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How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 15, 2019

It all started in 1914 when bigoted politicians decided that lower-class Americans could not be trusted to use opium wisely. Suddenly Mother Nature went from being a gift-giving goddess to a common drug kingpin. Enter Richard Nixon in the sixties, who decided to further blaspheme Mother Nature by criminalizing a host of additional psychoactive substances that happened to be used by his political enemies.

Update: May 05, 2025

It's always disappointed me that Americans have thus far hobbled together so little pushback against this denial of a birthright, this outlawing of the freely given gifts of Mother Nature, this unprecedented coup against the therapeutic goddess of humanity. The government took away our right to control our own pain and to control our own psychic condition and Americans seem to have merely sighed, asking their government, "Okay, so you want me to give up my natural birthright? Fair enough. Oh, and you want me to urinate on command to prove that I am faithful to my government? No problemo. Gee, isn't democracy just swell?"

Nowadays, when the DEA asks us to jump, Americans simply say "How high?"

For just one obvious example, browse some mycology pages online. You'll find that many mushroom hunters (professionals and hobbyists alike) want it to be known that they will have nothing to do with psychedelic mushrooms that they happen to come across. "Look at me," they seem to say, "I'm a professional mushroom hunter who is obediently ignoring the most interesting part of Mother Nature at the behest of the U.S. government. So don't expect me to write anything about your tawdry psychedelic shrooms!" Far from screaming bloody murder about their unprecedented loss of human rights, their forced separation from Mother Nature's bounty, many online mycologists pride themselves in pointing out that they study only those plants that their government will allow them to study. Thus they recast their own political timidity as patriotism.

But America's response to this usurpation has been even worse than that. We have rewritten history so that we do not have to confront the fact that we have criminalized Mother Nature in the first place. This can be seen by any regular viewer of the Great Courses program, a collection of videos presenting college courses taught by some of the most popular professors in the world.

Although I am a regular viewer of the Teaching Company's courses, I've yet to see one of their history professors so much as acknowledge the fact that the game-changing Elusinian mysteries of ancient Greece involved the use of a naturally occurring psychoactive substance similar to LSD. I've yet to see one of their biology professors allude to the psychoactive power of mushrooms. I've yet to see one of their anthropologists discuss the crucial role of natural psychedelic medicines in early South American ritual. Nor have I ever seen one of their political science professors ever mention the infamous DEA raid on Monticello ¹ in discussing the political legacy of Thomas Jefferson.

I guess this makes sense. It would be too painful for a supposedly free people to remember what we've given up, so we have rewritten history to help us pretend that Mother Nature's pharmacy was never particularly useful to us in the first place. "Humph! Mother Nature: who needs her? Let the government and Big Pharma ² ³ decide what I need - and when - and at what price, too."

The good news is: modern research is showing us today how so many of the natural substances that our politicians have outlawed are proving to be godsends in therapeutic settings. My hope is that the penny will eventually drop and we'll draw the obvious conclusion from this research, namely that no naturally occurring plant is bad in and of itself, and that, as Terence McKenna ⁴ once said, it is "ridiculous and obnoxious" to criminalize the freely offered medicines of Mother Nature. Perhaps someday we'll learn the ultimate lesson from today's anti-patient Drug War: that it is both scientifically stupid and a violation of basic human rights to turn Mother Nature into a drug kingpin.

Author's Follow-up: February 14, 2023

follow-up on essay by the Drug War Philosopher

Perhaps most astonishing of all is the fact that botanists go along with the Drug War. Michael Pollan is one notable and disappointing example. Has he never stopped to consider that it's wrong for government to dictate which fauna he can legally study? If anyone should see the absurdity (and fascism) in this policy, it should be botanists. To be sure, Pollan is not himself prevented from using psychedelics despite the laws against it, so it's not clear why he thinks prohibition is effective in any case. He is not the only one who can ignore legislation. But the very idea that government could limit his studies of nature should, I maintain, be repellent to him as an American citizen. His motto should be "anything BUT prohibition," as it represents the censorship of science -- never mind the fact that it tells Americans that they cannot think and feel in certain ways. Women protest "Our bodies, ourselves," but surely the more important protest is "Our minds, ourselves," for everything starts with our perception of the world, and when government controls that, we are screwed indeed.

And why does Michael support prohibition? Because he wants to protect a vast minority of young people from themselves, young people whom we have failed to educate about substances but rather attempted to frighten them instead. And what is the result of helping this vast minority? It is that the vast majority of the depressed (and others who could benefit from mind medicine) go without medical godsends -- and those are stakeholders that Michael COMPLETELY IGNORES.

*For Michael's somewhat equivocal stance on prohibition, see page 405 of the hardback version of "How to Change Your Mind."

Author's Follow-up: March 27, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

In re-reading the above effusions after the passage of two more years (which, as Poe might say, "embraces 63,072,000 seconds of the time that flies..."), I see that I have barely scratched the surface when it comes to enumerating the factors that folks like Michael Pollan ignore in championing continued prohibition.

