How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking

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How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 6, 2025

I stopped by a convenience store yesterday and noticed a huge sign behind the counter: "Nicotine is an addictive drug. This is because it changes the brain."

This warning, as the fine print makes clear, is displayed thanks to a court ruling. (I say "fine print," but the sign is so large that even this introductory blurb reads like a banner headline.)

This made me stop and think, why do we never see a sign like the following at psychiatrist's offices:

"SSRIs are dependence-causing drugs. This is because they change the brain."

That latter claim has been clearly demonstrated in the work of Richard Whitaker, who reveals how antidepressants ¹ cause the very chemical imbalances that they are purported to fix ².

The Jekyll and Hyde nature of America's attitude toward drugs is made clear by such over-the-top warnings about tobacco: on the one hand, we're screaming "Danger!" On the other, we're screaming, "Just let me buy what the hell I want to buy!" And the former court-supported warnings get louder every year. It seems it won't be long before stores are required to hire someone to personally lecture a would-be purchaser about the dangers of nicotine before allowing them to buy a pack of cigarettes.

This got me thinking about the relationship between nicotine and drug prohibition.

In my childhood in the '60s and '70s, I was subject to a barrage of television commercials ³ teaching me that cigarette smoking causes addiction and cancer. I now see in hindsight that this public health campaign helped to normalize the idea of drug prohibition in my mind by getting me used to the idea that the government and the courts had a role in protecting me from making bad decisions.

What I had yet to realize was that drug prohibition itself is what made tobacco the go-to drug for most Americans in the first place! It did this by outlawing all alternatives. Opium smoking drastically decreases the desire for tobacco smoking (and alcohol, for that matter), as does the use of certain phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, as is clear from the user reports that the chemist cites in "Pihkal.⁴" And yet we legalize tobacco while outlawing all less inherently risky drug use, in the same way that we legalize alcohol while outlawing all less inherently risky drug use.

This is what America cannot get through its thick puritanical skull: that drug prohibition causes the very problems that we assume that it will solve. Drug prohibition has always been based on the assumption that less drug use is always better -- but that is demonstrably false, not least because drug use has inspired entire religions ⁵! In a sane world, we would use the least harmful drugs in the wisest possible way, and this is made impossible by drug prohibition.

What are the prohibitionists thinking? They seem to be expecting that someday people will be happy to do without any mood-enhancing substances of any kind, but that is a bizarre, anti-scientific, ahistorical and inhumane goal. It can only be maintained seriously by a Christian Scientist as a matter of religious faith. To enforce such laws is, in fact, the enforcement of the Christian Science religion as the law of the land. Such tyranny makes no more sense than outlawing drugs for physical conditions, under the theory that no one "really" needs those either, provided only that they were "right with God."

Drug prohibition has not ended drug use in America. To the contrary, it has ensured that only the most dangerous possible drug use is practiced. Why? Because we have outlawed everything else!

As with any essay on the idiocy of drug prohibition, there is so much more that could and should be said on this topic. But I will spare the reader any more obvious truths in this particular post. Let me end, however, by citing a quote from William H. Brereton in the Truth About Opium, published in 1822 to counter the absurd lies of the Anti-Opium Society.

"Nicotine, the alkaloid of tobacco, is simply a deadly and rapid poison, useful only to the assassin. Morphia, the alkaloid of opium, is only poisonous when taken in an excessive quantity; whether used internally or injected under the skin, it is the most wonderful anodyne and sedative known. I fully believe that, when medical men come to study opium and opium smoking more fully, it will become the established opinion of the faculty that opium smoking is not only perfectly harmless, but that it is most beneficial, so that it may ultimately not only put down spirit drinking, but perhaps supersede, to a great extent, tobacco.⁶"

Of course, this quote will be hard for Americans to believe, since they have been protected from their birth from learning anything about the benefits of drug use -- just as they have been shielded from learning anything about the endless downsides of drug prohibition.

AFTERWORD

Even Psychology Today now acknowledges that SSRIs do not fix chemical imbalances. In fact, in a 2022 PT article ⁷ by Noam Shpancer Ph.D., the author tells us that "We don't know how antidepressants work." I would agree, except to add that "We don't know that they work at all," except perhaps to make the user satisfied with a lack of self-realization in life. Some might even claim that they keep some folk from committing suicide, but they only do so by limiting their possibilities in life. If we really wanted to help the depressed, we would let them thrive on the wise use of phenethylamines and opium and coca, all of which are inherently less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco, at least in a world in which we teach safe use and regulate product -- a world in which we replace the hateful Drug Enforcement Agency with a Drug Education Agency, staffed by what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths ⁸.

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes:

1: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
2: Whitaker, Robert. 2011. “Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker: 9780307452429 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books.” PenguinRandomhouse.com. 2025. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/189611/anatomy-of-an-epidemic-by-robert-whitaker/. (up)
3: Television Commercials and Drugs DWP (up)
4: Pihkal 2.0: Finding drugs that work for users rather than for pharmaceutical companies DWP (up)
5: How the Drug War Outlaws Religion DWP (up)
6: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
7: Shpancer, Noam. 2022. “Depression Is Not Caused by Chemical Imbalance in the Brain | Psychology Today.” Www.psychologytoday.com. July 24, 2022. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/202207/depression-is-not-caused-chemical-imbalance-in-t (up)
8: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism DWP (up)

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In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed. Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.

There would be little or no profiling of blacks if the Drug War did not exist.

Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.

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

Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.

Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.

The problem for alcoholics is that alcohol decreases rationality in proportion as it provides the desired self-transcendence. Outlawed drugs can provide self-transcendence with INCREASED rationality and be far more likely to keep the problem drinker off booze than abstinence.

Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.

In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.

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.

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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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