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Why Americans Can't Handle the Truth about Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 21, 2022



The reader who believes that I am desperately in favor of "drug use" is wrong. I am desperately in favor only of complete honesty about drugs whereby intelligent persons may make intelligent decisions about using (or abstaining from) any given substance -- complete honesty, that is to say, about ALL drugs, including everything from Ketamine to SSRIs, from LSD to alcohol, from opium to tobacco. This honesty that I'm after would be based not on wish fulfillment or eye-catching one-off anecdotes, but rather on actual outcomes of actual use patterns, telling potential users in effect, "If you use substance A in this way, then X is statistically likely to happen, if you use it in THAT way, then Y," with such reports focusing both on the reported subjective AND objective benefits and downsides of use. My urgency derives from the fact that there is no such drug honesty in the United States. Instead, users must decide for themselves precisely how much of Drug Warrior bluster, overstatement and factual cherry-picking should justifiably discourage them in their particular use of a particular substance.

That said, it is emphatically not just the Drug War which is to blame for this lack of honesty about drugs in America. There is another force at work in American society that limits our understanding about so-called "drugs" and that is what I call the sanctification effect. It is a descendant of the American penchant for medicine shows in the 19th-century, wherein an authority figure (generally decked out as a "doctor") convinced a desperate audience that a bottle of "Dr. Good" would cure everything that ailed them and without any untoward side effects whatsoever. This sanctification effect appears whenever capitalism 1 (or more specifically the entrepreneurial spirit) works to promote an unnuanced and glorified understanding of a psychoactive substance in order to peddle that substance to an often desperate clientele. Such a drug soon becomes beatified in the minds of its champions, who are thenceforth averse to even contemplating facts that might conduce to removing said substance from the pedestal that has been fashioned for it, often through a powerful combination of wishful crowd-think and the conscious sales strategy of ambitious entrepreneurs.

This tendency to sanctify is understandable as a reaction to the omnipresence of Drug War lies and misinformation in American society. It's especially understandable in those who believe as I do in our right to control our own minds and thought processes. Why, after all, would we want to give ammunition to our enemies so that they can emotionally trash psychoactive substances still further? Yet lies should be met with truth if we are ultimately to gain our freedom from those who would demonize psychoactive substances, even if such truth might seem to 'play into the hands' of our opponents in the short run. For it's not simply isolated truths that will eventually set us free, but rather the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In a world of such rigorous truth-telling, the unfounded and sensationalized fears of Chicken Little Drug Warriors will be seen for the uneducated panic that they represent.

For a specific example of the sanctification effect, let us consider ketamine. It is marketed as a new godsend for depression and highly praised both by entrepreneurs in the field and those who hope to benefit from the drug. So far, so good, as there is indeed some reason for excitement, especially in cases of severe depression. And yet ketamine use is not without risk2. I learned that there were risks, however, not from American doctors -- and certainly not from those doctors attempting to sell the drug as a depression treatment -- but rather from articles written by doctors in Hong Kong and Malaysia, where ketamine has been linked to urological problems in certain users. This negative factoid, however, is silenced in America by the above-mentioned sanctification effect. Why? Because generally speaking, the only folks who are talking extensively about ketamine depression therapy are the desperately depressed and those who cater to them capitalistically speaking, neither of whom are eager to hear about flaws in a substance that they are embracing (and/or marketing) as a long-awaited panacea.

So we have lies coming from both sides when it comes to drugs like ketamine: the Drug War encourages us to fear the drug uncritically while the sanctification effect leads us to embrace the drug uncritically.

That's why we need a Drug Education Agency to replace the highly mendacious DEA, which has been brazenly libeling plant medicine since its inception in 1973. We need an honest, nonpartisan and completely independent agency that neither touts drugs nor demonizes them, but rather provides totally unbiased and statistically based results of actual use of specific psychoactive substances in specific contexts, to clearly demonstrate how said substances can be used most safely for worthwhile purposes and in what ways their use may be seen to cause actual problems in the real world (problems, that is, which are not caused, as so many drug problems are today, by drug criminalization itself).

As this analysis suggests, it is not just the Drug Warrior who would oppose the creation of such a completely honest agency: it is the capitalist as well. For if we were completely honest about ketamine in this way, we would also have to be completely honest about Big Pharma 3 4 meds, and complete honesty based on actual usage would show Americans (in black and white, as it were, after years of self-interested silence on this point from financially interested parties) that many SSRI antidepressants 5 lead to a lifetime of substance dependency while yet not "fixing" depression, but rather leading in the long-term to emotional-flatlining.

And so when it comes to psychoactive substances, Americans of both parties are like Lieutenant Kaffee in "A Few Good Men." They say they want the truth, but they can't handle the truth.

