How the Drug War Outlaws Religion

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

How the Drug War Outlaws Religion

and why Hindus should be speaking up about it

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 27, 2025

Let me begin by presenting two quotes written over 3,000 years apart:

"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." --The Rig Veda, 1500 BCE ¹

"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing." --Pihkal, 1991 ²

From these quotes alone, it follows that the outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of religious liberty. For if a drug that inspires and elates can bring about the Hindu religion, why are similar drugs not allowed to bring about new modern religions as well? If readers cannot see this instantly, it can only be that they are blinded to common sense thanks to Drug War indoctrination, as the rest of this essay will attempt to demonstrate. (Should such readers deny such indoctrination, I ask them to tell me the last time that they saw a movie or a news report or a magazine article that presented a positive view of drug use, especially when it comes to drugs that elate and inspire in an obvious way.)

First, let us be clear, however: Soma was a drug, at least in the non-pejorative sense of that term. To say otherwise is to take part in a kind of "special pleading." For a drug is a drug is a drug, after all, notwithstanding the Drug Warrior's anti-scientific attempt to distinguish between meds and drugs -- or the mystic's similarly motivated attempts to distinguish between sacraments and drugs. Unfortunately, the term "drugs" is practically useless these days, however, because it has become a simple Drug War pejorative. It essentially refers to a substance which we believe can have no positive uses for anybody, anywhere, for any reason, at any dosage, ever -- as if there were ever any such substance on the planet. Even cyanide and Botox have positive uses. Thanks to this linguistic prejudice, however, we must revise our dictum to a somewhat more awkward formulation in order to speak meaningfully about such things: namely, by saying that "a psychoactive substance is a psychoactive substance is a psychoactive substance."

In contemplating these issues, I began to wonder why Hindus in particular were not pushing back against the Drug War as a group, insofar as their entire religion would not exist were it not for the inspirational effects of a psychoactive substance. Moreover, their religion would not exist were the DEA active in the Punjab in 1500 BCE, in which case the Soma peddlers would have been arrested, perhaps even beheaded by a prototypical drug czar in anticipation of the suggested tactics of our modern-day Drug War Torquemadas like William Bennett ³ and Daryl Gates ⁴. I thought that maybe I was missing something: maybe Hindus as a group WERE combatting the Drug War's threat to religion without my knowing it. So I did a Web search on the subject -- which is always a scary thing, by the way, since there is so much brainwashed blather out there on all things drug-related.

The first hit that appeared in a web search regarding Hinduism and Drugs was an article by David Frawley entitled "A Hindu View on Drug Use and Abuse.⁵" I took one look at it and I sighed. The page was full of inline images of children misusing drugs. Might as well have written an article about horseback riding full of images of youngsters being bucked and bronco'd. Horseback riding is the number-one cause of sports-related brain injury, after all ⁶. I can only hope that Frawley does not speak for all Hindus regarding drug use, because his article was full of the usual brainwashed pieties that have been drilled into westerners on the subject since their infancy: especially the idea that drugs are bad -- except for a few special exceptions carved out by the author himself, like the occasional ganja smoking of certain Vedic sects -- and even THEN such use is to be frowned upon, according to David. The author seems to have never noticed the fact that the Soma ⁷ of the Vedas was itself a psychoactive substance, or what Drug Warriors would call (or rather dismiss as) a "drug." Then there was the usual focus on the abuse of drugs by young people -- which is precisely what the Drug Warrior wants us to focus on: not the fact that drugs can inspire feelings of heaven and compassion and love -- merely the fact that young people can possibly misuse them. Oddly, however, these Drug Warriors do not wish to educate young people about safe use -- so their concerns about safety are disingenuous, to put it mildly.

One wants to scream because it is this lopsided analysis of drugs that has resulted in laws which have deprived me of godsends that grow at my feet -- and if David Frawley is going to tell me that Mother Nature has provided us with bad and unnecessary medicines, then the least he can do is to acknowledge himself as a Christian Scientist!

Consider the following user reports of drug use presented by American chemist Alexander Shulgin in the book Pihkal ⁸ and then tell me that drugs are not necessary or important and that we had all better just breathe deeply and sign up for David's drug-free Vedic-inspired exercise classes online:

"I felt that the experience continued for many days, and I feel that it is one of the most profound and deep learning experiences I have had."

"Excellent feelings, tremendous opening of insight and understanding, a real awakening."

"I learned a great deal about myself and my inner workings."

"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing." ⁹

And these are the experiences that Frawley implies are cheap and unnecessary? No, no, my dear David. It is hate-filled SOBRIETY that is cheap and unnecessary -- at least whenever it leads to school shootings and suicide. But such is the modern fanaticism of the drug-hater that they would prefer such tragedies to the use of evil, bad, horrible "drugs." That preference may not be consciously embraced, but it is implicit in their brainwashed attitudes toward psychoactive substances. What nonsense! It is a complete inversion of values provoked by our brainwashing in the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.

