Five wrong ways to think about drugs

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Five wrong ways to think about drugs

Which are you guilty of?

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 21, 2024

I can't speak for foreigners, but there are generally five types of people when it comes to how U.S. citizens think about drugs. Hopefully you belong to none of the following groups and so you can join me in the winner's circle below at the end of this article (beneath the heading for "Right-Thinking American", that is). But here is my list of wrongheaded Yankees when it comes to drugs. (Don't hate on me for calling out Libertarians on this one. I only do so because Milton Friedman himself said some very problematic things about drugs, at least in his early career.)

1) THE TYPICAL AMERICAN: Thinks that the Drug War is probably a bad idea, but agrees that some drugs are horrible and that people need to get off them and that drugs have very few if any benefits to offer. Believes that words like "clean" and "junk" and "dope" are actually unbiased terminology. Some in this category are slowly wakening to the idea that drugs may have benefits, though. An example in this latter subcategory is Michael Pollan ¹, who still favors prohibition, though he claims to be fascinated by the potential curative powers of plants and fungi.

2) THE REDNECK AMERICAN: Thinks the Drug War is a good idea, and that anyone who does not think so is anti-American or at least stupid. Thinks that it makes sense to have alcohol and guns protected by special amendments while doing everything possible to punish the use of less inherently dangerous substances. You know, DeSantis and his tribespeople. And Trump. Sadly, Biden has come close to full-fledged membership in this class, as the promoter of the law that punished Black Americans far more harshly than whites for possession of cocaine ².

3) THE LIBERTARIAN AMERICAN: Agrees that drug use is generally a bad idea, but thinks that people have a right to go to hell in their own way. Milton Friedman stands out in this category ³. In 1972, he opined that good folk can have different views about drug legalization - to which I would add, "Yes, but only if they are historically ignorant and philosophically challenged - not to mention unaware of the natural law upon which America was founded, which, if it guarantees anything, guarantees our right to what Mother Nature grows at our very feet."

4) THE MATERIALIST AMERICAN: Thinks that drugs are great for recreation but that "real" cures must come from reductionist science, that the goal is to manipulate brain chemicals rather than to treat an individual holistically. Carl Hart ⁴ is an example. Also Rick Doblin ⁵ and Dj Nutt ⁶. In his book "Drug Use for Grownups," Carl insists that drug use is for recreation only and that the depressed, in effect, should just keep taking their meds. (This scientistic version of materialism ⁷ is all based on the cold and icy Behaviorist psychology of JB Watson ⁸ ⁹, which says that feelings and desires don't count: only cold, hard "facts" -- which means anything that can be quantified. And so dreams and aspirations count for nothing -- nor do anecdote or history when it comes to positive drug usage. Did drug use inspire religions? So what? The materialist still has to decide for us if such drugs "really" work! Adieu, common sense! See my essay on Behaviorism and Drugs for more on this long-ignored linkage.)

5) THE SHAMANIC-FRIENDLY AMERICAN: Thinks that psychedelic and entheogenic drugs are wonderful, but thinks that there are no good reasons for using drugs like cocaine or opium ¹⁰ and is often even in favor of the continued outlawing of such drugs. Terence McKenna ¹¹ ¹² is one of this sort. Also Alexander Weil ¹³. Terence associated cocaine ¹⁴ ¹⁵ use with some of his dissolute friends and so concluded that it was a bad drug.

I have not bothered to specify yet where each of these groups have gone wrong when it comes to their thoughts about drugs and drug use. This is because they are all wrong in the exact same way. They believe that drugs can be judged "up" and "down," depending upon whether they are thought to be safe for American teenagers. Not all of these people would want to criminalize drugs, but they can definitely understand the impulse to criminalize them.

This is about as anti-scientific as you can get, to vote drugs "up" or "down" like this.

And it is anti-progress. It used to be common sense that all substances have positive potential uses, at some dose, in some cases, for somebody. Even cyanide has potential uses in the fight against diabetes ¹⁶. When you criminalize a drug, you keep it out of the hands of researchers and visionaries who might find uses for it that we have never dreamed of. So your drug laws simply veto human progress. It's also a way to hide real problems. When we blame drugs instead of poverty or lack of housing or poor education, we try to make a virtue of our selfish and niggardly values. It shows we would rather spend money on prisons than social programs of any kind.

