Why scientists gaslight us about the blatantly obvious benefits of drug use

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Why scientists gaslight us about the blatantly obvious benefits of drug use

An essay on the limits of the scientific method when it comes to the study of mind and mood medicine

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 28, 2026

WARNING: This is an essay that will only be of interest to the philosophically minded, and then only to members of the subset of that category who believe that one can be a philosopher in this life without the say-so of the academic establishment.

Today, I want to investigate the connection between the western world's seemingly quasi-religious faith in science and that same world's confused and ultimately incoherent attitudes about "drugs." In light of the current headlines, however, I should probably begin with a disclaimer. I have no sympathy with the "science deniers" of our time and readily acknowledge the importance of the scientific method. My only concern is to point out that there are limits to the applicability and usefulness of that algorithm, at least as it is employed today, and that when we ignore those limits, we enter a world of absurdity: a world in which drug researchers tell us, as it were with a straight face, that drugs like laughing gas have no positive uses for the depressed. This is a world wherein the scientists end up gaslighting Americans about glaringly obvious drug benefits, thereby helping to normalize drug prohibition by giving it a totally unearned veneer of "science."

Spoiler alert: I will not only advance my own thesis on this topic below, but I will demonstrate the explanatory value of that thesis as well.

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

Let us start by speaking as generally as possible and so taking the broadest possible view of the issues and mindsets involved here. Let us ask, what is the scientific method? According to the Science Notes website:

The scientific method is a system scientists and other people use to ask and answer questions about the natural world. In a nutshell, the scientific method works by making observations, asking a question or identifying a problem, and then designing and analyzing an experiment to test a prediction of what you expect will happen. ¹

This is a great way for solving problems in the inorganic realm and the proof is in the dizzying array of advances that have come about in technology since the Industrial Revolution. The scientific method yields the definitive answers required for building everything from a treehouse to an Eiffel Tower. The method works as well in the organic realm, at least to the extent that it deals with autonomic processes as considered apart from their psychological concomitants. For this is where the problem arises, when we attempt to apply the algorithm of the scientific method to the study of the psychological lives of human beings. For the only way to come up with definitive answers in this area using the scientific method is to place a severe limit on the number of variables that we study at any one time, and this is highly problematic when we consider that human behavior is the end result of a vast array of interacting "inputs" -- including the studied individual's upbringing, their biochemistry, their metabolism, their genetic legacy, their cultural beliefs, their general personality, their diet, their religion and/or their faith in science, etc., even the particular mood that this person happens to be in at the time of being studied.

When we employ the scientific method to answer questions about mind and mood, then, we are making an enormous and untenable assumption: that a relative handful of inputs that affect human behavior (the handful chosen by the scientist --or rather by the scientist's self-interested benefactor-- for the purpose of performing any given experiment) can be taken out of context and considered as definitive causative agents in and of themselves. In other words, we are assuming the falsity of the doctrine of holism. It is thanks to such presumptuous studies that scientists will misleadingly tell us that drug "x" causes this and that downside -- when all they have actually proven is that drug "x" causes this and that downside when considered outside of all context. There is plenty of evidence that tobacco use in the United States increases the risk of cancer in general in a westerner, but it does not follow that the time-honored shamanic use of the drug by native Americans has the same risk profile. To make that assumption is to assume that human beings are predictable biochemical widgets and that cultural and religious beliefs, diet, genetics, and a host of other factors can be safely ignored when evaluating the risks for individuals. This is to assume that any man or any woman is a sort of Everyman or Everywoman when it comes to studying the effects of a given form of substance use.

THE PROBLEM

The problem here is that the scientific method requires the researcher to simplify a problem before studying it, and that means ignoring seemingly irrelevant variables when it comes to the genesis of human feelings. But what are those irrelevant variables? How do we select them? We would have to be God him or herself in order to know for sure. We can only guess at the relative importance of any given patch in the crazy quilt of interacting inputs that result in a human being's emotional life. The butterfly that was flapping its wings three weeks ago on the other side of the globe may have seemingly nothing to do with the tornado that strikes today in Iowa, and yet chaos theory warns us that we ignore that butterfly at our own peril.

Scientists have but a small role to play here. They can but tell us the extent to which a drug is deadly to Homo sapiens qua Homo sapiens. As Thomas Szasz writes in "Our Right to Drugs":

Warning people about the risks a particular drug poses is the most that science can be made to justify.

p. 119 --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs ²

There is another problem inherent in the scientific method when it comes to studying mind and mood. The method calls for the objective and hence quantitative evaluations of data, and yet how do you quantify feelings that a human being may scarcely realize that they have? Even the most self-aware among us may have difficulty placing their feelings into words. Moreover, it is a commonplace to say that experiences under the influence of certain substances like psychedelics are beyond the power of human language to convey, except with a great deal of poetic license, which, of course, provides a scant basis for drawing the definitive, if narrowly applicable, conclusions that the scientific method is meant to facilitate on the subject of mind and mood.

MY THESIS AND ITS EXPLANATORY VALUE

We have seen then that the scientific method draws conclusions outside of context and that this is highly problematic when the subject of our investigations is a Homo sapiens, a creature whose thought processes are caused by an unfathomably complex interaction of a seemingly endless array of forces, any one of which we can ignore only at our own peril, at the risk of drawing conclusions based on a highly simplified strawman that we have custom-made for our own scientific benefit.

