share your concern about violent games for kids. Unfortunately, such games are clearly a reflection of American values these days. America just does not care much for peace, love and understanding. That's why they cracked down on the use of psychedelics in the '60s, and not (as Michael Pollan claims1) out of an interest in public health. Nixon and company wanted to put the flower children in jail, not to educate them about the wise use of psychoactive substances. The powers-that-be in the UK hate peace, love and understanding as well. The use of the drug Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace, love and understanding to the dance floors of 1990s Britain. But the government missed the forest for the trees. Instead of marveling that a small, extremely safe and non-addictive tablet could bring the world together like that, they cracked down on such drug use, causing ravers to switch to anger-facilitating drugs like alcohol, after which concert organizers had to hire special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces2. In a sane world, we would be developing protocols to use such empathogens on hotheads, to prevent them from 'shooting up' grade schools.
That's one of many reasons why I am enjoying writing essays against the Drug War and substance prohibition. It is empowering to be able to do this full time. I am also beginning to see why only the leisured and money classes dominated in the world of philosophy in the past. They were the only ones who had the time to adequately flesh out their own thoughts on important issues. If I was working ten hours a day, I could still write occasional essays, but they would necessarily be rushed and lack annotations and research. My philosophical progress would be limited simply because I would not have the time to elucidate the issues in my own mind. I would also lack the time to read and listen to the philosophers of the past in order to critique their implicit western disdain for 'altered states,' a disdain that they consider to be common sense yet which has never been shared by the indigenous people of the world. All so-called 'tribal peoples' have used psychoactive substances in various ways for the benefit of the individual and the community, in ritual and in mundane settings. All have affirmed the metaphysical reality of holistic truths suggested by the use of psychedelic medicines in particular, as pointed out by Richard Schultes, the world's first ethnobotanist, in his book 'Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers3.'
I have given myself the task of pointing out, first, why the west has this illogical disdain for psychoactive medicines, and second, how this 'intoxiphobia4' (as philosopher Russell Newcombe describes it) is the cause of needless suffering around the world. For the Drug War ideology basically amounts to this:
If a psychoactive substance can be theoretically misused by a white American young person for one reason, at one dose, in one situation, it must not be used by anyone, anywhere, at any dose, in any situation.
There are hundreds of millions of victims of this anti-scientific dictum around the world, people who suffer in silence behind closed doors, all because we outlaw obvious godsends based on selfish fears promulgated by racist demagogues. The fact is, of course, that all risky activities have victims - rock climbing, free diving, car driving, etc. - but until the subject came to drugs, that fact was never considered to be a reason for outlawing those activities. Even if 'drugs' had no benefits whatsoever, drug prohibition would be a counterproductive policy and completely at odds with the freedoms upon which Jefferson founded America, especially our right to the use of Mother Nature, which is explicit in the Natural Law from which the Founding Father took inspiration5. Such prohibition, moreover, would ensure corrupt drug supply and the formation of cartels, etc. Of course, the idea that drugs have no good uses can only be maintained by those who ignore several inconvenient truths, starting with the well-established link between mood and health, to be further discussed below.
But the fact is that the kinds of drugs that we outlaw in the west have inspired entire religions. Even if we grant that their criminalization could save a white American young person from themselves, it could do so only by outsourcing the downsides of prohibition to minorities and foreigners: to minorities in the form of drive-by shootings in inner cities, and to foreigners in the form of death squads and corrupted governments. Sixty thousand Mexicans have been 'disappeared' in the last 20 years in Mexico alone thanks to the U.S.-inspired War on Drugs south of the border - a fact which almost no mainstream news outlet ever connects with American drug policy6.
The media today is equally clueless about the causes of inner-city violence, even though it was drug prohibition which first armed such communities to the teeth. Prohibition created vicious drug gangs in the same way that liquor prohibition created the Mafia. And yet reporters on the beat seem baffled by the ongoing crime. 'Is it a result of joblessness?' they ask. 'How about global warming?' The Drug War is like a murdering magician: it can hide its victims in plain sight. The job of the philosopher is to awaken America from its 'dogmatic slumbers' by connecting the dots between cause and effect.
But violence is merely one of the more obvious downsides of drug prohibition (i.e., the outlawing of psychoactive medicine). There are deep philosophical problems with the Drug War ideology, problems that yet have consequences in the real world. Even Drug War opponents are unaware of these latter downsides. Why? Because they live and breathe the air of a society whose very way of thinking has brought these downsides about.
