an open letter to Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 11, 2025
i, Mike.
I was enjoying your book1. However, you "lost me" at the conclusion of the chapter on opium.
You speak as if re-legalization of Mother Nature is problematic. I very much disagree. Or rather, I agree that it might be problematic for hysterical Drug Warriors and Big Pharma execs and racist politicians and the medical establishment and law enforcement, etc., but so what? It SHOULD be problematic for them. Take Big Pharma, for instance. It has a monopoly on mind-and-mood medicine thanks to which 1 in 4 American women have to take a Big Pharma drug every day of their life! They are dependent for life on drugs that are harder to kick than heroin! Re-legalization of drug alternatives SHOULD be problematic for Big Pharma, just as arrest is problematic for a criminal. The chronically depressed, like myself, should be able to use drugs that inspire and elate and are not dependence-causing by design. Outlawed drugs have blazingly obvious benefits for the depressed, after all -- once we take off the behaviorist, materialist and reductionist blinders of modern science. If giving me mind-improving medicine is problematic for modern society, then bring on the problems. Let OTHER people suffer problems for a change while I get long-denied relief: let the Drug Warriors and prohibitionists reap the whirlwind that they have been asking for for over a century now.
Re-legalization is the right thing to do for two reasons:
First, drug re-legalization is the right thing to do based on principle, because the government never had the right to outlaw Mother Nature in the first place, least of all in a country founded on the Natural Law of John Locke, who claimed that a citizen has a natural right to the use of the earth and all that lies therein2. (Thomas Jefferson was rolling in his grave when the Reagan DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking.3) Moreover, the Drug War is the outlawing of the religious impulse4. The Hindu religion owes its existence to the use of a drug that inspired and elated, from which it follows that it is the outlawing of religion to outlaw drugs that inspire and elate -- and those are precisely the drugs that are outlawed by drug prohibition. Finally, we live in a time when I cannot get a job in America if I am a Christian Science heretic -- for drug testing will "out me" to my potential employers as having used godsend medicines of which racist politicians disapprove. Without any judicial process, I can be removed from the American workforce, and without any means of appeal -- nay, without even being charged with a crime. America is a Christian Science theocracy thanks to drug prohibition. (For more on this anti-democratic tendency of drug prohibition, see "Drug Warriors and Their Prey" by Richard Lawrence Miller.5)
Second, we need to end drug prohibition for practical reasons, because drug re-legalization would lead to far less death and suffering than is now going on thanks to drug prohibition. If you do not believe me, then I would suggest that you are not considering all the stakeholders in drug policy decisions. In that case, you are guilty of what I call "The Bill Clinton Fallacy,6" the idea that we can save white young people by outsourcing the downsides of drug prohibition to American inner cities and overseas. Bill thought he was saving his brother Roger by keeping cocaine illegal, but even if that highly problematic claim of his were true, he was saving his white brother only by killing minority children, Black children like Niomi Russell, who died in a drive-by shooting in 2024 in Washington, D.C.7 because drug prohibition had turned the 'hood into a shooting gallery. But then it is "out of sight, out of mind" for Drug Warriors when it comes to the downsides of their drug laws. Kids were not being mowed down in BILL's neighborhood, after all, so why should he care?
And yet, as Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014:
"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."
There was no machine-gun fire in American streets before liquor and drug prohibition. Nor were there daily drive-by shootings in inner-city neighborhoods.
Drug prohibition killed 67,000 Blacks in major US cities over the last ten years8, and drug prohibition has resulted in the disappearance of 60,000 Mexicans in the last two decades9. Meanwhile, outlawing drugs like DMT has the effect of forcing determined users to work with highly caustic chemicals in order to extract DMT for themselves. Who is worried about THEIR safety? Not Rick Strassman, for starters, who agrees with you that drug re-legalization is too risky. Meanwhile, drug prohibition has killed thousands of American opiate users by refusing to teach safe use and by refusing to regulate the drug supply as to quality and quantity. Kids were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal in America. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that. Drug prohibition also outlaws a wide variety of drugs that could be used to fight drugs with drugs10 -- as for instance the symptomatic use of "laughing gas" could have easily helped me through the hour or two when I was recently overwhelmed by depression thanks to my attempted withdrawal from the Big Pharma antidepressant called Effexor. (Such strategic and as-needed drug use is common sense -- or it would be if Americans did not believe the Drug War lie that outlawed substances can have no positive uses whatsoever.) Instead, I had to go back to full-dose Effexor use -- and it was all totally unnecessary! But then no one thinks about people in my position when they speak so breezily about outlawing drugs. Who cares if I get off Effexor? I am supposed to "shut up and take my meds" in any case and let science cure me. I am supposed to forget about all the common-sense medicines out there that bring that pesky euphoria and insight.
Millions of chronically depressed like myself go without godsend medicine every day and this is brought about by drug prohibition. Young people kill themselves every day because we outlaw all drugs that inspire and elate. Kids use alcohol only because we have outlawed all the far-less-dangerous alternatives. The depressed are given brain-damaging shock therapy because we have outlawed the drugs that would make shock therapy unnecessary.
