William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas

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William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas

an open letter to Steve Taylor, author of 'The Genius of William James'

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

January 27, 2023

Dear Mr. Taylor:

I just read your enjoyable and informative article in Psychology Today on "The Genius of William James," and would like to share a few thoughts with you on this topic, should you find the time to read them.

Update: June 21, 2025

1. Regarding your fascinating thoughts on time, I have recently read similar observations in works by Wolfgang Smith, who points out how Cartesian conceptions force us to think of time in ways that do not square with the ways that we actually experience it.

2. I share your views on human consciousness. I like to look at the brain as a radio receiver for consciousness, as one of many ways of interacting with consciousness, so to say. If the brain is damaged, it need not mean that consciousness is "damaged," any more than damaging a single computer will damage the Internet or damaging a TV will damage the national television networks.

3. Regarding warfare, you write: "human societies need to find an equivalent activity that brings the same collective and individual benefits of war—without causing death and devastation." The fact is that ravers have already found such an activity: it is the use of MDMA , or empathogens in general. The use of Ecstasy in the 1990s brought together every race in color in unprecedented harmony on the British dance floors. The problem is that Drug War ideology holds the anti-scientific notion that criminalized substances can have no positive uses, for anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason, ever.

Speaking of the Drug War, I would like to end with a sort of call for action, please. As you may know, England is getting ready to outlaw nitrous oxide, as America has already effectively done. Not only does this deny godsend medicine to millions, but it effectively outlaws philosophical investigations about the nature of consciousness and reality itself. For as you know, the use of nitrous oxide strongly influenced William James' ontology. In fact, that ontology would be very different had William James been obliged to refrain from using that substance.

Therefore I would humbly encourage you to join me in protesting the Drug War's ongoing attempts to outlaw all substances (like laughing gas ) that give us hints of a non-materialistic world. This is one reason why materialism ¹ has such staying power: because the Drug War has outlawed precisely those substances whose use tends to cast doubt on our materialist premises. This Drug War is surely a war on science and human progress and, in my view, it is our duty to denounce it as such.

Thank you for your time and your consideration of my ideas!

PS If there are problems with the use of N2O or any other substance, we need to educate people, not criminalize use and thereby end our investigations of ultimate reality. The money we spend on law enforcement should be spent on sending healthcare workers into affected communities and spreading the news about safe use practices. The alternative is scientific censorship.

For more about laughing gas and William James:

For more about the outlawing of MDMA ²

Here's why modern psychology is so baffled by drug use:

Nitrous Oxide: Possession of laughing gas to be criminal offence"

Author's Follow-up:

June 21, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

Mr. Taylor has not yet seen fit to respond to my open letter, this despite the fact that the FDA has been working in the meantime to criminalize laughing gas , the substance whose use shaped William James' renegade attitude toward materialism. But then it is rare to find an article about James that even admits that he ever worked with laughing gas ³ . Even James' online bio at Harvard University fails to point out that politically incorrect truth, no doubt because it is so at odds with the reigning view of behaviorism and materialism in academia. James created both the psychology department and the psychology field itself at Harvard and yet his legacy on this topic is ignored even there. Ironically, even Taylor's article on the Psychology Today website is being "sponsored" today by a company that promotes a materialist view of "mental illness ⁴ ." The ad for Liven, a self-help app, tells us that: "Procrastination is not laziness. It is a depression response." In other words, depression, according to the app makers, is identical in kind to liver disease or a headache. Medical professionals are the supposed experts when it comes to mind and mood.

This is a huge power grab by medical science, if Americans would only recognize it as such -- and for the Big Pharma ⁵ ⁶ companies, too, given that drug prohibition gives them a monopoly on providing mind and mood medicine. We are talking about a multi-billion-dollar business opportunity for medical science based on the category error of placing materialists in charge of mind medicine. With such money at stake, it is little wonder that the pushback against the jaundiced materialist outlook will be half-hearted, even to the point of rewriting history. I have contacted dozens of philosophers on this subject over the last three years, in the States and in England, and I have yet to find one who acknowledges a problem with the way that academia has rewritten James' history to avoid offending both materialist and Drug War sensibilities. I remain the only philosopher in the world to have officially protested the FDA's plans to treat nitrous oxide as a "drug," thereby making it even less available to philosophers (and to the depressed) than it already is.

In America, we would rather fear drugs than to use them to stop the depressed from killing themselves. In America, we would rather fear drugs than to allow for academic freedom.

Laughing Gas

Materialism

Notes:

1: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
2: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
3: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
4: How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs DWP (up)
5: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
6: 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)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Our tolerance for freedom wanes in proportion as we consider "drugs" to be demonic. This is the dark side behind the new ostensibly comic genre about Cocaine Bears and such. It shows that Americans are superstitious about drugs in a way that Neanderthals would have understood.

Researchers insult our intelligence when they tell us that drugs like MDMA and opium and laughing gas have not been proven to work. Everyone knows they work. That's precisely why drug warriors hate them.

The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.

Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!

Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.

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.

If drug warriors were serious about saving lives, they'd outlaw guns, cars, and all pleasure trips to Mars.

If media were free in America, you'd see documentaries about people using drugs wisely for a wide variety of praiseworthy purposes.

Our government treats drugs like uranium and spends hundreds of billions of dollars trying to scare us about them.

How else will they scare us enough to convince us to give up all our freedoms for the purpose of fighting horrible awful evil DRUGS? DRUGS is the sledgehammer with which they are destroying American democracy.

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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