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Capitalism and the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 15, 2021



The interests of capitalism dictate what politician-led Americans can think about substances. Psychoactive plant medicine need merely cause a problem for one demented youth and our politicians easily convince us that the substance must be eradicated from the face of the earth. Meanwhile if a Big Pharma 1 2 antidepressant causes weight gain and suicide, we dismiss these as "bad reactions," essentially blaming the victim for their oddball reaction to the drugs, while insisting that the substance in question is a godsend for the vast majority of the depressed.

April 2025 Update

This is not surprising since unfettered capitalism has a history of keeping problems from being solved if the solution would negatively affect stock values. That's why we have no quick answers to heart problems and cancer, since the obvious solution would be for Americans to cut back drastically on red meat, and yet the American Heart Association is supported by precisely those industries that would lose out given such a truly scientific approach. Therefore such agencies are like OJ Simpson vowing to spend his life searching for the guy who killed his wife. If they truly wanted to find the reason for heart disease (etc.) in America, they'd take one long look in the mirror.

We'd have been driving electrically powered cars a century ago, using free electricity and cell phones too, except that capitalism quashed these inventions because they merely empowered humanity rather than the all-important stockholder.



Author's Follow-up:

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It seems that capitalism requires a Drug War to exist. capitalism depends on the glorification of things and the money to buy them -- and if we legalize the sorts of medicine that inspired the Hindu religion, God knows how American priorities would change. Surely, the need to keep up with the Jones's would be jettisoned.

In "The Man in the Crowd," Edgar Allan Poe quoted the philosopher La Bruyère to the following effect:

"Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul."

In other words, the main problem with today's Homo sapiens is their inability to be alone, that is, to live with themselves. I think of this quote whenever I see male protestors on the street wrecking the place in the name of doubtful causes. It is interesting that these are usually males, by the way, that women generally seem to be able to live with themselves and stay at home without feeling that they are missing out. These arsonists and vandals are people who never feel so alive as when they are in a crowd and acting up -- but place them at home alone with themselves with time on their hand, and they go crazy.

Now, drugs that elate and inspire can actually change that status quo. If you allow a human being to see a world in a grain of sand -- or simply to see Mother Nature more clearly and profoundly -- their need for superfluous commodities would be mitigated -- or rather they would suddenly be aware of the superfluous nature of many if not most of the commodities that the capitalist requires them to purchase.

No wonder capitalism outlaws drugs that elate and inspire. Such drugs inspired the Hindu religion. The capitalist does not want their potential customers to reimagine the world in a way that money and products matter less. Hence the obvious connection between capitalism and the Drug War.

This is something that you can bet is not covered in most political science classes: i.e., capitalism 's inherent antagonism to the legalization 3 of psychoactive medicine. But the connection is obvious and has consequences. Just go into any drug store and check out the shelves: what you will see there are treatments for discrete human ailments based on a totally non-holistic and disease-mongering approach to human illness, one that ignores the ability of holistic-working psychoactive substances to improve overall health. capitalism has to ignore such holism, otherwise these drug-store shelves would disappear, and all the profits with them.

capitalism 4 requires disease-mongering -- and disease-mongering requires the suppression of medicines that work holistically, that work by improving mood and elating the individual AND THEREFORE improving their health overall.









Notes for essay entitled Capitalism and the Drug War:

1: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
2: 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)
3: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
4: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)




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There are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???

In a compassionate world, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.

This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.

Americans HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control their pain relief and how and how much they can think and feel in this life.

Guess who's in charge of protecting us from AI? Chuck Schumer! The same guy who protected us from drugs -- by turning America into a prison camp full of minorities and so handing two presidential elections to Donald Trump.

If the depressed patient laughs, that means nothing. Materialists have to see results under a microscopic or they will never sign off on a therapy.

The reasons that people use drugs are psychologically obvious. Academics gaslight us on this topic and invent new diseases to explain away our desire to live large.

Jim Hogshire described sleep cures that make physical withdrawal from opium close to pain-free. As for "psychological addiction," there are hundreds of elating drugs that could be used to keep the ex-user's mind from morbidly focusing on a drug whose use has become problematic for them.

Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.

Drug war pundits need to stop using the word "snorts" when it comes to cocaine. We "take" our "meds," and yet we "snort" cocaine, just like a pig. That is NOT neutral language, folks!


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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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