After the Drug War

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

After the Drug War

what a free world would look like

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 29, 2025

In a free world, drugs would not be the enemy. The enemies would be ignorance and unwanted dependency. In such a world, we would actually teach people how to use drugs as safely as possible. We would even encourage drug use in cases where it might prove beneficial. For in such a world, we would actually prefer that a suicidal person use drugs that elate and inspire rather than to have them commit suicide ¹. Imagine that! We would actually prefer that they use drugs rather than to have their brains fried by electroshock therapy ². Imagine that! We would actually prefer that a hothead use MDMA ³ rather than to shoot up a grade school ⁴. Imagine that! We would recognize, moreover, that there are many worse things than drug use, especially given the fact that many drugs can inspire and elate without the threat of addiction - and that even addictive drugs are used wisely by most people ⁵. In other words, in such a world, we would recognize the obvious. We would realize that drug use is like any other risky activity on the globe, like horseback riding and drinking, that it will have its victims, and that our goal can only be to make the activity as safe and beneficial as possible in a way consistent with democratic liberties. In other words, all drugs would be re-legalized. That is, they will be returned to the legal status that they have enjoyed throughout most of human history, until the arrival of racist and xenophobic American politicians who decided in the 20th century to use drug laws to disempower minorities and foreigners.

In this free world that I envision, we would actually study drugs to find common-sense ways to ensure their safe use and to steer potential problem users to better drug choices and better protocols. For the first time in world history, researchers would set forth with the freedom and resources necessary to study potential uses for ALL psychoactive drugs in the world, both natural and synthetic. This study would ask and answer the following question: how can we best use ANY of the psychoactive substances in the world (or any combination thereof) to help individuals live the best life possible, according to THEIR definition of that outcome (whether the goal of use be to study harder, to appreciate music more deeply, or even to help people commune with their God). In such a study, the effectiveness of drugs for such purposes would not be established by behaviorist standards ⁶, which tell us to ignore everything that really counts in life, such as the "mere" happiness and optimism of the user. We would no longer be dogmatically blind to the benefit of psychoactive substances based on our slavish adherence to the principles of the inhumane and long-obsolete psychology of J.B. Watson ⁷. Instead, we would muster enough common sense to admit that a person who is motivated and inspired by the strategic use of drugs IS INDEED motivated and inspired thereby - that we need no scientists to come along with a microscope to search still further for a "real" cure in an effort to vindicate materialism ⁸ viz the study of mood and mentation.

In enumerating these aspects of a post-prohibition world, it becomes clear why such ideas gain so little traction in the modern mind. Such a world would call for a moderate capital outlay for public health, after all, and Americans these days are dogmatic skinflints. The mainstream mindset, as personified by America's new king in Washington, D.C., holds that we should spend zero government money on public health. Zero.

This might sound like Libertarianism at first blush ⁹, until we realize that the people who favor such an approach to public health have no problem whatsoever with spending billions on arresting the people whom we refuse to educate and for whom we refuse to do any drug research whatsoever that would conduce to their actually thriving in life. Yes, today's doctrinaire skinflints will gladly spend billions to address drug problems - as long as this means arresting minorities for problematic use and using our drug laws as a means to lord it over countries south of the border, where, indeed, prohibition has long since destroyed the rule of law. These seeming skinflints will spend further billions on fighting wars to enforce our own Drug War prohibitions overseas. In other words, if economics were really all that mattered and the Drug Warriors had an ounce of brains, they would dismantle the enormously expensive military infrastructure that the drug-war approach has erected and spend a fraction of the money that they save thereby to let empathic people with common sense help their fellows to make decisions about drug use based on actual experience and common sense. The fact that such plans are a non-starter with the Drug Warriors belies their real goal, which is not to save money but to arrest minorities and so triumph at the polls as racist and xenophobic demagogues.

But back to utopia - or rather common sense.

All sane people in such a world will have been taught from grade school - not that drugs are wrong, but that prohibition is wrong. When it comes to prohibition, America has been there and done that and the approach has been found to cause endless unnecessary suffering, meanwhile thoroughly censoring the media and academia and leading to the election of tyrants. It has caused death and destruction, creating the Mafia and drug cartels out of whole cloth. It has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America and turned inner cities into shooting galleries. It has destroyed the 1st and 4th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It has censored academia and outlawed the freedom of religion ¹⁰. It has infantilized labor ¹¹ by forcing employees to urinate for their employers, not to identify impairment, but merely to search for Christian Science heretics in the workforce, i.e., those who use substances of which politicians disapprove. It has forced pain patients and the depressed to go without godsend medicines that elate and inspire. It has placed mental and physical pain relief in the hands of federal bureaucrats - and this at the behest of politicians who profess to hate Big Government.