Also, none of these groups understand basic psychology - tho' they should not feel bad, because today's psychologists do not understand basic psychology either ¹⁷ ¹⁸ ¹⁹. That's why progress is so glacial when it comes to the approval of psychoactive drugs. We fail to acknowledge the obvious, that drugs that cheer you up actually do cheer you up (whatever materialists may or may not observe under a microscope) - and that this is a good thing, to be cheered up, something far better than electroshock therapy or suicide ²⁰. Unfortunately, the Drug Warriors have convinced us that we can never use drugs wisely, and so we ignore the endless safe protocols that one can imagine for drug use once we re-legalize psychoactive medicine. For all drugs that elate and inspire are antidepressants ²¹ when used advisedly.

In this case, drug dealers are far more knowledgeable than our dogma-ridden professionals ²². And it's not just the fact that drugs can cheer you up, it's that their use is something one can look forward to, which also cheers one up. It's a virtuous circle, especially when managed in such a way that dependency need not develop for any particular substance.

But Americans have been brainwashed to think that the use of outlawed drugs will cause addiction. To the extent that this is true, however, it is BECAUSE of the Drug War, which refuses to teach safe use while also corrupting the drug supply and limiting what is available on the street to so few options that it's no surprise that dependency develops for whatever's readily available.

Of course, the Drug War is all about limiting our knowledge about drugs, so it shouldn't come as a surprise when I say that all of the members of the above groups tend to have very little knowledge of how drugs have been used for positive reasons by whole societies in the past, and, in fact, have played a vital role in the founding of religions, in Latin and South America and in India, where the psychoactive substance Soma inspired the Vedic-Hindu religion ²³.

I hope it goes without saying that I personally disapprove of all of the group attitudes noted above. But this begs the question: what is the RIGHT way to think about drugs.

I'm glad you asked!

RIGHT-THINKING AMERICAN: Thinks that drugs are capable of marvelous things: increasing energy, renewing our interest in Mother Nature, giving us an almost surreal level of concentration, inspiring a new understanding of ourselves and helping us to get rid of counterproductive behavior patterns. Knows that drugs have inspired entire religions and that it is therefore anti-religion to outlaw such drugs. Drug use is dangerous, yes, but in the same way that horseback riding is dangerous and rock climbing and car driving. Drugs are never responsible for anything, however, as they are inanimate substances. Goodness and badness reside in how a substance is used. This group also believes that it is always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract, because scare campaigns about irresponsible drug use have been shown to lead to more irresponsible drug use. That fact has long been used by the DEA to promulgate drug scares (think crack, ice, PCP ²⁴, oxy, Fentanyl...) through publicity that turns local misuse into national problems, thereby justifying the DEA's multi-billion-dollar budget ²⁵.

The media need to take these facts onboard and stop writing articles that scapegoat drugs for social problems, including anti-constitutional laws that deny us our once-obvious right to gifts of Mother Nature.

Author's Follow-up: December 20, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

My main beef with Libertarians is that they emphasize the fact that people should be allowed to "go to hell in their own way" when it comes to drugs. I'm kind of like, "Well, yes, but..."

Their dictum is a very harsh way of saying something that I could probably agree with after some qualifications. But the statement also suggests that the Libertarians are unaware of the many potential positive uses of drugs, uses that will become apparent once we jettison Drug War biases -- like the bizarre ideas that addictive drugs can only be used addictively and that drugs that make you feel good cannot be used as part of a creative protocol to treat depression. This is a claim that is advanced these days both on religious and scientific grounds, i.e., the grounds of reductive materialism which determines efficacy by looking under microscopes, not by listening to laughter or crediting accounts from time-honored historical use.

We do need to recognize that if substance RE-legalization ²⁶ leads to downsides, it is because of American attitudes towards drugs, not because of drugs themselves.