And the list of unrecognized downsides of drug prohibition goes on.
Drug prohibition has censored academia, or rather brainwashed and intimidated academics into censoring themselves. William James told philosophers to use laughing gas to learn about ultimate reality11, but the government is now trying to render that research illegal, even though such research was already totally impractical. And why? Because cowardly philosophers never took James seriously viz. the exploration of the "anesthetic revelation"12 whereas in a sane world, laughing gas would be made readily available for a wide variety of common-sense uses. For starters, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.
And the list of drug prohibition downsides continues.
Let's look at the censorship of authors in the non-fiction world. Most authors never mention drugs, even though drug use is of central importance in the study of a wide range of topics, from consciousness to anxiety. And so Donald Trump was right, albeit for the wrong reasons: we DO have a "fake science" today, but it came about because scientists are pretending that substance prohibition does not exist and that neither do the many psychoactive substances that have been outlawed thereby. And so these scientists say things like, "Depression is a tough nut to crack," when that is just a lie. They can only say that because they are reckoning without drug prohibition. The fact is, we could end most depression in a heartbeat with drugs that inspire and elate. In a heartbeat! Yet we treat drug prohibition as a natural baseline, so much so that many American history books do not even MENTION the Drug War. That is how "natural" we have been taught to feel about our unprecedented status quo of wholesale drug prohibition. The Drug War is not even mentioned in "A People's History of the United States" by progressive historian Howard Zinn13, nor in "Birth of the Modern" by conservative historian Paul Johnson14. Not mentioned once! Future humans may not even know that we lived in the times of a Drug War. How will we ever end prohibitions that most people pretend do not even exist, so blinded have they become to the sorts of downsides that I am enumerating here?
Here are still more downsides to drug prohibition.
When we crack down on opiates, we think we are saving white young people -- but we are actually forcing kids in hospice to go without adequate pain relief in India, where morphine is often unavailable thanks to bureaucratic, financial and legal hurdles brought about by America's anti-drug hysteria15. I say nothing of the creativity that we have outlawed for our poets and writers. As author Richard Middleton wrote, 19th-century poets used opium wisely, in "a series of quarterly carouses." When we outlaw drugs, therefore, we are not just making a medical decision about psychoactive substances; we are also tacitly deciding what we should value in life. And so doctors are called on to decide questions for which they have no expertise, such as:
"Do we prefer literary freedom, or would we prefer a level of safety for drug use that we do not demand of any other risky activity on planet Earth?"
The outlawing of LSD and Ecstasy did not just get rid of two drugs: it got rid of two major peace-and-love movements in a world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. And yet the geniuses in the prohibition movement think that they are saving lives? Please!
And this prohibition mindset is fundamentally flawed. Why? Because, as GK Chesterton pointed out in "Eugenics and Other Evils,16" health is the result of a balance of a wide variety of factors, it is not created by a single input. A drug that is deadly for one person when used at one dose for one reason may yet be a godsend for another person when used at another dose for another reason. When we place the government in charge of personal health via drug prohibition, therefore, it will necessarily be ham-fisted and unjust by treating everyone alike.
To paraphrase Shakespeare: "Do you think because some Americans are irresponsible , there shall be no more opiates, laughing gas and phenethylamines?"
Sadly, most Americans would probably answer yes, so blind are they to the endless downsides of substance prohibition -- not to mention the endless upsides to drug use, of which we are only now becoming reawakened as westerners thanks to the still largely ostracized work of such people as Alexander Shulgin, Charley Wininger, James Fadiman, Terence McKenna, and Paul Stamets.
For these reasons and countless others, I reject the idea that we are not ready for drug re-legalization. I do not believe you would say so yourself if you took into account all of the downsides of drug prohibition from which you -- like everyone else these days -- has been "protected" since infancy by Drug War censorship. Even today, our conglomerate media refuses to publish stories that either 1) place drug use in a good light, or 2) place drug prohibition in a bad light. And so reporters who cover inner-city violence profess to be baffled at the nonstop shootings, never stopping to notice that drug prohibition armed the 'hood to the teeth in the first place, not just in American inner cities but in inner cities around the western world. Indeed, Lisa Ling produced an entire documentary about Chicago gun violence for CNN in which she never even mentioned the War on Drugs17. And so drug prohibition has committed the perfect crime. It has disrupted Black neighborhoods, arrested minorities wholesale, and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America -- and gotten away with it. Yet westerners still think of drug prohibition as a rational policy.
In my view, this is because prohibitionists like the world that drug law has created: it has created artificial good guys and bad guys, with most of the bad guys being minorities and foreigners. It has also enriched their pharmaceutical portfolios, kept the workforce under the thumbs of government, and blinded us to real social problems (like a shortage of affordable housing and income equality and, indeed, the Drug War itself) by blaming everything on drugs.
This is why I started my Drug War Philosopher website six years ago, to unearth all the truths that are censored as a matter of course in a Drug War society: truths about the positive uses of drugs and about the negative effects of prohibition -- the latter being so numerous that I am still spoiled for choice when looking for my daily essay topics.