This thesis of mine has great explanatory value. It helps account for the fact that science is always seen to be lagging behind common sense on issues of mind and mood, in the animal world in general and not just with regard to Homo sapiens. For centuries, we westerners have been told that science proves that animals (with the usual exception of human beings) are mere machines, that dogs, cats and monkeys, etc., mimic human feelings like happiness and sorrow, but that they do not really feel anything at all. Those scientists of yore were demanding quantifiable proof on the topic and having found none, they drew rash and self-serving conclusions about animals rather than taking the more honest course by humbly denying the ability of science to pronounce advisedly on such a topic in the first place.³

And yet we have no right to preen ourselves on the supposedly advanced understanding of our times. We look back and say, "Those guys did not have any common sense when they denied the ability of animals to feel emotions." And yet our drug scientists today tell us (both directly and indirectly) that drugs like laughing gas have no positive uses for the depressed. Surely, our descendants, a hundred years from now, are going to look back and say, "Those guys did not have any common sense when they denied the ability of laughing gas to cheer us up!"

Herein lies the explanatory value of my thesis about the shortcomings of the scientific method with regard to the study of mind and mood medicine: it explains why a seemingly intelligent people can believe something that even a five-year-old child would know to be false: namely, that substances like laughing gas and cocaine have no positive uses for the depressed.

Our descendants are going to have a great laugh at this state of affairs a hundred years from now, just as we now laugh at the pretentious blockheads of yore who assured us that Fido does not "really" feel emotions.

AFTERWORD

Another example of the shortcomings of the scientific method may be observed in the case of gluten intolerance. Millions of women of the west have identified gluten as the big problem in their lives and are careful to avoid any product containing the same. This gives a feeling of security: they believe they have found a real smoking gun for a large subset of problems in their life. And yet this culprit of gluten has been found guilty in a rigged trial in which so many other suspects have been completely ignored. An holistic culture, at least as ideally conceived for the purposes of this discussion, would focus on the individual as a whole. If the presumed "shaman" of such a culture even mentioned gluten in his or her diagnosis of a struggling human being, it would be to point out how the individual's lifestyle had served to weaponize that substance in the first place. Such a diagnosis would seek to improve and alter an entire lifestyle of a sufferer. It would recommend remedies that would positively affect a whole host of "inputs" as opposed to singling out one culprit and holding it responsible in and of itself.

This is how psychedelic use, in specific cases and with specific people, can occasionally accomplish miracles, not by changing any one thing in the user's life but by adjusting their world view. Mycologist Paul Stamets tells the story of how he overcame his teenage stuttering in one afternoon after consuming a handful of mushrooms in his front yard. The psilocybin-fueled experience for him functioned as a sort of therapy session on steroids. It led him to understand in one afternoon, as it were intuitively, what could have otherwise taken him a lifetime to learn in expensive talk therapy: namely, that he had the power to simply stop stuttering then and there. He somehow understood, at some pre-lingual level, the dynamics of the defeatist mind game that he was playing whereby he was turning stuttering into a problematic habit and was thereby enabled to outgrow the habit in one afternoon.

It is no wonder that this approach is not popular in a capitalist society. There is no way for businesses to profit from Paul's condition, especially if Paul has simply secured his shrooms from Mother Nature rather than paying thousands of dollars for them at some semi-legal dispensary. The capitalist would rather that the Paul Stamets of the world purchase books about stuttering and buy gadgets and prescriptions that help suppress the habit. The capitalist would rather that Paul be placed on "meds" for life, meanwhile seeking further assistance from an expensive therapist. Various capitalists would then advertise in magazines and newspapers to promote a variety of products to treat a variety of supposed "causes" of his stuttering: a lack of vitamin B, a lack of proper sleep, a lack of proper exercise -- each capitalist earning money in proportion as his or her own "remedy" catches the eye of our increasingly desperate stutterer as he progresses through life, forever subject to new fits of his disempowering verbal tic.

Just so with gluten. Real business opportunities are generated when we blame problems on one single "input" like gluten while ignoring the vast concatenation and interaction of forces that are actually responsible for outcomes in the real world of human behavior. And this, of course, is why drug prohibition is so popular in a capitalist world. Even the use of non-psychedelic drugs can help us transcend perceived limitations of mind and mood and so help us rise above the desire to scapegoat a given substance as the be-all and end-all of our discomfiture. But this also explains why psychedelic drugs in particular stick in the capitalistic craw: such drugs are famous for providing users with an holistic view of the world, a view that everything is related, and such a mindset can only diminish the user's propensity to blame all their problems on one single scapegoat, a scapegoat that has been custom-selected out of a plethora of interacting causative factors in order to give entrepreneurs a chance to profit from our ailments.

Notes:

1: Steps of the Scientific Method Helmenstine , Anne, Science Notes, 2014 (up)
2: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
3: How Did Descartes View Animals? Vanja, The Collector, Subotic, PhD, 2024 (up)

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

The Partnership for a Drug Free America should be put on trial for having blatantly lied to Americans in the 1980s about drugs, while using our taxpayer money to do so!

The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that signs off on Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself.

Drug testing should flag impairment only. Any other use is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.

We need a few brave folk to "act up" by shouting "It's the drug war!" whenever folks are discussing Mexican violence or inner city shootings. The media treat both topics as if the violence is inexplicable! We can't learn from mistakes if we're in denial.

Laughing gas inspired the philosophy of William James. Outlawing N20 is outlawing academic freedom. Laughing gas should be available for the suicidal. Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.

We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.

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.

The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war.

That's so "drug war" of Rick: If a psychoactive substance has a bad use at some dose, for somebody, then it must not be used at any dose by anybody. It's hard to imagine a less scientific proposition, or one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering.

Drugs like opium and cocaine should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."

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tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

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