a philosophical review of 'A People's History of the United States'
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 17, 2023
merican authors are in denial about the Drug War. If anyone doubts this, they should check out the populist classic by historian Howard Zinn entitled "A People's History of the United States."
If any book might be expected to pan the War on Drugs, it should be this one, since that anti-scientific campaign against psychoactive medicine has militarized police forces around the world, caused civil wars in Latin America, destroyed the rule of law in Mexico, and killed and disenfranchised so many American blacks that racist fascists are now able to win presidential elections in the United States. And yet Howard Zinn, that dauntless unmasker of systemic wrongs, has absolutely nothing to say about the War on Drugs. Not a thing. True, he mentions "drugs" a handful of times in his lengthy tome, but only in an off-hand way which implies that the author shares the mendacious prejudices of our times according to which "drugs" are substances which have no valid uses for anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason, ever.
He writes of inner-city violence, of course, but only to link it to uncaring politicians who withhold money on social problems while beefing up the military to dangerous and unwieldy proportions. This is all too true, of course, but he misses the main point when it comes to inner-city violence: namely that it was first introduced into the 'hood by substance prohibition which gave massive financial incentives for the poor to start selling desired substances. Of course, the drug gangs thus created soon had to arm themselves to the teeth against both the police and their own inner-city turf rivals. That's why, 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."
And yet the Drug War is off the radar of Howard Zinn. Like Lisa Ling, who produced an hour-long documentary on Chicago gun violence without even mentioning the War on Drugs, Howard seems to think that city violence arose ex nihilo as a kind of passive-aggressive response to bad social policy in general, when the real villains of the piece were the huge financial incentives provided by substance prohibition.
I might have expected such blindness from other authors.
Science writers, for instance, have been ignoring the Drug War for many years now, giving us the latest materialist advice on fighting depression, anxiety and PTSD, but never pointing out the inconvenient truth (even via a footnoted disclaimer) that the government has outlawed almost all the psychoactive medicine with which one might have easily triumphed over these conditions in the past, or at least rendered their symptoms far less pernicious. In academia, in fact, it's commonplace to completely ignore the possibility that drugs can have good uses. Nor is the historian in a hurry to tell kids that Benjamin Franklin was a big fan of opium or that Thomas Jefferson grew poppies on his estate - or that he rolled over in his grave the day that the DEA stomped onto Monticello and confiscated those plants in violation of the natural law upon which Jefferson had founded America.
But Howard Zinn has no excuse for ignoring the Drug War. The fact that he does so makes me wonder if he ever bothered to read his own book. His entire thesis, after all, is that rich power brokers will go to great lengths to keep the lower classes fighting amongst themselves for what he calls the "leftovers" of exploitative capitalism. In chapter 23, for instance, he quotes HL Mencken as saying:
The whole aim of popular politics is to keep the public alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Surely "drugs" is the hobgoblin par excellence of American politics, and Howard, of all writers, should have recognized that fact.
Author's Follow-up:
April 11, 2025
Of course, there is something worse than ignoring the Drug War in a history book. In "The Birth of the Modern," Paul Johnson ignores the Drug War while also dissing drug use -- apparently ignorant of the fact that drug use inspired the Hindu religion and gave Socrates his view of the afterlife. Like most Drug Warriors, he libels the political category of "drugs" by only mentioning such substances in connection with abuse and misuse. This is like an author writing a history book in which all equestrian references concern horse-related accidents. We would rightly sense an agenda on their part. Just so, when Johnson mentions drugs only in connection with misuse and abuse, he clearly has his own agenda -- namely, to discredit drug use by associating it with downsides only. Moreover, his book should be completely disqualified from the history genre for his complete refusal to mention America's unprecedented wholesale drug prohibition, let alone the glaringly obvious (and yet somehow completely invisible) dystopia that it has brought about: including inner-city violence, the end of the rule of law in Latin America, unnecessary suicides, unnecessary school shootings, the end of due process and the outlawing of religions, and the creation of the biggest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time: the psychiatric pill mill, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent upon Big Pharma meds for life. How can a history of the 20th century ignore these things and not be laughed off of the book shelves? Answer? The government has brainwashed the public to pretend that the Drug War has no negative consequences whatsoever and is just a part of a normal life. Americans are clearly hypnotized into blindness when it comes to this 6,000-pound gorilla in the room.
If any of these charges advanced against the Drug War do not make sense to a reader, it can only be because the media has censored all such news from the public, as they have all reports of positive drug use. Take the outlawing of religion, for instance. The Hindu religion was inspired by the use of a drug that inspires and elates. From this fact alone, it follows that drug prohibition is the outlawing of religion since drug law criminalizes PRECISELY those drugs that inspire and elate.
