Who is the Greatest Living Philosopher?

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Who is the Greatest Living Philosopher?

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by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 3, 2026

I encountered some click-bait on Substack yesterday that asked the seemingly innocent question: "Who is the greatest living philosopher?"

This got me thinking. Let's see, I said to myself. For starters, the greatest living philosopher would have to be someone who recognized the fact that drug prohibition does not provide a natural baseline from which to draw unbiased conclusions about the world around us. Such a philosopher would recognize at a glance, for instance, that our scientists should not be writing essays about the molecular inevitability of depression while yet ignoring the fact that America has outlawed many drugs that could end depression in a trice ¹. Such a philosopher would chastise the social scientists who discuss medieval witchcraft while pretending that the "herbs" employed in that age were completely different than "drugs," just as they already pretend that the "meds" used by psychiatry in today's world are completely different from "drugs." ² ³ Such a philosopher would see at once that a full discussion of Kantian categories entails a continuation of the substance-inspired research of William James, which raises such obvious questions about the German philosopher's presupposition of a one-size-fits-all privileged consciousness and his insistence that rational consciousness alone can discover meaningful answers about the true nature of reality. ⁴ ⁵

Let's see, what else would we require of our greatest living philosopher?

Well, clearly, he or she would see at once that the outlawing of nitrous oxide in the United Kingdom was a violation of academic freedom insofar as it outlawed the kind of research advocated by William James. James' use of laughing gas changed his entire view of reality, after all:

One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. ⁶

William James -- The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature

Basically, what we're saying here is that our "greatest philosopher" would be protesting drug prohibition as the outlawing of academic freedom.

What else?

Well, our "greatest philosopher" would definitely be outraged by the case of depressed Canadian Claire Brosseau, who is demanding her "right" to state-assisted suicide. ⁷ ⁸ To be precise, he or she would be outraged by the fact that none of our esteemed medical ethicists see any connection whatsoever between drug prohibition and Claire's situation. And so our "greatest philosopher" would be pointing out the following inconvenient truth: namely, that it is bizarre to give the state the authority to kill Claire with drugs when that same state refuses to let Claire use drugs that could help make her wish to live! Our "greatest philosopher" would then go on to answer anticipated criticisms by insisting that such drugs do indeed exist, and that anyone who does not think so has been bamboozled, both by their failure to read up on the topic in question and by the conglomerate media's censorship of all positive reports of drug use. Our GP would point out that drug re-legalization would give Claire endless possibilities of improving her mental state, and that even if she was hampered by the west's historic disinterest in developing common-sense protocols for beneficial use, re-legalization would give Claire access to drugs with which she could end her life peaceably and peacefully, without any need on her part to turn the state into an accomplice in her dubious decision to end her already short life prematurely.

Of course, the injustice of drug testing (at least insofar as it is meant to "flag" anything but impairment) is but a readily deducible corollary from the above considerations, wherefore it follows that our "greatest philosopher" would also be protesting indiscriminate drug testing both loudly and clearly. ⁹

So, where does this analysis leave us, then? I think the takeaway message can be nicely summarized by paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 13:

If I speak in the tongues of academia of men or monads, but do not have a clue as to how drug prohibition biases and even outlaws our research on all such topics, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

If only we could find someone who met all the conditions formulated above, we would have our greatest living philosopher.

Unfortunately, there is nobody who fulfills every single one of those...

Wait a minute. I just realized something.

This is embarrassing and no doubt highly presumptuous of me... but it just occurred to me, ladies and gentlemen, that I myself meet all of the conditions outlined above for this greatest philosopher of ours.

Well, I'm sorry, but...

if the laurel fits, wear it!

NOTE: This is what happens when people don't stop to consider the phraseology of their questions. As Alfred North Whitehead reminds us, all statements are elliptical in nature. ¹⁰ When an expositor advances the proposition that "A is B," they are really telling us that "A is B -- given that we all agree that x, y, and z are the case." When our click-seeking author asked the question, "Who is the greatest living philosopher?", he or she clearly meant to ask, "Who is the greatest living philosopher, given the fact that any plausible candidate for such a distinction must be an academic, one whose books are to be found in the "philosophy" section of bookstores like Barnes & Noble?"

AFTERWORD: Of course, in many ways, today's board certified philosophers are far more intelligent than yours truly. The point of this essay is that philosophers today are like Don Quixote: many of them are geniuses on many subjects and yet when this pet subject is raised, the subject of drug prohibition, they behave like children, tacitly accepting prehistoric propositions about drugs that are totally unworthy of them, propositions like the following: 1) that drugs can have no beneficial uses and 2) that drug prohibition can be accepted as a natural baseline condition from which to study and opine on the nature of the world around us.

Notes:

1: Forbidden Quotations about the beneficial use of drugs DWP (up)
2: Drug Dealers as Modern Witches DWP (up)
3: The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present Hutton, Ronald, Yale Press, 2017 (up)
4: “The Varieties of Religious Experience : William James : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2021. Internet Archive. 2021. https://archive.org/details/the-varieties-of-religious-experience_202109. (up)
5: What drug use could tell us about the rationalist triumphalism of Immanuel Kant DWP (up)
6: “The Varieties of Religious Experience : William James : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2021. Internet Archive. 2021. https://archive.org/details/the-varieties-of-religious-experience_202109. (up)
7: Nolen, Stephanie, and Chloë Ellingson. 2025. “Claire Brosseau Wants to Die. Will Canada Let Her?” The New York Times, December 29, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/health/assisted-death-mental-illness-canada.html. (up)
8: Claire Brosseau does not need the right to assisted suicide: she needs the right to take care of her own health as she sees fit DWP (up)
9: Pissed off about Drug Testing DWP (up)
10: Alfred North, Whitehead. 1920. Review of The Concept of Nature. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg. 1920. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18835. (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.

I'm grateful to the folks who are coming out of the woodwork at the last minute to deface their own properties with "Trump 2024" signs. Now I'll know who to thank should Trump get elected and sell us out to Putin.

There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.

So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.

The outlawing of coca and opium is a crime against humanity.

I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.

Healthline posted an article in 2021 about the benefits of getting off of antidepressants. They did not even mention the biggest benefit: NO LONGER BEING AN ETERNAL PATIENT -- no longer being a child in the eyes of an all-knowing healthcare system.

The Drug War is the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.

Outlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.

Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.

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

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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