against everything Jefferson stood for. The TJ Foundation DISHONORED JEFFERSON and their visitors should know that!
The Drug War treats doctors like potential criminals and it treats the rest of us like children. Prohibition does not end drug risks: it just outsources them to minorities and other vulnerable populations.
Big pharma drugs are designed to be hard to get off. Doctors write glowingly of "beta blockers" for anxiety, for instance, but ignore that fact that such drugs are hard -- and even dangerous -- to get off. We have outlawed all sorts of less dependence-causing alternatives.
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.
It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.
DEA Stormtroopers should be held responsible for destroying American Democracy. Abolish the American Gestapo.
I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.
There would be almost no recidivism for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.
If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.
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