He ignores the fact that drug prohibition resulted in the "disappearance" of 60,000 in Mexico over the last two decades ⁵, that it resulted in the deaths of 67,000 in America's inner cities over the last ten years ⁶, that it has destroyed the first and fourth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, that it has censored academia, that it has resulted in a Drug War theocracy in which Drug War heretics are denied the right to earn a living via the expedient of drug testing ⁷ , and that it has outlawed religions whose adherents consider Mother Nature to be a goddess rather than a drug kingpin.

To better recognize the Drug Warrior's antipathy to the freedom of religion ⁸, consider the fact that the Hindu religion would not exist today had the DEA been active in the Punjab in 1500 BCE. Had William Bennett been the Drug Czar in the Indus Valley at the time, the government would have beheaded those who peddled the psychoactive Soma.

And yet Michael and company claims that we have to continue outlawing Mother Nature for health reasons?

Please!

"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -The Rig Veda ⁹

Author's Follow-up:

May 05, 2025

Drug Warriors are insane. They support the criminalization of drugs that have produced the following user reports in "Pihkal"¹⁰:

"Tremendous clarity of thought, cosmic but grounded, as it were."

"Poetry was an easy and natural thing. Both the reading of it and the writing of it."

"This feels marvelous, and a whole new way to be much more relaxed, accepting, being in the moment. No more axes to grind. I can be free."

"It was a glorious feeling, and beauty was everywhere enhanced. With eyes closed it felt marvelous, and it was appealing to pursue the inner experience."

"Intense euphoria that I call a feeling of grace, soft skin, voices, youthful appearance, animated discussions, feelings of great closeness to others."

"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."

"MMDA appears to bring dreams to the conscious level; is a link between the subconscious and the conscious."

Note that latter quote in particular. It reminds us that the Drug War is outlawing philosophical research into the nature of the mind, into the mind-matter debate and the nature of Reality writ large. Just ask William James who told us that philosophers must experience altered states to opine advisedly about such things.

Drug Warriors are obviously insane for outlawing synthetic drugs that produce the above-listed effects, but it should be remembered that even thoroughly demonized opium can produce godsend states.

Consider this citation from the 19th-century short story entitled "What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien:

"Those hours of opium ¹¹ 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.¹²"

"The Drug of Paradise!" Clearly, scientists are gaslighting ¹³ us ¹⁴ when they sign off on the DEA lie that such substances have no beneficial uses. Clearly, the deeply depressed should be actively placed on this drug, using it in the time-honored fashion of smoking it nightly. Instead, we actually believe in America that the severely depressed should have their brains damaged by shock therapy -- a procedure about which the drug-hating FDA actively promotes!

I wish I could freeze my body and come back in a thousand years -- because surely America's drug policies are going to be considered superstitious and bizarre by future societies -- when humanity finally understands that it was a category error to place passion-scorning materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. Our wholesale outlawing of psychoactive substances will one day make the excessive blood lettings of yore look like a strategy of genius.

Someday, in fact, the wise and strategic use of drugs will be part of poetry classes, and music classes -- and even political science classes. In the latter case, they will be used to help students understand the role that empathogens like MDMA ¹⁵ could play in helping bring humanity together as one, thereby keeping nuclear annihilation at bay.

Notes for essay entitled How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Drug War:

1: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
4: McKenna, Terence. 2026. “History Ends in Green.” The Library. 2026. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/history-ends-in-green. (up)
5: Mexico's war on drugs: More than 60,000 people 'disappeared' 2020 (up)
6: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
7: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition DWP (up)
8: Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
9: Complete Rig Veda in English (Sakala Shakha). n.d. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/rigvedacomplete. (up)
10: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
11: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
12: Great Ghost Stories O'Brien, Fitz-James , Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., 1918 (up)
13: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
14: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
15: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)

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It's funny to hear fans of sacred plants indignantly insisting that their meds are not "drugs." They're right in a way, but actually NO substances are "drugs." Calling substances "drugs" is like referring to striking workers as "scabs." It's biased terminology.

Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.

Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.

I have nothing against science, BTW (altho' I might feel differently after a nuclear war!) I just want scientists to "stay in their lane" and stop pretending to be experts on my own personal mood and consciousness.

If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"

All drugs have potential positive uses for somebody, at some dose, in some circumstance, alone or in combination. To decide in advance that a drug is completely useless is an offense to reason and to human liberty.

Democratic societies need to outlaw prohibition for many reasons, the first being the fact that prohibition removes millions of minorities from the voting rolls, thereby handing elections to fascists and insurrectionists.

It is a violation of religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate. The Hindu religion was inspired by just such a drug.

Science knows nothing of the human spirit and of the hopes and dreams of humankind. Science cannot tell us whether a given drug risk is worthwhile given the human need for creativity and passion in their life. Science has no expertise in making such philosophical judgements.

We need a few brave folk to "act up" by shouting "It's the drug war!" whenever folks are discussing Mexican violence or inner city shootings. The media treat both topics as if the violence is inexplicable! We can't learn from mistakes if we're in denial.

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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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