PS Some might say that drugs are covered honestly in Academia, but this is not so. Any survey of the literature shows that almost all discussion of psychoactive substances is written with a myopic focus on the downsides of use. The collective effect of this body of literature is to toe the Drug War line that there is no rational use for psychoactive substances, a stance which is at odds both with the history of substance use (as, for instance, when Soma inspired the Vedic religion) and the very basics of human psychology, which tell us that the search for self-transcendence is universal and not pathological as the prudish academic literature on this topic seems to imply.




May 26, 2022

Let's toss in a few caveats here that Brian (bless him) failed to address: First, when it comes to naturally occurring medicines, we have no right to outlaw them in the first place since they are a gift from nature and therefore not subject to criminalization -- in light of the natural law upon which America was founded. Yes, let's be truthful about them until the cows come home, but we must not let any safety scruples that we formulate about them convince us that we have a common-law right to criminalize plants. That was the original sin of the Drug War back in 1914 when politicians had the unmitigated hubris to criminalize the poppy, thereby creating a century-plus of gunfire, violence and the outlawing of religion -- insofar as drugs like coca, opium 6 and psychedelics have inspired entire religions before the west came along to declare the substances somehow criminal in and of themselves.

Here's another elephant that Brian failed to observe in the room: The FDA's idea of "safety" reckons without its host. It gives decidedly short shrift to the desperate needs of the depressed and suicidal. That's why they can outlaw such an obvious help to the depressed as laughing gas 7 (nitrous oxide). They outlaw it because they're scared to death that some uneducated young people will find a disastrous way to use the drug and then end up on the evening news in some local tragedy that will get drug-warrior jaws flapping in Congress. And what's the result of their politically inspired fear: MILLIONS AND MILLIONS must go without a godsend treatment -- all because a handful of young people might find a politically button-pushing way to misuse it. Since when do the merely theoretical concerns about a small number of young people trump the needs of millions if not billions??? Answer: Since the topic of "drugs" was politicized and became all about fear instead of education. Speaking of which, it never occurs to the FDA that the answer to their disproportionately centered fears is to educate the public -- rather than force the whole world to go without godsends because a relatively tiny number of kids are going to find a way to misuse them.



Author's Follow-up: June 21, 2024

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In reality, it is very difficult to give objective information about drug usage. We may find, for instance, usage rules that hold true for Stateside Americans but which do not hold true historically in Latin American use. This is because drug use, especially of psychedelics and entheogens, is not just about set and setting, it is also about what Bobi Hill Deere of Oklahoma University described as "Set, Setting, and Sacra.8" Although he does not use this latter terminology, author Michael Stuart Ani highlights the importance of this additional category in his 2020 YouTube interview with Stephen Gray entitled "Secrets of the Sacred Mushroom.9." Also, we judge drugs by how they act on their own, not in combination with any other substances or in consideration of dietas that a "user" might have performed in advance of use. It is, however, foreign to the shamanic viewpoint to consider the effect of one substance in and of itself, in the abstract, without regard for the entire mix of circumstances in which "use" might occur.

Finally, no substance is bad in itself. When we outlaw a drug, we outlaw all of the potential benefits that a clever mind might have found in that drug. That is anti-science, anti-progress, and inhumane.









Notes for essay entitled Why Americans Can't Handle the Truth about Drugs:

1: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)
2: Ketamine, like any drug, has positive uses. We need neither apologize for it nor sanctify it. We simply have to evaluate the costs and benefits to decide if it makes sense in our particular situation. This is common sense, of course, but it's precisely what the drug warrior has forgotten. (up)
3: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
4: 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)
5: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
6: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
7: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
8: Set, Setting, and Sacra: Eastern North America’s Tobacco Shamans and the New World Narcotic Complex Deere, Bobi Hill, Academia.edu, 2023 (up)
9: Secrets of the Sacred Mushroom: StephenGray Vision interviews Michael Stuart Ani. Stuart Ani, Michael, StephenGray Vision stephengrayvision.com, 2020 (up)




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The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.

The book "Plants of the Gods" is full of plants and fungi that could help addicts and alcoholics, sometimes in the plant's existing form, sometimes in combinations, sometimes via extracting alkaloids, etc. But drug warriors need addiction to sell their prohibition ideology.

William James knew that there were substances that could elate. However, it never occurred to him that we should use such substances to prevent suicide. It seems James was blinded to this possibility by his puritanical assumptions.

We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.

It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.

Most substance withdrawal would be EASY if drugs were re-legalized and we could use any substance we wanted to mitigate negative psychological effects.

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

Antidepressants might be fine in a world where drugs were legal. Then it would actually be possible to get off them by using drugs that have inspired entire religions. In the age of prohibition, however, an antidepressant prescription is usually a life sentence.

Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.

Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."


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