Drugs: the great American scapegoat
for all social ills
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 26, 2021
There is no drug problem in America. There never has been. However there is a HUGE problem with how America deals with drugs. Instead of learning about them and teaching Americans how to use them wisely and for good purposes -- such as religious inspiration, creativity and increased mental focus, the way that "drugs" have been used since caveman days -- we demonize such substances and blame every possible social problem on them. Why? Because if we were to acknowledge that drugs aren't a real problem, we'd have to look at the real causes of our problems with drugs: namely, modern cynicism, unfettered capitalism 1 , and America's scientistic expectation that all "drugs" should act like aspirin, that we should simply take them and wait placidly for some specific effect, with no effort on our part to make ourselves open to the drug-aided inspiration and epiphany that we're expecting. And of course when this naive attitude inevitably leads to "bad trips," we blame the substance rather than our inability to use it wisely.
And so American politicians blame "drugs" for all of America's problems, thereby shooting the messenger that's trying to tell us that Americans are immature and improperly educated. Other nations have been deeply awed by psychoactive substances to the point of creating entire religions around them and the hints of cosmic truth that their ingestion provides. But Americans titter like grade-schoolers at such substances and imagine ways of harnessing them to achieve carnal self-fulfillment. At least that's the image that the Drug Warriors seek to perpetuate, desperate as they are to hide the fact that so-called "drugs" have ever been used for anything but evil. And so we see nothing but horrifying depictions of hedonist "drug use" on television, drug "fiends" shooting up with dirty needles and scumbag thugs "snorting blow" as loudly as they possibly can.
Check out the unintentionally hilarious scene in the drug-war propaganda film called "Crisis" from 2021, wherein Jake, the self-righteous undercover DEA agent, is shuttling a nefarious "drug dealer" (is there any other kind?) across town in an unmarked police car as the latter horrible "druggie" snorts like a disgruntled water buffalo, frequently swiping his forefinger under his nose, just in case the audio clues are insufficient to convince the viewer that the bad guy in question has been "doing" that evil drug par excellence called cocaine . (Oh, the shameless hussy!) The producers do everything but insert a lower-third graphic reading "rotten evil druggie" with an arrow pointing upward at the offender's constantly wriggling proboscis. One thinks for a moment that the indignant Christian Science good guy in the driver's seat is going to lose his cool, come out from undercover and shout, "Oh, hell no," as he slams on the brakes and begins to pummel his passenger for daring to flaunt his terrible evil drug use in such a noisy and plebeian fashion, like an open invitation for SWAT teams to start raiding his home at once and start kicking his grandmother in the face. ("And here's another kick for raising that scumbag son of yours!")
Meanwhile we censor our history books to expunge the fact that folks like Marco Polo, Benjamin Franklin, and Marcus Aurelius used opium 2 ; that MesoAmericans employed coca and psychedelics in their religious rituals, and above all the fact that Sigmund Freud himself considered cocaine 3 4 to be a godsend cure for his depression.
America is in such deep denial about its childish inability to handle "drugs" that it has forced the entire world to adopt its own jaundiced attitude about the plant medicine that grows unbidden around us. Desperate to ignore the fact that there's a problem with our own attitudes toward psychoactive substances, we not only demonize such substances but we insist that the entire world do the same, on penalty of our Army marching into their countries unbidden to burn the plants and fungi that we have turned into scapegoats for our own social problems. Nor do corrupt politicians have the least incentive to change this status quo, since they know that drug laws can be used like poll taxes to suppress voting by minorities simply by targeting them with "drug-related" felonies in order to remove them from the voting rolls -- plus, we can invade countries at will, merely by associating its leadership in any way with the sale of non-western medicine. Just the excuse that an imperialist government needs to carry on business as usual despite today's ostensible anti-colonial sentiment.
Author's Follow-up:
October 27, 2025
Here are some relevant quotations from Ceremonial Chemistry 5 by Thomas Szasz 6 7 8.
"“Dangerous drugs,” addicts, and pushers are the scapegoats of our modern, secular, therapeutically imbued societies; and that the ritual persecution of these pharmacological and human agents must be seen against the historical backdrop of the ritual persecution of other scapegoats, such as witches, Jews, and madmen."
". The root of modern terms such as pharmacology and pharmacopeia is therefore not “medicine,” “drug,” and “poison,” as most dictionaries erroneously state, but “scapegoat”! "
"Lacking the usual grounds on which people congregate as a nation, we [Americans] habitually fall back on the most primitive yet most enduring basis for group cohesion, namely, scapegoating."
Notes:
1: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)
2: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
3: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
4: “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)
5: “Ceremonial Chemistry – Syracuse University Press.” 2026. Syr.edu. 2026. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1114/ceremonial-chemistry/. (up)
6: Scribd.com: Interview with Thomas Szasz Szasz, Thomas (up)
7: In Praise of Thomas Szasz DWP (up)
8: Sullum, Jacob. 2005. “Thomas Szasz Takes on His Critics.” Reason.com. May 1, 2005. https://reason.com/2005/05/01/thomas-szasz-takes-on-hiscriti/. (up)
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Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
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.
If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"
"Those gentlemen who adopt the anti-opium doctrine... are only comparable to the monomaniac, who, sane upon every subject but one, is thoroughly daft upon that." --William Brereton
We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.
If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.
Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.
Westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight.
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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.
Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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