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How the Archive.org Website Censors Free Speech About Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 26, 2025

This was going to be an essay about my new plan to protest the Drug War by reviewing government-supplied propaganda on Archive.org. I was going to engage in a frenzy of reviewing because most of the site's drug-related content had yet to receive reviews, and so my own reviews would have pride of place as being first in line. But then something happened that changed my priorities completely. I had just finished my critique of a NIDA ¹ article entitled QQ1006. I had pointed out how NIDA was a propaganda arm of the U.S. government, and that it would always be so until it began to recognize both the glaringly obvious benefits of drug use and the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition. This was going to be the opening salvo in my campaign of posting reviews against the hateful War on Drugs. The form was filled out and ready to go...

And then I clicked "submit."

Instead of receiving a confirmation message or a thank-you, I received instead the following chilling announcement:

"It looks like your review triggered our spam detector."

Yes, and it looked like their site had triggered my BS detector.

Suddenly, the big story of the day was not my decision to review articles on Archive.org: the big story was the fact that minority opinions about drugs are not welcome in the age of the Drug War and so are censored at will. They are subject to Kafkaesque veto thanks to code written by anonymous techies who have been brainwashed in grade-school about the evil of godsend medicines. Suddenly, the big story was censorship, the fact that the Drug War mindset had effectively outlawed free speech ². I had encountered such censorship before, back in 2020, when I had posted a drug-related question for Professor Patrick Grim and it was automatically deleted by algorithms used by the Wondrium company during a virtual discussion forum. (See my essay entitled I asked 100 American philosophers what they thought about the Drug War for more on that 2020 censorship.) I knew, moreover, that self-censorship was rampant in the age of the Drug War (see my essay entitled Self-Censorship in the Age of the Drug War, also written in 2020). But I had not been so suddenly censored in five years, and I was not prepared for it. It was like a smart slap in the face.

The censorship had at least one positive outcome, however. It reminded me how there are life-and-death issues at stake when it comes to the War on Drugs and that the topic represents more than just an opportunity for the philosophically minded to expose the puerile assumptions on which such a policy is based. The Drug War is having hateful anti-democratic consequences right here and now in the real world. I had a similar feeling last night in watching an old episode of Night Gallery set in a state penitentiary. As the camera panned by the barbed wire and tall cement walls, it reminded me that there are real victims of Drug War policy, hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caged as we speak for having used and/or dealt with substances that the government had no right to outlaw in the first place, least of all in a country founded on natural law, a doctrine which tells us, according to John Locke himself, that "the earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being ³."

Review of

QQ1006, an article by NIDA

Archive.org refused to publish this review thanks to algorithms written by anonymous coders who value drug-war orthodoxy over free speech.

The government study of drugs is HUGELY biased. Their researchers ignore all the benefits of drugs as well as all the downsides of prohibition. Their only job is to demonize drug use by holding it to a safety standard that we apply to no other activity on planet Earth: not to free climbing, not to drag-racing, and certainly not to gun shooting or drinking alcohol. Speaking of alcohol, it kills 178,000 a year according to the CDC, and yet the government invites us to fear drugs like Ecstasy, which have killed no one. The only deaths related to Ecstasy are those caused by the Drug War, which refuses to educate about safe use and to regulate product.

Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace, love and understanding to the dance floors of Britain in the 1990s, but Drug Warriors do not like peace, love and understanding. And so Drug Warriors cracked down on the use of Ecstasy, after which violence SKYROCKETED at rave concerts as dancers switched to the anger-facilitating drug called alcohol, and concert organizers had to bring in special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces!

NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition, thanks to which America's inner cities have been turned into shooting galleries and the rule of law is now a joke in much of Latin America. 60,000 Mexicans have been "disappeared" thanks to the Drug War over the last 20 years ⁴, and yet NIDA ⁵ wants to outlaw a drug whose only crime is that it brought about unprecedented peace, love and understanding.

We don't need a National Institute on Drug Abuse. We need a National Institute on Drug USE -- an agency that recognizes the benefits of drugs and the downsides of prohibition.

Internet Archive Censorship

Censorship

Notes for essay entitled How the Archive.org Website Censors Free Speech About Drugs:

1: NIDA is the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Its bias is clear in its name. If it were an objective organization, it would be called the National Institute on Drug USE. (up)
2: Speak now or forever hold your peace about drug prohibition DWP (up)
3: Second Treatise of Government Locke, John, Project Gutenberg, 1689 (up)
4: Mexico's war on drugs: More than 60,000 people 'disappeared' 2020 (up)
5: Blocks, NIDA. 2016. “How the NIDA Blocks Marijuana Research over and Over.” Cannabis.net. 2016. https://cannabis.net/blog/opinion/how-the-nida-blocks-marijuana-research-over-and-over. (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.

You can get a Ph.D. in healthcare, and not learn a thing about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs, as demonstrated by history, anecdote and common sense.

This pretend concern for the safety of young drug users is bizarre in a country that does not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987.

First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.

Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.

Alcohol makes me sleepy. But NOT coca wine. The wine gives you an upbeat feeling of controlled energy, without the jitters of coffee and without the fury of steroids. It increases rather than dulls mental focus.

Properly speaking, MDMA has killed no one at all. Prohibitionists were delighted when Leah Betts died because they were sure it was BECAUSE of MDMA/Ecstasy. Whereas it was because of the fact that prohibitionists refuse to teach safe use.

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.

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.

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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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