Herman Melville and Drugs

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Herman Melville and Drugs

What 'The Confidence-Man' tells us about America's attitude toward psychoactive substances

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 17, 2025

"The Confidence-Man ¹" by Herman Melville seems to have been something of a disappointment, at least in literary circles, when it appeared in 1857. The idiom-rich dialogue, while often witty and philosophically suggestive, was considered improbable and, worse yet, unrelated to any overarching plot. The seemingly big-hearted author of the previously well-received adventure tales of "Typee" and "Omoo" was also criticized for a lack of "kindliness":

"We are conscious of a certain hardness in [The Confidence-Man], from the absence of humour, where so much humanity is shuffled into close neighbourhood. ² "

Given my own philosophical turn of mind, I personally enjoyed the book, in spite of its alleged literary shortcomings -- or perhaps even because of them. I enjoyed mulling over the abstruse topics broached by the diverse portfolio of American "types" on the Mississippi steamboat, like the hypothesized moral accountability of a rattle-snake or the propriety of the philosophical principles championed by Shakespeare's Polonius. But of course the real merit of the book as viewed in retrospect lies in its rebuke of the racist ideology of the American backwoodsman, as revealed in the chapters about the Metaphysics of Indian-Hating.

I say I enjoyed the book, but I should be more modest and admit that I am enjoying it. This book is so full of often uncredited voices that a tantalized reader will have to read it at least twice, if only to figure out "who's on first" at any given point in the narrative. Fortunately, the ideas in "The Confidence-Man" matter far more than do the individual characters or even the plot itself -- if, indeed, there is a plot. So the book can be enjoyed without regard for page order as a sort of collection of philosophical insights. As critic Ann Sophia Stephens wrote in the New Monthly magazine in the year of the book's publication: "You might, without sensible inconvenience, read it backwards ³."

The book also raised fraught questions about the seemingly thin line between altruism and self-interest in a capitalist society, with the author coming dangerously close to implicitly concluding that America is made up of two classes: namely, the con artists and their patsies, with, of course, the latter outnumbering the former by an order of magnitude. The book does, in fact, seem to have been written by a newly minted curmudgeon.

But I will leave any further literary criticism to others far more qualified for the task. I merely wish to point out one additional aspect of "The Confidence-Man" that has never been highlighted before to my knowledge: namely, the way in which the author repeatedly glorifies the use of drugs -- by which, of course, I mean, the use of the drug called alcohol. The book is full of it! Had the author so frequently extolled the use of any other drug, he would have been considered a lunatic in his own times and a drug fanatic in ours! And yet Melville's unapologetic boosterism for alcohol seems to have gone unnoticed by his critics, both in his time and in ours.

This literary drug-pushing on Melville's part raises all sorts of questions about America's hypocritical attitudes about psychoactive substances in general. To demonstrate this fact, I present the following selection of liquor-friendly quotations from "The Confidence-Man" along with a short commentary on each.

"We being newly-made friends must drink together."

NOTE: Imagine if this sentence had read as follows: "We being newly-made friends must smoke an opium pipe together."

An instance of just such convivial smoking was recounted by author Fitz-James O'Brien in his 1859 short story entitled "What Was It?"

"Those hours of opium happiness which the Doctor and I spent together in secret were regulated with a scientific accuracy. We did not blindly smoke the drug of paradise, and leave our dreams to chance. While smoking, we carefully steered our conversation through the brightest and calmest channels of thought." ⁴

NOTE: Imagine that: the wise use of opium by adults?! Who in brainwashed America knew it was even possible -- except for neurosurgeon Carl Hart ⁵, perhaps?

"Let us drink. It appears to me you don’t drink freely."

NOTE: Talk about peer pressure. Imagine someone saying, "You've hardly TOUCHED that cocaine!"

"Oh, one can’t drink too much of good old wine—the genuine, mellow old port. Pooh, pooh! drink away."

NOTE: More peer pressure! And yet this kind of drug-pushing is totally acceptable to Americans, then as now. Yet we are told today that we are glorifying drug use if we merely suggest -- with Sigmund Freud himself -- that cocaine has positive uses ⁶! or if we merely suggest -- with Benjamin Franklin himself -- that opium is a mind-stimulating blessing for us ⁷ ⁸! (I can already hear the mental screams of brainwashed Americans after reading these lines: "Cocaine and opium??? Positive uses??? BLASPHEMY!!!")

'My wife drink Santa Cruz?'
'Either that or die."
'But how much?'
'As much as she can get down.'
'But she'll get drunk!'
'That's the cure.'

NOTE: Not only is the speaker encouraging the use of a drug, but he is explicitly encouraging its EXCESSIVE use! And there are no cries from the critics, no indignant snorts from the medical community.

"Why don’t you drink?”

NOTE: More peer pressure.

"If this wine with its bright promise be not true, how shall man be, whose promise can be no brighter?"

NOTE: Wine here is extolled as the very epitome of truth. The selective hypocrisy of this view is breathtaking in light of modern anti-drug prejudices.

"Good wine, good wine; is it not the peculiar bond of good feeling?"

NOTE: For westerners, perhaps. But I guess it is asking too much of Melville to have appreciated the imperialist nature of his drug preferences.

"As for suspicions against the dealers in wine and sellers of it, those who cherish such suspicions can have but limited trust in the human heart."