Yet so-called historians fail to even notice that drug prohibition ever existed in America, let alone that it exists to this very day and has censored academia, to the point that most academics are scared to even mention the subject, to the point that science magazines publish endless scientific "conclusions" that only make sense when we pretend that wholesale drug criminalization provides a natural baseline from which to do research. See, for instance, the endless feel-good articles about depression in Psychology Today, whose authors totally ignore the fact that we have outlawed all the substances that could end depression in a heartbeat. Scientists are so cowed, however, by the double biases of Drug War propaganda and behaviorist theory that they refuse to recognize the obvious benefits of drugs. Of course, even by their own scientific standards, they should place a disclaimer after all articles about psychological matters -- and human consciousness, for that matter -- stating that the magazine is taking drug criminalization as a natural baseline for research -- that the magazine is, in effect, accepting the drug-scorning religion of Christian Science as gospel truth -- and yet the editors refrain from doing this, thus rendering their magazines completely non-scientific, even by their own scientific standards. The editors have a duty to announce their magazine's biases to the public. And what are their biases? Answer: their biases are the following: 1) the idea that psychoactive drugs do not exist (and that therefore the ramifications of their use can be ignored), and 2) the behaviorist idea that all that counts when it comes to mind and mood is what is quantifiable, that therefore all history and anecdote (and psychological common sense, for that matter) may be ignored when it comes to the beneficial use of "drugs."
Christian Science
On a superficial level, Christian Science may be seen as a drug-hating religion and so its very existence tends to support the effort of drug warriors to outlaw godsend psychoactive medicines. On a deeper level, however, the religion's founder Mary Baker-Eddy was fighting not so much against drugs as against the failure of modern science to acknowledge the power of the human mind. In Mary's case, of course, this was the mind as influenced by Jesus Christ, but yet she recognized a principle with which even a non-believer can agree and which, moreover, is clearly true in light of drug user reports from the Vedic days to the present: namely, that the human mind has a great as-yet untapped power to control one's outlook on life and to therefore positively affect overall human health to some as-yet undetermined degree. Mary does seem to have overestimated the mind's ability to cure the body, of course, but it is worth noting in her defense that the government has outlawed the very research that would be required to determine exactly where the line should be drawn between the mind-curable condition and that which is beyond the help of this sort of holistic healing.
We would need to be able to use psychoactive medicines freely in order to generate the sort of user reports that could help us answer such questions adequately. And this would be research of the greatest philosophical importance, because it would essentially be a search into the true nature of mind-body dualism.
Mind-body dualism is like the weather when it comes to the field of philosophy: everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Well, here is a chance for philosophers to launch a first-hand investigation of the interaction between mind and body and to thereby determine the nature of each -- as well as the nature of the interactive whole which they in some sense comprise. Philosophers just have to decide: Do they want to perform the kind of hands-on philosophic research that William James advocated viz. altered states, or do they want to keep pretending that the drug war does not exist and that it has no downsides for philosophical research. For the opposite is so obviously true: namely, that drug prohibition forbids us from performing the kind of research that could blow the whole "mind-body" problem wide open from the western point of view and so inspire whole new fields of research.
The Drug War is all about censorship. If you don't believe it, just ask yourself how many movies and magazine articles you've seen about the safe and wise use of opium, or of coca, or of MDMA, or of psychedelics. As Carl Hart reminds us, most people use these drugs wisely, but you will not see such use portrayed in movies or books. Instead, you will see books and movies in which drugs are personified as evil incarnate in the form of "Cocaine Bears" and "Meth Gators." This is because the drug-war propaganda of censorship has rendered Americans childish about drugs. The American government is all about keeping us infantile in this way. The government is engaged in a full-blown campaign of drug-related censorship, with the White House actually working with TV producers to spread the party line on drugs in TV shows. That is why we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse and not a National Institute on Drug Use.
Meanwhile, the government's FDA refuses to approve MDMA, a drug which has killed no one, properly speaking, and yet they approve Big Pharma drugs whose side effects as announced on prime-time television include death itself, this in a world in which liquor causes 178,000 deaths a year. This is the same FDA that approves brain-damaging shock therapy for the depressed while refusing to sign off on naturally occurring drugs that could make ECT unnecessary. This fact is obvious. Common sense itself screams out loudly and clearly that this is so. But scientists ignore common sense these days for two reasons: first, because of their fealty to the drug war ideology of substance demonization, and second because of their stubborn belief in the inhumane tenets of behaviorism, which tell us that user feelings and opinions do not matter when it comes to studying drug use, that all that counts is quantifiable data about brain chemistry and genetics.
