Drug re-legalization is not enough

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Drug re-legalization is not enough

America needs a new philosophy of life

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 16, 2025

Americans need to acquire a whole new philosophy about drugs, and hence about life itself. Otherwise, drug law reforms will cause new problems and Drug Warriors will blame those problems on the reforms. This vicious circle is inevitable since drug law is all about keeping social problems out of sight by blaming everything on drugs. Once drug laws are lifted, the real social problems start to become glaringly obvious. When police stopped arresting street people for drug use in Oregon, it became clear that there was a housing problem in that state as well as a lack of meaningful health care services ¹. And so Drug Warriors were screaming for us to put the bandage back on those real problems so that no one would see them. They had no interest in addressing real issues. They wanted to return to the troglodytic option of arresting people for their health-related problems and so pretend that everything is right with the world of unfettered capitalism ² .

We also need wholesale drug law reform. Rather than just decriminalizing opiates, we need to both legalize and facilitate the use of regulated opiates at home so that those who are determined to use such substances on a daily basis can rejoin society in a time-honored way. Opium has been smoked peaceably at home for thousands of years to various extents and in various societies, notwithstanding the outrageous lies of western missionaries. For more on that latter topic, read "The Truth about Opium" by William Brereton ³. Meanwhile, the critics of reform must be reminded that the more potent varieties of opiates were first created precisely because opium had been outlawed in the early 1900s. The outlawed opium proved difficult to sell illicitly, being somewhat bulky in nature, hence the sale of morphine ⁴ and heroin ⁵. We need to return to 1913, when an opium smoker could still be a good citizen in America and had not been demonized in the name of anti-Chinese bigotry.

Meanwhile, US drug policy remains in aggressive denial. We outlawed the peaceable use of opiates at home, and now we are upset that opiate users are on the streets.

The message is clear: drugs are not the problem, criminalization is the problem.

Americans need to grow up and realize that drug use is just one of millions of risky activities, like mountain climbing, like car driving... indeed, like alcohol drinking, which accounts for 178,000 American deaths per year in the United States alone ⁶. Like all those other risky activities, drug use, too, will always have its victims. But we can avoid increasing the number of those victims by resisting the temptation to criminalize drugs, which only incentivizes drug dealing, which in turn subjects users to contaminated product and uncertain drug supply and a total lack of information about safe use. If drug criminalization "saves" junior from a drug overdose, it only does so by outsourcing death to other communities -- like Black inner-city neighborhoods which we call "no-go zones" today thanks to the drug-war-inspired violence that they contain. Drug warriors also "save" white American junior by passing laws which lead to the corruption of governments in central and South America and the creation of drug cartels, which have brought about the disappearance of 60,000 in Mexico alone over the last 20 years ⁷.

Drug warriors actually love this, by the way, because they do not believe in peace, love and understanding. Witness their hatred of peace-loving hippies in America in the 1960s, at a time when conservatives were frantically amassing an enormous thermonuclear arsenal, one which may yet hoist America by its own petard. Witness their contempt for the peace-loving ravers in England in the 1990s ⁸. There is nothing that bothers a Drug Warrior more than seeing people using drugs in order to facilitate peace, love and understanding. That seems to be their biggest complaint about psychedelics and Ecstasy, for all the pseudoscientific mud that they've thrown at such drugs. It never occurs to them that drugs which inspire compassion could be used strategically to help end school shootings, prevent suicides, and even pull the world back from the brink of armageddon ⁹ by inspiring worldwide cooperation. But then there is no violence in such outcomes, no chance to self-righteously use one's guns and bombs on minorities and foreigners.

Speaking of which, we have to stop pretending as a country. We need to acknowledge that drug use has glaringly obvious benefits, a fact which is proven by anecdote, by history, and by psychological common sense, a quality which is in rare supply these days, however, thanks both to drug-war prejudices and to the misguided application of materialist principles to human behavior that we find in today's government-subsidized ivory tower. We need to remind two groups in particular about the inconvenient truth that drugs have glaringly obvious benefits: first, the stealth Christian Scientists in Baptist churches across the country who consider the hypocritically defined category of "drugs" to be evil in and of itself; and second, the behaviorist scientists at the NIH, the NIMH, and NIDA, who insist that the truth about psychoactive drugs is to be found under a microscope and not in the uncensored testimony of actual users -- millions of whom still manage to use drugs wisely ¹⁰ despite the 24/7 effort of government to do everything it can to make such use dangerous ¹¹.

Yes, the problem is drug criminalization -- but America's desire to turn drug use into a criminal matter in the first place is the real pathology here. To respond to this illness, we have to confront the patients with the palpable insanity of their world view, meanwhile offering them an alternative way of looking at the world. The details of such an alternative mindset are beyond the scope of this essay, but at least some of its basic principles can be found in the Cosmovision of the Andes, a philosophy dedicated to wholeness and the ultimate oneness of all nature, humans included. The gist of that holistic philosophy can be gleaned from the following citation by Ilona Suran, member of Our Common Cause:

"The main point tends to be the awareness that we are part of an interdependent whole in which each element plays a specific role within the Earth ecosystem. A Whole, which is intrinsically penetrated by a cosmic and divine force, the very matrix of Life, regularly represented as God, here implied without particular religious distinction.¹²"

In other words, we are all one and love matters, etc.: you know, the very things that our pathological Drug Warriors hate to hear.

Fortunately, there are many medicines that can help them to understand this viewpoint and to cast off their violence-prone selfishness. But that is a topic for another essay.

Notes:

1: Oregon's Incoherent Drug Policy DWP (up)
2: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
4: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
5: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
6: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
7: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
8: When the Brits cracked down on Ecstasy use, the ravers switched to anger-facilitating drugs like alcohol, after which the dance floors erupted into such violence that concert organizers had to hire special forces troops to keep the peace. See the documentary "One Nation" by Terry Stone. (up)
9: 8 Nuclear Close Calls that Nearly Spelled Disaster Davidson, Lucy, History Hit, 2022 (up)
10: Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear Hart, Dr. Carl L. Hart, 2020 (up)
11: Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State Miller, Richard Lawrence, Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 1996 (up)
12: The Andean cosmovision as a philosophical foundation of the rights of nature Suran, Ilona , Notre Affaire a Tous, 2021 (up)

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Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.

When scientists discuss suicide without mentioning the fact that their government has outlawed drugs, it is like scientists discussing deaths from bacterial infection without mentioning the fact that their government has outlawed antibiotics.

Drug testing should flag impairment only. Any other use is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.

This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.

Many psychonauts (like Terence McKenna) praise psychedelics while demonizing other psychoactive substances. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason for some people in some circumstance.

There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill.

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."

We know that anticipation and mental focus and relaxation have positive benefits -- but if these traits ae facilitated by "drugs," then we pretend that these same benefits somehow are no longer "real." This is a metaphysical bias, not a logical deduction.

"The Legislature deliberately determines to distrust the very people who are legally responsible for the physical well-being of the nation, and puts them under the thumb of the police, as if they were potential criminals." -- Aleister Crowley on drug laws

The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.

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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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Drug re-legalization is not enough

America needs a new philosophy of life

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