American sciences, psychology included, operate today according to the hateful doctrine of behaviorism, which tells us that human feelings do not matter except insofar as they can be quantified. If you tell a behaviorist that laughing gas cheers you up and its occasional use gives you something to look forward to, THEREBY IMPROVING YOUR OVERALL MOOD AND HEALTH, the behaviorist will just tell you, 'So you say, but I have to figure out if laughing gas can REALLY help you.' In other words, the behaviorist is on a metaphysical quest, in search of quantitative data that will 'prove' that laughing gas REALLY works for you. In still other words, the behaviorist as such is obliged to ignore common sense.
And since no one with money has the inclination to fund the 'scientific' study of laughing gas for therapeutic purposes, the FDA seeks to outlaw nitrous oxide as a 'drug,' this despite the fact that William James urged philosophers to use such substances to study the limits of human perception and the nature of ultimate reality. Readers Digest has said for 100 years that 'laughter is the best medicine,' and yet materialist doctors are bound by dogma to ignore the fact. If laughing gas is 'abused' today, it is simply because we have not provided easy ways for it to be 'used' appropriately, nor have we set any value on drug education. To the contrary, the national drug policy is all about inspiring fear about drugs, not spreading unbiased facts about the costs AND benefits of specific drug use. In a sane world, the suicidal would be given laughing-gas kits in the same way that we give epi pens to those with extreme allergies. But Americans prefer to demonize drugs rather than to use them for human benefit7.
In short, laughing gas 'works!' Everybody knows it. We have learned to ignore the obvious under the idea that 'science knows best.' But it is time to question science when it cannot even decide whether laughing gas could help the depressed! That is a confusion that only eight or more years of expensive schooling could bring about.
I am the only philosopher in the world who formally complained to the FDA about their plans to regulate laughing gas as a 'drug.' I was the only philosopher who stood up for William James and for the freedom of academia, this despite the fact that I sent over a hundred personal emails to the philosophers at Oxford and Harvard in an attempt to get them to do likewise. Like most of my letters related to drug policy, those were all ignored8. But then that's fine. It's even good. All the more glory for me in having carried the banner of free inquiry all by myself!
How did we get to such a pass? How is it that 'being scientific' in America now requires one to ignore the obvious when it comes to drugs: to ignore anecdote, to ignore history, and even to ignore psychological common sense?
As physicist David Bohm writes, the modern theories of relativity and quantum physics have at least one thing in common: they both tell us that reality must be judged in context and not by studying isolated parts. He points out the irony that physicists have understood this for some time now, while fields like biology and psychology do not seem to have gotten the memo. He says that this is particularly unfortunate in the latter field, wherein context and 'flow' is crucial to understanding.
'Thus we arrive at the very odd result,' writes Bohm, 'that in the study of life and mind, which are just the fields in which formative cause acting in undivided and unbroken flowing movement is most evident to experience and observation, there is now the strongest belief in the fragmentary atomistic approach to reality9.'
The reductive focus of psychology has one benefit, however: it helps the field of psychology to toe the drug-war party line that outlawed substances have no known uses - for, indeed, if one ignores anecdote, history and psychological common sense, there is no 'proof' that psychoactive substances 'work,' unless one spends a great deal of time and money looking under microscopes for the proof that is staring one straight in the face.
The fact is that ANY psychoactive substance could be used as an antidepressant - at some dose, under some regimen, for certain people, in certain situations - either by itself or as part of a common-sense therapy involving numerous substances. The human mind can imagine creative protocols for treating depression with any drug or drugs that inspires and elates - at some dosage, in some cases, at certain times, for certain people. But the Drug Warrior hates specifics like these and wants us to consider only the worst-imaginable scenarios for such drug use.
This is why the Drug War is not just a collection of a few misguided laws designed to target hedonists. It represents a whole misguided way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some.
This Drug War ideology is even relevant to a discussion of physical diseases.
Immediately, when there is a suspicion of Disease A, the health professional advises Procedure B and Diet C, all based on what has worked best for patients in similar cases.
The westerner will ask, 'Well, Brian, what else can they say?'
Answer: Maybe nothing in the age of the Drug War, especially if they want to keep their jobs. But that is the whole point! For there is plenty more to say.
There is a whole world of psychoactive medicine that can improve mood - and so improve health! There is a causal connection between good attitude and good therapeutic outcomes. This linkage is even accepted by modern science, albeit grudgingly. And yet if this connection were really clear to Americans, they would be demanding the immediate re-legalization of all psychoactive substances.
Opium works by a sort of psychological magic, at least when used purposefully by an educated person. As Jim Hogshire explains in 'Opium for the Masses,' the drug has no more analgesic power than mere aspirin; its strength lies in its ability to make the opium smoker view their pain differently10. Thus in the Lovecraft story 'The Crawling Chaos,' the painful pounding inside the narrator's head transforms into the painless pounding of a violent sea upon the seashore, thanks to the storyteller's ingestion of opium. The narrator is suddenly enabled to consider his pain metaphorically: he experiences it as being something outside himself, as something to be observed calmly and analytically. This, in fact, is an extraordinary gift with obvious potential uses in psychotherapy. Patients under the influence of opium could instantly assume the objective point of view with respect to their maladies. That's an ability that most psychotherapists and counselors spend decades attempting to cultivate in their patients, and then mostly in vain. Surely such mental control is a positive drug effect, not a negative one. Opium smokers can instantly become that fabled mystic on the mountaintop who, after long decades of practice, has become insensible to pain and irritation by dint of sheer creative mental power. This enormous gift from opium, however, is just one of the endless drug-inspired benefits that we are told that we must forego - nay, that we must not even imagine -- in fealty to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization and the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
To quote Poe from 'Ligeia':
'Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor?'
Answer: Nobody. And we will NOT know until America rejects both substance prohibition and the inhuman ideology of behaviorism.
And yet the materialist healthcare system discounts this power entirely, and declares that there are inevitable negative outcomes to specific physical diseases unless one follows what has been proven scientifically to work.
Miracles happen, however, and they are all due to attitude, whether that attitude is ascribed to the sufferer's religion or merely to their bull-headedness.
The fact is, we cannot talk advisedly about the limits of the power of the human mind until we once again give it the freedom to use psychoactive medicines. Only then will we know what the mind can and cannot accomplish with respect to keeping illness at bay. This will require a wide variety of quixotic individual experiments based on a wide variety of unique variables -- in a world in which context always matters and the whole is greater than the parts. It will be an ongoing project, with results being shared freely and even lovingly, in an effort to promote safe and beneficial drug use for all, while teaching how to avoid unwanted chemical dependency and how to renounce it effectively over time if it were to develop -- how to renounce it without the gnashing of teeth which we moderns think is a natural requisite on such occasions. Until we are free to use the common-sense expediency of 'fighting drugs with drugs,' we will not know whether the kicking of a given dependency or addiction requires immense suffering, or whether that suffering is just an artefact of drug laws which essentially force modern rehab to mean 'going cold turkey.' In the common-sense world, the withdrawing individual could use a variety of strategically chosen, non-addictive drugs, drugs that can inspire and elate and which work via different biochemical pathways than those of the unwanted substance. It is common sense that such assistance will help keep the withdrawing individual on track for renouncing a problematic substance for good - not a substance that is problematic in itself, remember, but rather one which has proven problematic for a specific individual11.
And yet the medical institution is stuck on materialist approaches that totally ignore the power of mind. And when they find a drug that promotes a positive mental attitude, they pick it apart wearing the blinders of reductive materialism, looking for the specific way in which the drug helps with a specific condition. They are dogmatically incapable of judging the drug holistically. This is why they should not be involved in judging drugs at all. The proof of psychoactive medicine is in its glaringly obvious power to elate and inspire. We do not need a scientist to come along and tell us it is not 'really' working. We do not need to establish 'proof' for every single condition, that the drug is working in some direct way for that specific condition. That is not how holistic medicines work. A drug like psilocybin cheers one up overall... AND THEREFORE HELPS WITH SPECIFIC THINGS LIKE DIABETES. There need be no 'diabetes pathway' or 'stomach pathway' or 'depression pathway' in the brain to show that such drugs work for diabetes or for stomach aches or for depression. Holistic drugs need not live up to our reductionist expectations.
That's why it is depressing to read the accounts of scientists trying to figure out if psilocybin can help for things like diabetes. They are picking the drug apart like tenured scavengers, trying to find what's so special about it, in complete denial of the obvious, but rather in search for physical causes and effects which will let them see the wonder through the eyes of a physicist, as who should say, 'Nothing to see here. A just causes B which causes C which causes D.' And so the search is always on for a specific biochemical way that a time-honored substance like psilocybin is improving things with respect to one particular illness at a time. It is imperialist science, imposing western reductionist criteria on drugs whose whole benefit consists in the holistic nature of their effects! The result is that progress is glacial for drug approval. Sufferers have to sit back and wait until their particular condition is finally studied by psilocybin researchers - and those who wish spiritual revelation will have to wait the longest. Because the materialist's unspoken goal is to prove that such substances are 'nothing but' things that the scientist can understand and point to. The fact that drugs can work indirectly, holistically, is foreign to them, even though it makes perfect psychological common sense that a good attitude, drug-inspired or not, can help one keep disease at bay and/or lessen its severity.
But then it was a category error to place scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine to begin with. The drug-using individual is the expert on their own mental states. To paraphrase Pascal, 'The mind has its own reasons, which materialist science does not know.' If help is needed, then the user should be turning to what I call 'pharmacologically savvy empaths' - empathic individuals with a wide-ranging understanding of the effects of a wide variety of psychoactive substances and a knowledge of how to use them safely, by themselves or in combination, as part of an overall protocol to achieve the psychosocial goals of the users, not the goals of the empath. This is a practice that would unite the safety interests of western medicine with the holistic knowhow of the indigenous world12.
This is why the end of the Drug War requires a change in the American attitude toward life. We need an holistic outlook, one in which peace and love matter and wholeness is paramount instead of fragmentation. Unfortunately, for now, the world seems to be moving further from such a world than closer. Perhaps the most realistic goal we can shoot for at this time is to get the United States government to graciously accede to the requests of other countries to view drugs differently, according to holistic principles and psychological common sense. If the U.S. cannot wrap its collective head around the fact that drugs have tremendous positive uses, perhaps they can be inspired with just enough humility and self-doubt to convince themselves to let another country try another approach to drugs, one in which ignorance and racism are the evils, not drugs. For now, however, the U.S. is in such denial about their own pathological approach to psychoactive substances that they insist that the entire world follow suit on pain of economic reprisal. Sadly, less arm twisting seems to be required for that purpose than one might have imagined. Authoritarian leaders see the Drug War as just another way to crack down on undesirables. Besides, if the Drug War is supported by America, the most ostensibly free country in the world, why should less freedom-oriented nations do otherwise?
In short, the evils of the Drug War are just too big to be seen. In addition to the downsides mentioned above, the Drug War has destroyed the fourth amendment of the U.S. Constitution through indiscriminate drug testing and outlawed the freedom of religion, with our courts almost always denying the legitimacy of any faith that uses psychoactive sacraments. The Drug War even played a decisive role in ending American democracy by throwing millions of minorities in jail and so handing election victories to Drug Warriors, culminating with the victory of the Fearmonger in Chief in November 2024. For the Drug War is all about fearmongering, and fearmongering has always been the political M.O. of the Blamer in Chief in Washington, D.C.
Materialism
Materialist scientists collaborate with the drug war by refusing to see glaringly obvious drug benefits. They acknowledge only those benefits that they believe are visible under a microscope. The Hindu religion would not exist today had materialist scientists held soma to such a standard. But that's the absurd pass to which prohibition eventually brings us in a society wherein materialist science is the new god: scientists are put in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to imagine new religions or not.
This materialist bias is inspired in turn by behaviorism, the anti-indigenous doctrine of JB Watson that makes the following inhumane claim:
"Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic."
According to this view, the hopes and the dreams of a "patient" are to be ignored. Instead, we are to chart their physiology and brain chemistry.
JB Watson's Behaviorism is a sort of Dr. Spock with a vengeance. It is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it would seem to justify all their inability to deal with human emotions. Unfortunately, the attitude has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive usage reports or historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide how they are doing. It is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with drug war ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants.
That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a bar chart.
In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.
This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.
How do I know this?
Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.
More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?
This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
This massive concern for safety is downright bizarre in a country that will not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.
In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan says psychedelic legalization would endanger young people. What? Prohibition forces users to decide for themselves which mushrooms are toxic, or to risk buying contaminated product. And that's safe, Michael?
In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.
Critics tell me that drugs have nothing to offer us. What? Not only are they being psychologically naive and completely ahistorical, but they are forgetting that the term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they connote.
We need to push back against the very idea that the FDA is qualified to tell us what works when it comes to psychoactive medicines. Users know these things work. That's what counts. The rest is academic foot dragging.
More materialist nonsense. "We" are the only reason that the universe exists as a universe rather than as inchoate particles.
In fact, that's what we need when we finally return to legalization: educational documentaries showing how folks manage to safely incorporate today's hated substances into their life and lifestyle.
Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.
Alcohol makes me sleepy. But NOT coca wine. The wine gives you an upbeat feeling of controlled energy, without the jitters of coffee and without the fury of steroids. It increases rather than dulls mental focus.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs: an open letter to a reader, published on February 22, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
share your concern about violent games for kids. Unfortunately, such games are clearly a reflection of American values these days. America just does not care much for peace, love and understanding. That's why they cracked down on the use of psychedelics in the '60s, and not (as Michael Pollan claims1) out of an interest in public health. Nixon and company wanted to put the flower children in jail, not to educate them about the wise use of psychoactive substances. The powers-that-be in the UK hate peace, love and understanding as well. The use of the drug Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace, love and understanding to the dance floors of 1990s Britain. But the government missed the forest for the trees. Instead of marveling that a small, extremely safe and non-addictive tablet could bring the world together like that, they cracked down on such drug use, causing ravers to switch to anger-facilitating drugs like alcohol, after which concert organizers had to hire special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces2. In a sane world, we would be developing protocols to use such empathogens on hotheads, to prevent them from 'shooting up' grade schools.
You have been reading an article entitled, Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs: an open letter to a reader, published on February 22, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