By the way, if you want to be personally censored, just try publishing an article about safe and wise drug use online -- say, about the wise use of opium. Such accounts are simply not allowed by most publishers -- not because they are not true, but because they spread a message that is contrary to the drug-war ideology of substance demonization and so must be suppressed. I myself have been blocked numerous times from posting comments and publishing articles simply because I point out positive real uses of drugs -- safe and productive drug use that has actually taken place despite the fact that the government does everything it can to make drug use risky by refusing to regulate product and refusing to teach safe use. The Mad in America website solicits life stories from victims of the psychedelic pill mill, but they refuse to publish mine, despite the fact that I have used such drugs for 40 years now. The life story that I submitted to them contained neither lies nor proselytization, and yet the organization told me that it might be seen as medical advice. This is how publishers shut down free speech about drugs, by claiming that factually honest accounts about drug use constitute medical advice.
They will then tell us that we should see our doctors about such topics -- failing to realize that it was our doctors themselves who rendered us dependent on Big Pharma to begin with! Their drugs cause greater dependence than anything nature has to offer, and yet we are only allowed to discuss drugs with these folks whose entire careers depend on the psychiatric pill mill itself!
This is why I say that the drug war is a cancer on the body politic and must be eliminated if Americans want to restore democracy and make it last this time.
If we need to censor any speech, it should be the speech of drug warriors. They are the ones who advocate policies that have turned inner cities into shooting galleries around the world and resulted in the disappearance of 60,000 Mexican citizens in the last 20 years, while turning the rule of law into a joke in much of Latin America.
What am I advocating after all? Merely intellectual and spiritual freedom. Merely the end of censorship. Merely the renewed freedom of religion. Merely the return of freedom of speech. Merely the informed use of psychoactive drugs, especially entheogens like MDMA, to help bring people together in this age when hate has put our species on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
And yet I am beyond the pale? Say rather that the Drug War Industrial Complex is beyond the pale -- supported as it is by the same sort of short-sighted idiots who made the criminal decision in the 1950s to develop thermonuclear weapons, the same people who were to denounce the peace-loving 'flower children' of the next decade as Communist subversives.(Drug Warriors hated both "summers of love" -- the U.S. version in the 1960s and the U.K. version in the 1990s, and used drug hysteria to quash both and to turn the world into haters. After they cracked down on Ecstasy in the U.K., the dance floors erupted into such alcohol-fueled violence that event organizers had to hire special forces troops to keep the peace.)
Incidentally, anyone who doubts our society's willingness to suppress free speech need only look at the blacklisting of Americans by HUAC in the 1950s. It must be remembered that this persecution of dissenters was not based on the outing of any supposed criminal activities that they had committed but rather on their mere championing of ideas that were anathema to the powers-that-be. The government loves censorship and always has.
And the Internet Age has not changed anything. To the contrary, it has rendered censorship far more easy and efficient for cowardly publishers thanks to the use of algorithms written anonymously by philosophically challenged techies.
Most authors today reckon without the drug war -- unless they are writing specifically about "drugs" -- and even then they tend to approach the subject in a way that clearly demonstrates that they have been brainwashed by drug war orthodoxy, even if they do not realize it themselves. That's why I write my philosophical book reviews, to point out this hypocrisy which no other philosopher in the world is pointing out.
"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary
We should be encouraging certain drug use by the elderly. Many Indigenous drugs have been shown to grow new neurons and increase neural connectivity -- to refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!
The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.
Two weeks ago, a guy told me that most psychiatrists believe ECT is great. I thought he was joking! I've since come to realize that he was telling the truth: that is just how screwed up the healthcare system is today thanks to drug war ideology and purblind materialism.
The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.
My local community store here in the sticks sells Trump "dollar bills" at the checkout counter. I don't know what's worse: a president encouraging insurrection or an electorate that does not see that as a problem.
In a sane world, we'd package laughing gas for safe use and give it to the suicidal -- saying, "Use before attempting to kill yourself." But drug warriors would rather have suicide than drug use.
Morphine can provide a vivid appreciation of mother nature in properly disposed minds. That should be seen as a benefit. Instead, dogma tells us that we must hate morphine for any use.
There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.
I think we should start taking names. All politicians and government officials who work to keep godsends like psilocybin from the public should be held to account for crimes against humanity when the drug war finally ends.
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, Even Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug War: a philosophical review of 'A People's History of the United States', published on April 17, 2023 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)
merican authors are in denial about the Drug War. If anyone doubts this, they should check out the populist classic by historian Howard Zinn entitled "A People's History of the United States." 
You have been reading an article entitled, Even Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug War: a philosophical review of 'A People's History of the United States', published on April 17, 2023 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)
