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How Milton Friedman Completely Misunderstood the War on Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

January 28, 2023



In 1972, Milton Friedman made the following breathtakingly uninformed remark on the subject of drugs and substance prohibition:


"I readily grant that the ethical issue is difficult and that men of good will may well disagree."

(source: "From Fighting the War on Drugs to Protecting the Right to Use Drugs)


Men of good will might have disagreed back in 1972, particularly those who lacked the philosophical instinct to intuit the predictable consequences of outlawing strongly desired substances that have been used for millennia by humankind, but it is impossible for "men of good will" to support the Drug War today.

Would men of good will prohibit philosophers from following up the work of William James, whose use of laughing gas changed his entire view of reality?

Would men of good will withhold morphine 1 from children in hospice based on the superstitious drug-war doctrine that morphine 2 is bad "in and of itself," without regard for how or why it is used?

Would men of good will suppress religious liberty by arresting those who use time-honored sacred medicine for religious purposes?

Would men of good will support an outlay of 51 billion dollars a year for punishing Americans who use substances of which racist politicians disapprove?

Would men of good will support a prohibition policy that has led to the presence of Mexican drug cartels in over a thousand American cities?

Would men of good will support a policy that has destroyed the Mexican judicial system and led to the corruption of countless officials, including the nation's top anti-drug official, Noe Ramirez, in 2008?

Would men of good will support a policy that, in just 50 years, has resulted in a 400% increase in the cocaine 3 4 supply in America?

Would men of good will support a policy that has given Big Pharma 5 6 a monopoly on mind medicine thanks to which 1 in 4 American women must now take tranquilizing medicine every single day of their life?

Would men of good will support a policy that has led to an opiate epidemic in America in which 1 user died every 16 minutes in 2016?

Would men of good will support a policy that has disenfranchised millions of Blacks and thereby led to the election of racist traitors and insurrectionists like Donald Trump?

Would men of good will remove young people from the American work force because they used medicines that, in the past, had inspired entire religions?

No, Milton. Drug Warriors are not "men of good will," or even "people of good will," as we would phrase it today. The very best thing that we can say about Milton's "men of good will" today is that they have been brainwashed, like Milton himself, in the Drug War ideology of substance demonization, which feeds us the unscientific lie that "drugs" have no positive uses, ever, for anyone, at any time, in any dosage whatsoever.

True, many of these downsides took time to develop and were not apparent in the 1970s (though they might have been predicted by a somewhat shrewder philosopher than Milton), but Libertarians today continue to accept Milton's analysis uncritically, as Doug Bandow does in the article cited above. They continue to ignore the 'good' uses of drugs, in fealty to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization, and they have yet to admit, let alone protest, the way the Drug War shuts down free scientific inquiry and debate.

As just one example of the self-censorship that the Drug War encourages, take the fact that Britain is getting ready to outlaw laughing gas 7 , for the usual purblind reason that it could be dangerous to young people (the young people whom we have doggedly refused to educate about safe use). While there are many people who are protesting this upcoming prohibition, I am the only one in the world, to my knowledge, who is protesting the ban on the grounds of intellectual freedom, thereby standing up for William James and the right to free philosophical inquiry. This can only be because the Drug Warrior has, for the most part, convinced everybody on planet earth that 'drugs' are truly bad -- and this is, in fact, the impression one gets from reading libertarians like Friedman on this topic: they do not like prohibition, but that's only because they think that we should all have the right to 'go to the devil' in our own way.

Author's Follow-up: January 28, 2023


Not only are Drug Warriors not "men of good will," but they may well be just the opposite. Julian Buchanan argues that the Drug War is a great success, not because it is cutting down on "drug" use but because it is accomplishing the goals of the Drug Warriors: namely, to militarize police forces, disenfranchise minorities, and keep America's eyes off the prize when it comes to achieving social reforms.

Actually, I'm too easy on Milton Friedman. Even in 1972, he should have known that the outlawing of Mother Nature's plant medicines is an obvious violation of the Natural Law upon which America was founded. Surely a libertarian of all people should acknowledge that, concerned as they are about government overreach. I can scarcely imagine a greater case of government overreach than the government telling its citizens which plants and fungi they are allowed to access. I have a right to those medicines as an inhabitant of Planet Earth! John Locke said so in his Second Treatise on Government, that we have a right to the use of the land and all that lies therein. Not that we need a 17th-century philosopher to convince us of such a SELF-EVIDENT truth.









Notes for essay entitled How Milton Friedman Completely Misunderstood the War on Drugs:

1: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
2: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
3: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
4: “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)
5: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
6: 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)
7: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




America arrests people whose only crime is that they are trying to be all that they can be in life... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.

It is actually illegal to be a Ben Franklin in 21st century America. To put this another way: we outlaw far more than drugs when we outlaw mind and mood medicine.

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.

There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.

Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.

Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.

Cop and detective shows are loaded with subtle drug war propaganda, including lines like, "She had a history of drug use, so..." The implication being that anyone who uses substances that politicians hate cannot be trusted.

Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.

When people tell us there's nothing to be gained from using mind-improving drugs, they are embarrassing themselves. Users benefit from such drugs precisely to the extent that they are educated and open-minded. Loudmouth abstainers are telling us that they lack these traits.

We should start taking names. All politicians and government officials who work to keep godsends like psilocybin from the public should be held to account for crimes against humanity when the drug war finally ends.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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