NOTE: Contrast this idolization of the wine dealer with the deadly enmity that Americans have been taught to feel against the modern scapegoat of our time: the so-called drug dealer! The latter is a non-person, we're told, worthy of worse than death -- as in the movie "The Runner ⁹," in which a Black teenage drug courier is dismissed as a "waste of space" by a white cop, who later gets an award for a botched raid on a high-school in which the young unarmed student is riddled with bullets by a gung-ho SWAT team.

"Thank fortune, Frank, I am young, every tooth sound in my head, and if good wine can keep me where I am, long shall I remain so."

NOTE: Notice how the drug called alcohol is considered more than a harmless vice; it is viewed as a beneficial medicine!

"You don’t think that tobacco, when in league with wine, too much enhances the latter’s vinous quality—in short, with certain constitutions tends to impair self-possession, do you?”

“To think that, were treason to good fellowship,” was the warm disclaimer.

NOTE: Here we are reminded that alcohol was not the only drug that was hypocritically championed in the past -- or in the present. Nicotine was also welcomed as a blessing rather than a curse.

And the peer pressure and drug glorification continue throughout the book:

Do you drink on.

I naturally love a cheerful glass.

Let me fill your glass again.

Do you fill up, and my glass, too.

But smoke away, you, and pray, don’t forget to drink.

CONCLUSION

The point, of course, is not that Melville was wrong about alcohol. Indeed, he was right. Most people can and do use alcohol wisely without harm to themselves and perhaps even with benefit. And yet I could easily concoct a monograph in which I depict alcohol as evil incarnate and I could do so without telling any lies whatsoever. I could simply limit my discussion to statistics on liver damage and the DT's and broken families and wife beating and car accidents. Again, I would not be telling lies: it is just that I would only be telling part of the story about alcohol. And this is, in fact, exactly how prohibitionists go about tarnishing the reputations of almost all drugs except alcohol. It is a branding operation. They focus exclusively on downsides outside of all context, only in most cases these downsides are far more speculative and far less ruinous than in the case of alcohol.

The real problem here, as GK Chesterton understood, was our decision to place the government in charge of the health of the individual in the first place. For the moment we do that, wrote Chesterton:

"...there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens.¹⁰"

It was inevitable that such an intrusive "health" policy would eventually devolve into a nationwide branding operation designed to whitewash the favored drugs of the powers-that-be, while simultaneously tarnishing their psychoactive competitors through agitprop and censorship.

What's more, the branding operation was sure to work, for America has yet to come to terms with two crucial facts that have become apparent after the end of World War II:

1) that propaganda works
and...
2) that this is a bad thing -- for both democracy and freedom.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Much has been made of the racist underpinnings of drug prohibition, and rightly so ¹¹. But most Americans fail to appreciate the role that the medical community has played in outlawing drugs. America's hypocritical drug policies were born when the self-interested medical community started lobbying Congress to "protect us" from patent medicines. As Thomas Szasz pointed out, the American people were not upset by having such drug choices -- it was rather the self-interested doctors who denounced such drugs on behalf of the supposedly gullible people ¹². But did they really want to keep us safe -- or did they really want to outlaw time-honored panaceas, like opium and cocaine, whose widespread use would put them out of business?

Popular wisdom aside, those patent medicines actually worked, insofar as they contained opium and cocaine (and alcohol, of course). They improved mind and mood and hence improved one's ability to fight off depression and disease -- albeit in the sort of indirect way that materialist doctors are finding it hard to wrap their heads around even today ¹³. Unfortunately, these self-interested doctors were in a good position to demonize such drugs because the concoctions were generally sold by hucksters who themselves did not understand the benefits of the medicines from whose sale they themselves were profiting. Indeed, they may have considered themselves to be confidence men, being, like their critics in the medical field, unaware of the power of an improved mental and emotional state to foster or even bring about physical well-being.

FINAL THOUGHT

In reading "The Confidence-Man," I was reminded of Carl Hart's complaint about life in 21st-century America: the fact that liquor drinkers are genially accommodated in public places while those who make use of competitive substances are relegated to back alleys and treated as pariahs ¹⁴. Melville's book reminds us that this dual standard about drug use is of longstanding in America and so entrenched as to have bamboozled the anti-imperialist author himself.

Notes:

1: “The Project Gutenberg EBook of the Confidence-Man, by Herman Melville.” n.d. Www.gutenberg.org. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21816/21816-h/21816-h.htm. (up)
2: The Life and Works of Herman Melville: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade melville.org (up)
3: The Life and Works of Herman Melville: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade melville.org (up)
4: Great Ghost Stories O'Brien, Fitz-James , Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., 1918 (up)
5: Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear Hart, Dr. Carl L. Hart, 2020 (up)
6: “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)
7: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
8: Opium for the Masses: Harvesting Nature’s Best Pain Medication Hogshire, Jim (up)
9: The Runner: Racist Drug War Agitprop DWP (up)
10: Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument against the Scientifically Organized State Chesterton, GK (up)
11: Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America Hansen, Helena, 2023 (up)
12: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
13: Husserl and Drugs: how materialist psychology blinds us to common sense about godsend medicine DWP (up)
14: Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear Hart, Dr. Carl L. Hart, 2020 (up)

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Herman Melville and Drugs

What 'The Confidence-Man' tells us about America's attitude toward psychoactive substances

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against the hateful war on US

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