How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Drug War
by 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.
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 23 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
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
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 decades5, that it resulted in the deaths of 67,000 in America's inner cities over the last ten years6, 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 Veda9
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 us14 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.
I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.
It's rich when Americans outlaw drugs and then insist that those drugs did not have much to offer in any case. It's like I took away your car and then told you that car ownership was overrated.
Peyote advocates should be drug legalization advocates. Otherwise, they're involved in special pleading which is bound to result in absurd laws, such as "Plant A can be used in a religion but not plant B," or "Person A can belong to such a religion but person B cannot."
When psychiatrists write about heroin, they characterize dependency as enslavement. When they write about antidepressants, they characterize dependency as a medical duty.
Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.
Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.
This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.
Why does no one talk about empathogens for preventing atrocities? Because they'd rather hate drugs than use them for the benefit of humanity. They don't want to solve problems, they prefer hatred.
I agree that Big Pharma drugs have wrought disaster when used in psychotherapy -- but it is common sense that non-Big Pharma drugs that elate could be used to prevent suicide and obviate the need for ECT.
The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.
I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.