Meanwhile, we must learn to think of drug deaths in the exact same way that we now think of deaths from mountain climbing or driving a car: our response to them must be more and better education -- not criminalization. The problem with the Libertarian dictum noted above is that it tends to imply that there are no good reasons to use drugs -- and to imply that is to yield much ground to the Drug Warrior.

It's easy to think there are no benefits to drugs because all examples of productive use have been censored from media for the last one hundred years. Here's just one example of what we are not meant to know. In "Tale of the Ragged Mountains," Edgar Allan Poe shows how morphine ²⁷ use can lead (in the properly disposed and educated individual) to an almost surreal appreciation of Mother Nature. Now, that is a drug benefit -- a marvelous drug benefit, in fact -- and it is just one of an endless list of benefits that the Drug Warriors have been censoring from all media -- and I need hardly add the fact that drugs have inspired religions.

So we should be screaming out the good side of drugs that the Drug Warrior has censored for us for our entire lifetimes and continues to do so to this very day.

Should self-interested pen-pushers at the FDA be in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to have an almost surreal appreciation of Mother Nature? ABSOLUTELY NOT! END SUBSTANCE PROHIBITION NOW!

Notes for essay entitled Five wrong ways to think about drugs: Which are you guilty of?:

1: The Michael Pollan Fallacy DWP (up)
2: Lock the S.O.B.s Up’: Joe Biden and the Era of Mass Incarceration Stolberg, Sheryl Gay, The New York Times, 2019 (up)
3: How Milton Friedman Completely Misunderstood the War on Drugs DWP (up)
4: Drug Use for Grownups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear Hart, Carl (up)
5: Rick Doblin Doblin, Rick (up)
6: Drug Science Nutt, DJ (up)
7: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
8: JB Watson Britannica (up)
9: The purblind coldness of the Behaviorist doctrine is made clear in the following words of its founder, JB Watson, as quoted in the 2015 book "Paradox" by Margaret Cuonzo: "Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic." (Surely, Watson was proactively channeling Dr. Spock of the original Star Trek series.) (up)
10: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
11: McKenna, Terence. 2026. “History Ends in Green.” The Library. 2026. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/history-ends-in-green. (up)
12: What Terence McKenna Got Wrong About Drugs DWP (up)
13: What Andrew Weil Got Wrong DWP (up)
14: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
15: “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)
16: Cyanide ingredient could lead to new type 2 diabetes treatment Uncredited, diabetes.co.uk, 2016 (up)
17: The Naive Psychology of the Drug War DWP (up)
18: Speak now or forever hold your peace about drug prohibition DWP (up)
19: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
20: How Scientific Materialism Keeps Godsend Medicines from the Depressed DWP (up)
21: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
22: In Praise of Drug Dealers DWP (up)
23: History of Hinduism: Prevedic and Vedic Age Marbaniang, Domenic, 2018 (up)
24: Kirkpatrick, Jonathan. 2023. “Filter.” Filter. October 10, 2023. https://filtermag.org/pcp-meth-news-media/. (up)
25: 'Synthetic Panics' by Philip Jenkins DWP (up)
26: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
27: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)

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Governor Kotek is "dealing" with the homelessness problem in Oregon by arresting her way out of it, in fealty to fearmongering drug warriors.

Assisted suicide cannot be discussed meaningfully without discussing the drug prohibition that renders it necessary in the first place.

According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.

Americans think that fighting drugs is more important than freedom. We have already given up on the fourth amendment. Nor is the right to religion honored for those who believe in indigenous medicines. Pols are now trying to end free speech about drugs as well.

Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!

A generally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear. --James B. Stockade.

Drug warriors think only about young people misusing drugs. They never think about the millions of the depressed whom they're condemning to a lifetime of totally unnecessary misery by outlawing drugs.

In a sane world, we would learn to strategically fight drugs with drugs.

So much harm could be reduced by shunting people off onto safer alternative drugs -- but they're all outlawed! Reducing harm should ultimately mean ending this prohibition that denies us endless godsends, like the phenethylamines of Alexander Shulgin.

Drug warriors abuse the English language.

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Five wrong ways to think about drugs

Which are you guilty of?

Author's Follow-up: December 20, 2024

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