^1435^Such Drug Warriors fail to see that there is no bigger government on earth than a government that calls the shots when it comes to how and how much its citizens are allowed to think and feel in this life. There is no greater government intrusion into the lives of individual citizens than to control their minds like this. This is why I cannot help but laugh when they see these drug-warrior hotshots tooling around town in pickup trucks whose license plates read "Don't tread on me." It's really quite amusing. It's as if these wannabe rebels were telling the government: "Yes, indeed, don't tread on me, damn it! Humph! That said, please continue to tell me how and how much I can think and feel in this life, Mommy!"

Sorry about the digression, but can you blame me? Those Drug Warriors are just so precious when it comes to their counterproductive cluelessness about matters of principle! But now back to the delineation of the free-world zeitgeist already in progress.

All sane people in such a world would learn in grade school a fact that Drug Warriors never grasp: the fact that health is determined by a balance of factors, not by one single input. Health is determined by the unique circumstances of a single individual: their genetics, their biochemistry, their education level, the neurotic hang-ups of their parents, etc. etc. The same drug that seems to be a problem for one person can be a godsend for another. In other words, drugs in themselves are neither healthy nor unhealthy. It is nonsense, therefore, to talk about the healthiness or usefulness of a specific drug in the abstract. And so when we ask, "Is a psychoactive drug useful and appropriate?" the answer must be: "What do you mean? Is it useful and appropriate for whom? at what dose? in what circumstance? for what reason?" The appropriateness of drug use is always dependent on a wide variety of factors - and to come up with one-size-fits-all judgments about individual drugs is therefore insane and productive of great harm. The Drug Warriors try to convince us of the following antiscientific lie: namely, that a substance that may be misused, even in theory, by a white American teenager at one dose, for one reason, in one circumstance, must not be used by anyone, at any dose, for any reason, in any circumstance. It is hard to imagine a viewpoint more likely to produce sorrow and suffering in the world. Our post-Drug War world puts and end to such manipulative choplogic by exposing it for the anti-philosophical garbage that it is.

Yes, there will be victims of freedom - there always are. Young people die from horseback riding. Young people die from climbing cliffs. Young people die from parachuting. But anyone who thinks that this approach to drugs would cause more death and sorrow than the status quo is simply misinformed. The approach here proposed would be all about making drug use as safe as possible, whereas the prohibitionist status quo is all about making drug use as dangerous as possible. For when we outlaw desired substances like drugs, we place their manufacture and distribution in the hands of financially motivated dealers, whose product is uncertain as to quality and quantity, a fact that has led to the misnamed opiate crisis, which is actually a prohibition crisis. Why are folks overdosing, after all, except for the fact that they can have no idea of the exact content and dosage of the substances that they are using? Do we really think that this dystopia of young American deaths is better than the reality that obtained before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, when opiate users could smoke a regulated opium ¹² supply peaceably in their homes, reasonably certain of the quality and quantity of the substance that they were consuming? Moreover, the mindset I advance would provide new but psychologically obvious ways in which folks could kick unwanted dependencies by the common sense method of fighting drugs with drugs ¹³. Most importantly of all, the end of prohibition would remove the incentive for extreme violence and even physical torture that drug prohibition has made an everyday reality in many parts of Latin America.

I could go on listing reasons why education, freedom and common sense provide the best approach to "dealing" with drug use from any conceivable point of view - except for that of a selfish and racist xenophobe, perhaps -- but I fear that those who remain unconvinced at this point are too brainwashed (at best) or too evil (at worst) to benefit from any further elucidation on my part. Perhaps, though, they are laboring under the illusion that drugs have no benefits - which is easy to believe, of course, in a world in which media companies refuse to publish any stories that serve to demonstrate the common-sense benefits of psychoactive substances. With this possibility in mind, let me provide some examples of beneficial drug use as described in drug user reports from Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin ¹⁴ - one of the few pharmacists in the world who was given a chance to legally look for the kinds of beneficial drugs that we are talking about here - despite the DEA's de rigueur attempts to entrap him into illegal activity and so put a stop to his academic freedom ¹⁵. For there is nothing that Drug Warriors hate so much as education and truth.

"An energetic feeling began to take over me. It continued to grow. The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people."

"I am experiencing more deeply than ever before the importance of acknowledging and deeply honoring each human being. And I was able to go through and resolve some judgments with particular persons."

"All emotions and feeling available, but there is a cool perspective which informs all thinking... Could do a lot of learning with this material."¹⁶

And these are the effects of drugs that the DEA tells us have no known positive uses whatsoever -- a lie with which today's scientists connive thanks to their adherence to the emotion-scorning doctrine of behaviorism ¹⁷.

