Why science is a joke in the age of the drug war

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Why science is a joke in the age of the drug war

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 11, 2024

The field of psychology today is a joke insofar as it ignores common sense in order to toe the Drug War party line that "drugs" can have no positive uses whatsoever. Of course, this position is never stated explicitly by modern psychologists, but it is implicit in their lack of interest in demonized drugs, except in papers that focus exclusively on the presumed pathology behind their use ¹.

This indifference may seem to be changing today, as academia begins to wrap its collective head around the fact that entheogens ² like psilocybin ³ and MDMA ⁴ ⁵ do, indeed, seem to help people cope with life and to see themselves more objectively, etc. Yet there is a basic idiocy in modern psychology that remains thanks to the stubbornness of materialist doctrine, which refuses to recognize psychological common sense in considering the potential use of a wide variety of drugs, and not just the psychedelics that are now stealing the show when it comes to psychological healing on the national stage. For the simple truth is that any drug that makes a person feel good and/or increases brain function can have a positive effect in therapy for the confused and the depressed, for the once-obvious reason that people enjoy both feeling good and looking forward to feeling good. Hence it follows that the wisely scheduled use of mood-elevating drugs can create a virtuous circle in which the user is empowered to successfully pursue their goals in life (as opposed to the goals of society and/or their therapist).

Nor does this "use" need to be addictive, except in the fretful mind of the Drug Warrior, who falsely tells us that any "feel good" drug will be addictive. This is not true, of course, and least of all for the category of drugs known as entheogens, for which "cravings," at least in the pejorative sense of that term, are virtually unknown. Moreover, in a world without the Drug War, the variety of "feel good" drugs available would skyrocket, making it easy to produce a virtuous psychological circle without establishing physical dependency. (See, in particular, the hundreds of inspirational phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin.⁶) Finally, it used to be common sense that the use of ANY drug is preferable to suicide. If this is so (and it surely is), then it is wrong even to deny opium and cocaine to the suffering, if that is the only thing that "works" for them (again, according to the USER's definition of that term).

I am picking on psychology here, but it is our entire society that is blind to the value of drugs. Science in general is blind. That's why magazines like Science News continue to plump for shock therapy for the depressed ⁷. They refuse to even acknowledge the existence of outlawed drugs and so feel no need to consider how they might work in making shock therapy unnecessary. They are 100% behind technical manipulation of the human brain, but they refuse to even talk about using the plant medicines that grow at our very feet. As mentioned above, this is beginning to change when it comes to entheogens, but the simple fact that coca and opium could be helpful to the suffering is beyond the brainwashed imaginations of scientists at this point and the editors who publish their work. They have all been told since grade school that it is their patriotic duty to be hysterical about drugs rather than to find good uses for them.

This is probably a good place to remind the brainwashed scientists why they are wrong on this topic even on their own scientific terms. For the Drug War is based on the following anti-scientific lie:

That a drug that can be misused by white teenagers at one dose in one situation must not be used by anybody in the world at any dose in any situation.

That attitude is not simply anti-scientific, but it is selfish and inhumane as well.

So while prohibitionists like Bill Clinton are patting themselves on the back for supposedly saving their irresponsible brothers from addiction, they should be apologizing to the hospice kids in India for insisting that they suffer unnecessarily. Speaking of which, it is depressing that a Rhodes Scholar like the former president believes that it is best to lie to Americans about drugs and that the human mind can never learn to use such substances wisely ⁸. It goes a long way toward quelling my IQ envy, when I see folks who should know better espousing such anti-intellectual and obscurantist policies. This is what happens, though, when you ignore common sense: like the fact that it is wrong on so many levels to outlaw the godsends of Mother Nature - and that all perceived "benefits" from doing so are sure to be paid for in blood and suffering, even if it be by strangers in inner cities or overseas.

P.S.

When I write essays like the above, I am always asking myself how a brainwashed reader might react. In this case, I envision them saying: "Yes, that's all well and good, but legalization ⁹ would lead to anarchy."

My response: Assuming that you are correct, why is this so? I will tell you why. It's because Americans have been taught to scream and holler about drugs. The media believes it is their job to parley any negative drug event into a lurid narrative against drugs. The natural result of this attitude is that we are always being reminded of the lie that drugs are inherently evil. It's as if the media were focusing on the lurid details of car crashes with the goal of getting cars outlawed.

The result: we only see the evil side of drug use, so we crack down some more, creating more bad outcomes for the media and politicians to exploit in lurid detail, and so the beat goes on: the deadly Drug War continues, causing civil wars overseas and leaving inner cities in bullet-riddled shambles ¹⁰.

Frankly, people need to just plain shut the heck up about drugs. It should be illegal, in fact, to blame drugs for anything, since it is social policy and laws like prohibition that make drugs dangerous, not drugs themselves. No drug is dangerous in and of itself. Not PCP ¹¹, not ICE, not crack cocaine ¹² ¹³ , not Fentanyl ¹⁴. Even cyanide has positive uses ¹⁵. To blame drugs for negative outcomes is simply a modern superstition. Americans love to arrange their world in such a way that there is one cause, one single "whipping boy," for all their problems. But the world is far more complicated than that and when you think otherwise, you end up with laws that make things far worse.

In 1913, Americans used opium ¹⁶ peaceably in their homes; in 1915, they were suddenly turned into addicts. The drug did not change, only the laws.

Notes for essay entitled Why science is a joke in the age of the drug war:

1: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
2: Entheogen defined Erowid (up)
3: Scribd.com: Psilocybin: a trip into the world of Magic Mushrooms Griffiths, William, William Griffiths, Annapolis, 2021 (up)
4: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
5: Listening to Ecstasy: The Transformative Power of MDMA Wininger, Charles, 2021 (up)
6: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
7: Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II DWP (up)
8: Recognizing, of course, that Trump has managed the seemingly impossible by being far worse than Clinton (or even Biden, for that matter) when it comes to drug policy. (up)
9: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
10: Jenkins, Philip. 1999. Synthetic Panics. NYU Press. (up)
11: Kirkpatrick, Jonathan. 2023. “Filter.” Filter. October 10, 2023. https://filtermag.org/pcp-meth-news-media/. (up)
12: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
13: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
14: Drug Use for Grownups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear Hart, Carl (up)
15: Cyanide ingredient could lead to new type 2 diabetes treatment Uncredited, diabetes.co.uk, 2016 (up)
16: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)

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against the hateful war on US

I knew democracy was in trouble when most Americans in the '80s saw no problem with allowing drug testers to go on a fishing expedition in their bodily fluids for substances of which politicians disapprove.

America legalizes alcohol and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.

It's almost impossible not to have a problem with drugs in a world in which the government is spending over $50 billion a year to render drug use problematic.

Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.

News flash: certain mushrooms can help you improve your life! It's the biggest story in the history of mycology! And yet you wouldn't know it from visiting the websites of most mushroom clubs.

Prohibitionists are responsible for the 200,000-plus killed in the US-inspired Mexican drug war in the 21st century.

Rick Strassman reportedly stopped his DMT trials because some folks had bad experiences at high doses. That is like giving up on aspirin because high doses of NSAIDs can kill.

Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.

Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).

"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. The very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.

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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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Why science is a joke in the age of the drug war

P.S.

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against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend