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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



ear 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 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:
Keep Laughing Gas Legal: Everyone is so concerned about the safety of a relatively small number of young people, whom we fail to educate about drugs, yet no one ever worries about the MILLIONS of folks like myself who are living what Thoreau called 'lives of quiet desperation.'

For more about the outlawing of MDMA
How the Drug War killed Leah Betts: How the British government discouraged research that could have saved Leah Betts, meanwhile shutting down the rave scene Camelot and replacing it with gangsters and crack

Here's why modern psychology is so baffled by drug use:
The Philosophy of Drug Use: There is not a drug problem among celebrities: there is a problem of ego and choking.


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. 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." 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 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.




William James






William James (1842-1910) is considered the founder of American psychology. He urged philosophers to study the effects of substances like laughing gas for what they could tell us about reality writ large. And yet the bio of the man on the website of the Harvard Psychology Department fails to even mention this 'call to arms.' And so Harvard rewrites history to jibe with drug war prejudices, just as the Thomas Jefferson Foundation refuses to discuss the fact that it helped federal agents confiscate the founding father's poppy plants in a 1987 raid by Ronald Reagan's DEA. Existing institutions are all about normalizing the drug war by pretending that it does not exist. This saves our materialist psychologists and philosophers at Harvard from having to confront James' unpopular holistic views with rational arguments of their own. Instead, they can simply declare a victory for materialism by pretending that those views of his do not even exist! This is just one of the many reasons why I say that we live in a make-believe world today thanks to drug prohibition, one in which all of our major institutions ignore the role that prohibition has played -- and continues to play -- in skewing our views of reality.

  • A Philosophical Review of 'The Varieties of Religious Experience': How William James failed to connect the dots
  • After the Drug War: what a free world would look like
  • Christian Science and Drugs: What Mary Baker-Eddy Got Right
  • Clueless Philosophers: Rationality self-destructs in the face of authoritarian abuse of power
  • Conservative Lies about Drugs
  • End Drug Prohibition Now: an open letter to Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century
  • Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide
  • How AI turned William James into a Drug Warrior: letter to the editors of New Scientist
  • How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James: an open letter to Psychology Professor Matthew K. Nock
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Philosophy: by privileging materialists with unearned victories
  • I asked 100 American philosophers what they thought about the Drug War: Every one of them took the fifth
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Keep Laughing Gas Legal: Open letter to Niamh Eastwood (Executive Director of Release) and Dr. David Nicholl (NHS neurologist), in response to their recent interview about laughing gas on Channel 5, UK
  • Listening to Laughing Gas
  • Majoring in Drug War Philosophy: an open letter to Professor David Nutt
  • Soma and the Anesthetic Revelation: How William James failed to connect the dots
  • Ten Points that no one ever makes about so-called Drugs
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants: an open letter to Frederick S. Barrett, Ph.D., cognitive neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter: an open letter to the Drug Policy Alliance
  • The Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
  • The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War
  • The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs
  • Why Philosophers Need to Stop Dogmatically Ignoring Drugs: an open letter to Matthew D. Segall PhD
  • Why Science is the Handmaiden of the Drug War: an open letter to physicist Carlo Rovelli
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs: an open letter to a reader
  • Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas: The laughable proposal to crack down on nitrous oxide
  • 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'
  • You Have Been Gaslit!: or, when someone tells you that your entire life has been a mistake

  • Laughing Gas






    Laughing gas is the substance that inspired William James' philosophy about human perception and the nature of ultimate reality. "No account of the universe in its totality," wrote James, "can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." And yet disregard them we must because the drug war has outlawed all substances that help create such states. This is a veto on human progress. It is also psychological common sense that laughing gas could be used to prevent suicides and treat depression -- but materialist science ignores common sense. This is why they need to butt out when it comes to psychoactive medicine. They are no experts on emotional states, except in their own dogmatic materialist minds. It is a category error to place materialists in charge of our thoughts and feelings. We actually know what works for ourselves. And if there are any experts in the field, they are not materialists, they are pharmacologically savvy empaths, what the indigenous world calls shaman.

  • Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Keep Laughing Gas Legal: Open letter to Niamh Eastwood (Executive Director of Release) and Dr. David Nicholl (NHS neurologist), in response to their recent interview about laughing gas on Channel 5, UK
  • Listening to Laughing Gas
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter: an open letter to the Drug Policy Alliance
  • Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas: The laughable proposal to crack down on nitrous oxide
  • 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'

  • Materialism






    In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James demonstrated how materialists are blind to the depth and meaning of psychological states of ecstasy and transcendence -- or in other words the states that are peculiar to mystics like St. Teresa... and to those who use psychoactive substances like laughing gas. The medical materialist is dogmatically dismissive of such states, which explains why they can pretend that godsend medicines that elate and inspire have no positive uses whatsoever:

    "To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce."


    And so 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.





  • A Quantum of Hubris: how know-it-all materialists block scientific progress
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Behaviorism and the War on Drugs: or why doctors and researchers are blind to common sense
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Common Sense and the Drug War: How prohibition and materialistic science work together to turn Americans into babies when it comes to psychoactive medicine
  • Constructive criticism of the MAPS strategy for re-legalizing MDMA
  • David Chalmers and the Drug War: how reductive materialism ruins American healthcare
  • Dogmatic Dullards: why scientists are the slow kids in the class when it comes to drugs
  • Every Day and in every way, you are getting more and more bamboozled by drug war propaganda
  • Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman
  • How AI turned William James into a Drug Warrior: letter to the editors of New Scientist
  • How Bernardo Kastrup reckons without the drug war: a philosophical review of 'Why Materialism is Baloney'
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Scientific Materialism Keeps Godsend Medicines from the Depressed
  • I've got a bone to pick with Jim Hogshire: a philosophical review of 'Opium for the Masses'
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Materialism and the Drug War
  • Materialism and the Drug War Part II: open letter to the Discovery Institute
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart: author of 'Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear'
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith: author of 'The Quantum Enigma'
  • Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II: just when you thought it was safe to go back into the insane asylum...
  • The Inhumanity of Drug Prohibition: and its roots in materialist morality
  • The Poorly Hidden Materialist Agenda at Scientific American: in response to the September 2024 issue
  • Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk: how sci-fi nerds ignore the healing power of Mother Nature
  • What Can the Chemical Hold?: a review of the paper by Katherine Hendy on Academia.edu
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs: an open letter to a reader
  • 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'
  • Without Philosophy, Science becomes Scientism





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    Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

    By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.
    The Drug War is the most important evil to protest, precisely because almost everybody is afraid to do so. That's a clear sign that it is a cancer on the body politic.
    Someone has to speak up for the hundreds of millions of souls who go without godsend medicine merely because the drugs in question could theoretically be misused by America's young people, those young people whom America refuses "on principle" to teach about safe use.
    The Partnership for a Death Free America is launching a campaign to celebrate the 50th year of Richard Nixon's War on Drugs. We need to give credit where credit's due for the mass arrest of minorities, the inner city gun violence and the civil wars that it's generated overseas.
    In an article about Mazatec mushroom use, the author says: "Mushrooms should not be considered a drug." He misses the point: NOTHING should be considered a drug: every substance has potential good uses.
    M. Pollan says "not so fast" when it comes to drug re-legalization. I say FAST? I've gone a whole lifetime w/o access to Mother Nature's plants. How can a botanist approve of that? Answer: By ignoring all legalization stakeholders except for the kids whom we refuse to educate.
    Michael Pollan is the Leona Helmsley of the Drug War. He uses outlawed drugs freely while failing to support the re-legalization of Mother Nature. Drug laws are apparently for the little people.
    Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.
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    Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
    More Tweets



    The latest hits from Drug War Records, featuring Freddie and the Fearmongers!


    1. Requiem for the Fourth Amendment



    2. There's No Place Like Home (until the DEA gets through with it)



    3. O Say Can You See (what the Drug War's done to you and me)






    front cover of Drug War Comic Book

    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, 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', published on January 27, 2023 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)