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Addiction



by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





January 17, 2025

2025 update

Addiction is a loaded term in the age of the Drug War. There are at least four reasons why this is so.

  1. The Drug War does everything it can to make drug use problematic.

  2. The Drug War outlaws all drugs that could help folks get off of an undesired drug. For more on this latter topic, see my essay on "Fighting Drugs with Drugs."


  3. The Drug War ensures that users will have access only to the handful of substances that dealers find it profitable and practical to offer. It is therefore likely that the user will show a disproportionate interest in one particular drug, thereby increasing their potential for addiction.


  4. This negative outcome is all the more likely in the age of the Drug War when public policy holds that it's wrong to educate, that it's wrong to speak honestly about drugs and drug use.


Until we end the Drug War and attempt to fight addiction with psychological common sense -- something that materialist science ignores -- we can draw no conclusions about the degree to which addiction is an enormous problem versus an artefact of Drug War ideology itself.

Meanwhile, it is a little "too convenient" for materialist science to tell us that there are "addictive types" out there. First of all, that is an anti-scientific conclusion for it assumes that substance prohibition is a natural baseline, whereas it greatly influences every aspect of drug use. We will not know how large a problem addiction really is until we renounce Drug War policies which do everything they can to render drug use problematic.

There is also an unrecognized moral judgment involved when we describe a desire for drug experiences as pathological. Drug use represents a desire to transcend one's apparent limits in life (whether psychological, vocational, familial, etc.) and should not be categorized as pathological in itself. Indeed, an argument could be made that one is pathological, or masochistic, when they accept an emotionally or vocationally stifled life without taking every step possible to transcend one's limitations, by hook or crook, whether by meditation and jogging or by drug use. And we can hardly blame the transcendence seeker for botching the job of drug use when we as a society have done everything we can to make drug use risky through failing to regulate product, failing to provide options, and failure to provide education.

It's "rich" when materialist scientists tell us that our desire for drugs is pathological. These are the same people who cannot see any of the glaringly obvious benefits of drug use. Their behaviorist principles prevent them from even signing off on laughing gas for the depressed. Who cares if we laugh while using it, the materialist insists on finding a "real" cure for our depression, you know, like the Big Pharma antidepressants upon which one in four American women are dependent for life. That's bad enough, of course, but the materialists practice a kind of aggressive myopia when they go on to tell us that we are actually physically ill if we insist on obtaining the transcendence that drugs could provide.

There is a materialist agenda at work here: one that holds that we are merely the product of invisible chemical forces and that psychology does not matter. It is the hateful doctrine that blinds modern doctors to common sense. The world is our oyster when we adopt a common-sense shamanic approach to drug use, when we look at drugs not as threats, but as a means to self-understanding and insight. Until we change our world view on this topic, reductionist science will continue taking us down the path of pill mills and victim blaming.

The answer lies in the realization that empathic and experienced drug users are the experts when it comes to altered states and drug use, not materialist scientists. These modern shamans would combine the best of the east and the west. They would have a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances worldwide and would focus on the ways that they have been used profitably, by individuals and by societies, to achieve positive goals in the lives of individuals and communities.

This is why I created this entire site back in 2019, because I realized that vanquishing the Drug War cannot be accomplished by merely tweaking laws. It cannot be accomplished by merely moving a few white-privileged substances from the "drugs" category to the "meds" category. We need to drive a stake through the heart of Drug War ideology itself, and that requires an entire change of attitude on the part of the western world. We need to realize that materialist scientists are not the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine and that human beings are not robots and that it is wrong to judge holistic-acting drugs by reductionist standards. The proof of efficacy of psychoactive drugs is to be found in anecdote and history and psychological common sense and not by looking under a microscope!

We could also add a fifth problem with the concept of "addiction." We live in a world in which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma meds for life. This is not considered wrong: in fact, it is considered a positive good! We are told we need to "keep taking our meds." And yet if a person smokes opium nightly, they are considered an addict. Apparently it is fine to be chemically dependent, but it's wrong to use a drug that, in theory, could cause cravings when stopped.

That's an insane standard. Why is it wrong for a drug to cause cravings when stopped but it's fine for a drug to make you merely feel like hell when it's stopped?

Insanity! Unexamined assumptions all down the line!



Author's Follow-up: January 18, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up





The materialist will object that there are clear correlations that have been established between genetics and a propensity for, say, alcoholism. But this is not the issue here. The question is, how much would those propensities matter in an educated world in which alternatives to alcohol were freely available, alternatives that gave the "users" the same (or better) emotional relief than that provided by alcohol?

In other words, those who study alcoholism are reckoning without the Drug War. They incorrectly assume that substance prohibition is a natural baseline from which to study so-called "substance abuse," whereas such social policy has a definite and enormous effect on the subject-related outcomes in the real world. Such researchers get to this point by ignoring psychological common sense. The Drug War (and our lack of drug education and research) leave the alcoholic with no way to get their desired "lift" but with alcohol. Why are we then surprised when certain biochemically or genetically predisposed people develop a problematical relationship with liquor? We set them up for failure with the disastrous social policy of drug prohibition and enforced ignorance.

In a sane world, pharmacologically savvy empaths would find safe use protocols for using a wide variety of substances that we demonize today, such that we can profit from them as safely as possible, meanwhile avoiding those substances whose use is rendered unacceptably risky for us personally on account of our own personal genetic and biochemical makeup. We would no longer simply globally outlaw the substances that seem to pose a risk to white American young people in the fevered imagination of racist Drug Warriors -- those hypocrites who fight to outlaw time-honored panaceas while giving a greenlight to the infinitely larger threats of alcohol, guns, and cigarettes.



Addiction






Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the drug war censors honest talk about drug use.

In short, until we end the drug war, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.

Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both drug war ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.

  • Addicted to Addiction
  • Addicted to Ignorance
  • Addiction
  • America's Invisible Addiction Crisis
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How Prohibition Causes Addiction
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Modern Addiction Treatment as Puritan Indoctrination
  • Night of the Addicted Americans
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Prohibition Spectrum Disorder
  • Public Service Announcements for the Post-Drug War Era
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism
  • Sherlock Holmes versus Gabor Maté
  • Tapering for Jesus
  • The aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependency
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism




  • Next essay: Clodhoppers on Drugs
    Previous essay: When Drug Warriors cry 'Censorship!'
    More Essays Here


    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)






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    Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

    Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."
    Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war: "clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
    This is why I call the drug war 'fanatical Christian Science.' People would rather have grandpa die than to let him use laughing gas or coca or opium or MDMA, etc. etc.
    The FDA is not qualified to tell us whether holistic medicines work. They hold such drugs to materialist standards and that's pharmacological colonialism.
    We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).
    Think you can handle a horse? So did Christopher Reeves. The fact is, NOBODY can handle a horse. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
    Someone should stand outside Jefferson's estate and hand out leaflets describing the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello to confiscate poppy plants. That raid was against everything Jefferson stood for. The TJ Foundation DISHONORED JEFFERSON and their visitors should know that!
    Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.
    Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.
    The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
    More Tweets






    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, Addiction published on January 17, 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)