How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 6, 2025
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 cause the very chemical imbalances that they are purported to fix1.
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 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 smoking 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.2" 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 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 religions3! 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.4"
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 article5 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 empaths6.
Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths
In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.
This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.
How do I know this?
Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.
More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?
This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."
The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.
Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal":
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."
Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).
If America cannot exist without outlawing drugs, then there is something wrong with America, not with drugs.
Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.
The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault. The Drug War is the triumph of hypocritical idiocy.
The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.
People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.
Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.
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You have been reading an article entitled, How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking published on June 6, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
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."
You have been reading an article entitled, How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking published on June 6, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