Finally, in a post-Drug War world, we would replace pill-dispensing psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy shaman: highly empathic individuals with a wide historic and anecdotal knowledge of the best and safest ways to benefit from psychoactive medicine ¹⁸. By making this fundamental change in addressing psychological health, we would abolish the entire concept of the mental "patient," for these empathic shaman would counsel anyone and everyone who seeks to improve their psychological life with the help of psychoactive medicine. Whether one is dealing with a clinically defined "depression" or they are seeking to safely and thoroughly study altered states in the manner of William James, they would seek the informed advice of these modern empaths. These knowledgeable and experienced drug users would be a community resource, ready to intervene and educate in cases in which people use drugs unwisely -- for, as stated above, we will hold ignorance to be the enemy in our post-Drug War world rather than superstitiously blaming problems on the inanimate objects that we deride as "drugs."

Why this change? Because it has always been a category error to place materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine. Because we need to stop gaslighting ¹⁹ Americans ²⁰ by telling them that drugs have no beneficial uses, when many, in fact, have GLARINGLY OBVIOUS beneficial uses, when used strategically and intentionally. For more on this topic, see my essay entitled Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism.

AFTERWORD

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I am always trying to anticipate and rebut any likely objections to my essays, so let me conclude by addressing what I call the "Bill Clinton" Fallacy about drug use ²¹. Bill, it might be remembered, once remarked that his brother would have been dead had cocaine ²² ²³ in particular been legal. This objection, however, is easily disposed of. Firstly, Bill does not really know this - and even if he did, his statement begs the question, why is society not teaching Roger about safe use? Secondly, even if we agree with the doubtful assumption that we could "save" the Roger Clintons of the world by enacting prohibition, we can only do so by outsourcing the drug-related dangers to minorities and foreigners. So we save one white American to kill hundreds, if not thousands of Blacks and Mexicans. The outlawing of the coca leaf is the reason why 60,000 Mexicans were "disappeared" in Mexico over the last two decades ²⁴. It sparked a Drug War which destroyed the rule of law in Latin America. What a huge price to keep Roger Clinton safe! There were tens of thousands of gun deaths in inner-cities over the last ten years ²⁵. What a huge price to keep Roger Clinton safe! Moreover, when we outlaw the drug on behalf of uneducated users, we outlaw all manner of responsible use by responsible users. This is tyrannical in the case of psychoactive drugs like coca, whose positive and beneficial uses are limited only by the human imagination. Does the responsible world have to go without godsends because of the ignorance of Roger Clinton - an ignorance that the government refuses to correct on principle, under the warped prohibitionist premise that ignorance is the best policy when it comes to drugs? To paraphrase Shakespeare: "Dost thou think, because Roger Clinton is ignorant, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"²⁶

If we want to save the maximum number of the Roger Clintons of the world in a way that does not throw all would-be responsible drug users under the bus, then we need to educate, not arrest. We need to rethink our entire outlook on drugs along the lines suggested above. In such a re-legalized world, drug use would be as safe as possible, while leading to as many benefits as possible - and that is all we can ask for any risky activity on the planet, at least if we want a drug policy that is consistent with the principles of democracy and freedom.

After the Drug War

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes for essay entitled After the Drug War: what a free world would look like:

1: How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs DWP (up)
2: Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II DWP (up)
3: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
4: Hello? MDMA works, already! DWP (up)
5: Drug Use for Grown-Ups Hart, Carl, Penguin Random House, New York, 2022 (up)
6: Behaviorism and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
7: The purblind coldness of the Behaviorist doctrine is made clear in the following words of its founder, JB Watson, as quoted in the 2015 book "Paradox" by Margaret Cuonzo: "Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic." (Surely, Watson was proactively channeling Dr. Spock of the original Star Trek series.) (up)
8: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
9: How Milton Friedman Completely Misunderstood the War on Drugs DWP (up)
10: Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
11: How Drug Prohibition has turned academics into children DWP (up)
12: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
13: Fighting Drugs with Drugs DWP (up)
14: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
15: Coverup on Campus DWP (up)
16: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
17: Behaviorism and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
18: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism DWP (up)
19: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
20: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
21: The Bill Clinton Fallacy DWP (up)
22: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
23: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
24: Mexico's war on drugs: More than 60,000 people 'disappeared' 2020 (up)
25: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
26: Partnership for a Death Free America DWP (up)

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Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.

The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.

The evidence has been in for well over a century now: people want to use psychoactive substances to transcend the rational mind. It's about time we stopped punishing them for that.

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.

No imaginable downside could persuade westerners that guns and alcohol were too dangerous. Yet the DEA lies about almost all psychoactive drugs, saying there are no good uses.

America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.

Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.

Whether we judge people only by the words that they say or only by the substances of which they partake, we are ignoring the most important things: what they really mean and how they really behave.

Psst! Drug use has benefits too. Pass it on!

It is a truism to say that we cannot change the world and that therefore we have to change ourselves -- but the drug war outlaws even this latter option.

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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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After the Drug War

what a free world would look like

After the Drug War

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend