From the Penal Laws of Ireland to the Drug Laws of the United States
How governments always find a way to treat hated demographics like dirt
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 20, 2026
One of the best ways to demonstrate the hateful prejudices of drug prohibition is to compare America's drug laws with the Penal Laws created in Ireland by English protestants between the 16th and 18th centuries.1 In the time of the Protestant Ascendancy, the British Government in Ireland sought to marginalize Catholics with what Dublin Professor Charles Ivar McGrath has described as a "rag-bag" of tyrannical laws, designed (at least in theory) to harry Catholics to the point that they finally renounced their Catholic faith in favor of Protestantism.2 In the time of the American Drug War, the U.S. government seeks to marginalize drug users with its own rag-bag of tyrannical laws, designed (at least in theory) to harry drug users to the point that they finally renounce their belief in Mother Nature's medicines and live instead according to the drug-hating dictates of the Christian Science religion. In both cases, the government's legislators sought (and seek) to outdo themselves in devising new and creative ways to treat their enemies like dirt while evincing a cavalier disregard for the "rights of man," or what we moderns might refer to as the rights of the human being qua human being.
Let us now compare some of the punishments meted out to Irish Catholics during the Protestant Ascendancy with those given to drug users and dealers in our Age of Drug Prohibition, the age of our country's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of Mother Nature's plant medicines. We will see that there is a shared mindset at work here on the part of the powers-that-be, one that not only links the Penal Laws with modern drug laws, but a mindset that links both of these in turn with South African Apartheid, American racism, and ultimately with the policies of Nazi Germany itself. This is why the drug-demonizing mindset has to be ended as soon as possible. If left unchecked, our bandwagon of hysteria-driven scapegoating is poised to end in something even blinder and more callous than it already has become, in a dystopia that has no longer even a superficial resemblance to the world of freedom envisioned by our nation's founders.
Note: The term "drug users" in the following chart refers to any of the 20 million Americans who have been charged with felony drug possession (usually for small amounts) or drug dealing. Bear in mind that 33% of all blacks have felony convictions, most of them for drug use and/or drug dealing. 33%.
Could not become doctors or lawyers.
Cannot become doctors, lawyers or practice a long list of other professions -- although they are still eligible to become president of the United States.
Could be evicted from home.
Can be evicted from home, along with their family, especially when that home is considered public housing.
Forced to sign documents declaring their belief in Protestant doctrine.
Forced to take drug tests to ensure their adherence to the drug-hating doctrines of the Christian Science religion.
A priest who came to Ireland could be hanged.
US drug patrols shoot to kill when they see boats that fit their profile for drug running. This real-time capital punishment can even be meted out to non-felons and without so much as a trial.
Let's consider some of the additional punishments that convicted drug users and dealers face in Drug War America, as detailed by Colleen Cowles in War On Us.3
A felony drug conviction, even for simple drug use, deprives the family of the felon from receiving food benefits for their kids through the SNAP program, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. As Colleen notes, this penalty does not apply to any other category of felon, not even to murderers and rapists. Only the children of the hated drug user or dealer can be punished in this way. The children of other offenders are not punished for the sins of the father or of the mother.
A felony drug conviction removes voting rights. To put this another way, the Drug War has disenfranchised one-third of the Black population. One-third. This is doubtless an understatement of the amount of minority voting that drug prohibition suppresses, because imprisonment for non-felons often means that the arrestee will not be voting, thanks to practical considerations or the questionable policy decisions and priorities of local wardens and sheriffs on any given election day.
As a felon, convicted drug users and dealers are barred from a host of employment opportunities, of which Colleen provides an extensive list over multiple pages. Felons cannot provide dentistry services or electrician services. They cannot become an investment advisor or an interior designer. They cannot be a pawnbroker, physical therapist, or work in the medical field, nor can they work for a company that receives government contracts. They cannot even get a student loan to prepare themselves for one of the few occupations that they might even be technically allowed to pursue.
Surely, any fair reader must conclude that America's unprecedented criminalization of Mother Nature's plant medicines has resulted in a hate-filled world in which we scapegoat vulnerable human beings for the social problems that we blame on drugs. Our use of draconian legislation to punish those who access Mother Nature's plant medicines has created a permanent underclass in the west, one which we treat with all of the disdain that Protestants once lavished upon Catholics with the help of the Penal Laws of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.
As Richard Miller reminds us in "Drug Warriors and their Prey":
The population explosion of drug offenders in the penal system was caused by politics. Not partisan politics, but a political decision to make war on drug users.4
Political decisions of this kind have been taken throughout the years: to make war on Blacks, to make war on Catholics, to make war on Jews, and today to make war on drug users. Until we recognize the feature in common to all of these wars of hysteria-inspired hatred -- namely, the desire to dehumanize the designated enemy in every way possible -- then citizens of even the most ostensibly free countries in the world will continue to be susceptible to the fearmongering of self-interested politicians, those morally challenged racists and xenophobes who encourage us to blame all of our problems in life on the unpopular demographic of the time, whatever that demographic may happen to be in any particular case.
Ecclesiastes was right. There is nothing new under the sun. Even in a world in which technology is changing every minute, the basics of human personality remain the same, both as to the bright side of the homo Sapiens species and to its dark side. We have seen the Drug Warrior's MO before, after all, in the war against Catholics, Jews, Gypsies, Tutsis, Armenians, Cambodians, indigenous North Americans, and particularly in the war against Blacks, of which the Drug War is really just the continuation after a little rebranding in order to bring Black leaders themselves onboard. And so the wholesale disempowerment of Blacks in America has been presided over, tragically enough, with the help of Black leaders themselves, who were convinced that Mother Nature's plant medicines are the problem rather than social policy.
Instead of spending the last 50 years attempting to change human nature and make the entire Black community renounce the benefits of Mother Nature, the leadership should have been recognizing drug prohibition for what it was: an attempt to disempower minorities, and above all the Black community. They should have taken a close look at the roster of avid Drug Warriors and seen at a glance that the War on Drugs had nothing to do with ensuring public health, insofar as it was enthusiastically supported by obviously racist politicians who did not wish to spend a single dime to improve health care. They should also have studied history, especially the history of the war against Catholics in Ireland. Edmund Burke could have been speaking about the modern policy of drug prohibition and what it has wrought for Black communities in the United States when he described the Penal Laws of 18th-century Ireland as follows:
A machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.5
Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.
We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.
In a free world, almost all depressed individuals could do WITHOUT doctors: these adult human beings could handle their own depression with the informed intermittent use of a wide variety of psychoactive substances.
A Pennsylvanian politician now wants the US Army to "fight fentanyl." The guy is anthropomorphizing a damn drug! No wonder pols don't want to spend money on education, because any educated country would laugh a superstitious guy like that right out of public office.
The DEA is still saying that psilocybin has no medical uses and is addictive. They should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for using such lies to keep people from using the gifts of Mother Nature.
Conservatives say they're against Big Government -- but they let bureaucrats decide what medicines they can use.
In America, they save the depressed from cocaine and opium by turning them into patients for life with dependence-causing "meds." Now 30-year-old doctors get to treat 67-year-olds like children, with new visits every damn three months.
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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