One thing I think we do agree on, however: for re-legalization to take effect and last, we need a whole new outlook on drugs, and on life in general. For more on that topic, I invite you to read my articles on the subject of "pharmacologically savvy empaths18" and also my four-essay series entitled "After the Drug War.19"
Finally, here is a downside of drug prohibition that hit home for me two months ago.
My sister-in-law recently went to the E.R. for severe depression. Did they give her a substance like laughing gas that gave her glimpses of heaven? Did they give her a holiday on opium? Did they give her a phenethylamine that inspired rapture in the user in clinical studies? Did they, in short, reassure her that life could be good and that there were better ways of seeing the world?
No, of course not. That would not be scientific! Instead, they started her on a course of antidepressants that she will have to take for a lifetime, in the hopes that their sedating and mind-numbing qualities would "kick in" before she killed herself. That's a chance that they were willing to take. Why? Because drug prohibition inverts human values. It gives us a prior commitment to drug demonization that comes even before the well-being -- nay, the very survival -- of our loved ones.
And I am only getting started on enumerating the downsides of the prohibition that you suggest should not be ended any time soon. It cannot end quickly enough for folks like myself, who, at age 66, have now gone almost an entire lifetime without godsends that grow at my very feet. And why? Because of laws created by racist politicians for the purpose of marginalizing minorities and thereby winning elections -- thanks to which Donald Trump is in office today, by the way, and democracy -- at least for now -- has come to an end in the United States of America.
Is that not ENOUGH reason to end drug prohibition and end it now, come hell or high water? Or do we have to wait around to see what OTHER time-honored liberties we will have to forgo in an effort to quash the modern boogieman called "drugs"?
Best Wishes,
Brian Ballard Quass
The Drug War Philosopher @ abolishthedea.com
PS The Drug War works according to the following anti-scientific notion:
that a substance that can be misused by a white American young person at one dose when used for one reason in one context, must not be used by anybody at any dose in any context.
Talk about imperialistic! If we find aliens on another planet, I suppose the DEA will have to outlaw their godsend medicines as well.
Such a mindset leads to endless unnecessary suffering. Unfortunately, most of that suffering is off the radar of westerners because the conglomerate media is not aware of such issues -- or if it is, it is determined to keep the public in ignorance regarding them. And so we see anti-drug campaigns uncritically promoted by media with alarmist billboards shouting inane phrases like "Fentanyl kills" and "Oxy kills" -- utterances which make no more sense than shouting "Fire bad!" as did our paleolithic ancestors. All such phrases are philosophically the same: they counsel us to fear and demonize dangerous things rather than to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. Besides, if "Fentanyl kills" then "Alcohol massacres," but no one is seriously talking about bringing back liquor prohibition... although I should shut up, lest I give people ideas, for the prohibitionists are always looking for new scapegoats on which to blame social problems, thereby taking our eyes off the prize when it comes to social justice and democratic norms.
PPS If I had to sum up the problems with the modern mindset in one single blurb, it would probably be the following:
Prohibition kills, not drugs!
The media and government work together to keep us from noticing the fact. That is why an online search on "opiates" will bring up endless articles about abuse and misuse, but none about their godsend ability to inspire the prepared mind. Consider the following report of morphine use in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" by Edgar Allan Poe:
"In the meantime the morphine had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf- in the hue of a blade of grass- in the shape of a trefoil- in the humming of a bee- in the gleaming of a dew-drop- in the breathing of the wind- in the faint odors that came from the forest- there came a whole universe of suggestion- a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought."
For some of us, such outcomes of drug use are a consummation devoutly to be wished. And yet no one even considers such benefits to be benefits -- so brainwashed have westerners become by their cradle-to-grave brainwashing in the substance demonizing ideology of drug prohibition.
Finally, if the capitalist west really cannot get by without drug prohibition, then there is something wrong with the capitalist west, not with drugs. In that case, drugs are just our scapegoat for the fact that we are immature as a society and unable to create common sense healthcare platforms to ensure safe use. The political motivation of the Drug Warrior is clear in the fact that they will not spend one penny for healthcare, but will spend billions to lock people up -- especially when a disproportionately large number of those arrestees are minorities. Meanwhile, we are in such denial about the shortcomings of our social system that we insist that the entire world share our own jaundiced view of drugs, especially the kind that stand the chance of inspiring new religions.
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as free as Benjamin Franklin.
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.
The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.
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.
Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.
Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.
LA Police Chief Daryl Gates said drug users should be summarily executed. William Bennett said drug dealers should be beheaded. These are the attitudes that the drug war inculcates. This racist and brutal ideology must be wiped out.
Peyote advocates should be drug legalization advocates. Otherwise, they're involved in special pleading which is bound to result in absurd laws, such as "Plant A can be used in a religion but not plant B," or "Person A can belong to such a religion but person B cannot."
All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
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, End Drug Prohibition Now: an open letter to Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century, published on May 11, 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)
i, Mike.
You have been reading an article entitled, End Drug Prohibition Now: an open letter to Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century, published on May 11, 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)