I cannot help but feel that folks like Frawley are making a remunerative virtue of the legal necessity of scorning "drugs," as who should say: "Yeah, who needed them anyway? Just follow my exercise routines and you'll get as close to heaven as anyone need come, in this life, at any rate."

Does he not see, however, that he has been brainwashed to consider only the downsides of drug use? Does he not understand that modern society refuses to let him hear or read stories of positive drug use? Does he not see that he has been indoctrinated since grade-school in the drug-hating ideology of the western world?

Frawley's attitude bothered me so much, that I sent him the following comment on his web page at Vedanet.com:

Here is a quote from the Rig Veda ¹⁰: "They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture."

Here is a quote from Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin ¹¹: "I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."

Do you not see that the Drug War is the outlawing of religion? It insists that there is nothing religious about ecstasy and inspiration. Surely this should be a topic of concern on a site called 'vedanet.'

The real problem with the many Frawley's of the world is that they have been brainwashed into adopting a fallacious view of health. I only pick on David because his views are so typical of the vast majority of brainwashed Americans when it comes to drugs. So he's in good -- if completely bamboozled -- company.

The truth is that health is not determined by any one thing -- not by drugs, genetics, biochemistry, the actions of one's mother or father, etc. etc. etc. Health is created by a balance of a wide variety of factors. The same drug that seems to cause problems for one person can be a godsend for another person. Health, again, is created by the concatenation of a wide variety of inputs. The Drug Warrior asks us to consider drug use outside of all context -- which is completely illogical and antiscientific. But the Drug Warrior is purposefully ignoring all nuance -- because his or her job is to convince the world that substances that have inspired entire religions have no positive uses for anybody, anywhere, ever. They largely succeed in this task because they have the support of modern publishers and authors, almost all of whom self-censor their output to ensure that they publicize no sensible use of psychoactive substances whatsoever.

Not only do they censor reports of all positive effects of drug use, but they equally censor all negative effects of prohibition -- and thus we see endless news stories about inner-city violence, none of which acknowledge the fact that the 'hood was armed to the teeth thanks to Drug War prohibitions in the first place. There were 67,000 gun-related deaths in large American cities between 2013 and 2023 ¹². Meanwhile, the 60,000 "disappeared" in Mexico over the last two decades are reported as victims of drug gangs ¹³. No one cites the inconvenient truth that our drug prohibitions created those drug gangs out of whole cloth and in so doing destroyed the rule of law in Latin America.

Such censorship is found even in the works of authors who should know better. Howard Zinn does not mention the Drug War once in his "A People's History of the United States.¹⁴" Lisa Ling created a CNN documentary about gun violence ¹⁵ in Chicago, in which she never mentioned the Drug War ¹⁶. In "Modern Times," Paul Johnson never mentions any downsides of drug prohibition, nor any upsides of drug use ¹⁷. But he does make occasional references to... you guessed it... drug "misuse" and "abuse." The implication is clear: In Paul's mind, drugs have no positive uses and are a bane in and of themselves.

Just thinking about this latter drug-warrior author ticked me off. I had to take time out from writing this essay to post a review of Paul's book on the Everand platform.

Paul Johnson never mentions the Drug War -- which represents the unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicines. It means placing the government in charge of your pain relief. Paul Johnson never mentions "drugs, " except in the context of misuse and abuse. But then the media saw to it that he never saw positive depictions of drug use. Drug prohibition destroyed the rule of law in Latin America and turned inner-cities into shooting galleries, meanwhile destroying the 1st and 4th Amendments, all during the time period of which Johnson wrote. Yet, Paul was a conservative. He either thought that these outcomes were good things -- or else he was in complete denial about the downsides of prohibition: aggressive denial, even, insofar as the Drug Warrior seeks to impose his jaundiced view of Mother Nature's medicines on the entire world.

Let me now remind the reader of my reason for enumerating these inconvenient truths in the first place. My point is to show that Hindus -- and westerners in general -- are prevented by their drug-war brainwashing from drawing the obvious lesson from the Vedic scriptures when considered in light of the well-documented positive effects of drugs. Had they not been bamboozled into only considering the negative side of drug use, they would see that drug prohibition is antithetical to the Hindu religion, insofar as the former was inspired by the use of a psychoactive substance. They would also see that the Drug War is outlawing new religions today, even as we speak, by denying the proposition that religions CAN be inspired by such things as drug-aided ecstasy and enlightenment. If the Hindu religion can be inspired by a psychoactive substance that inspires and elates, then why cannot MY religion be inspired in the same way?

Answer: Because of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization, which uses censorship to convince us that psychoactive substances have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, ever. Had this idea been embraced in the Punjab in 1500 BCE, there would be no Hindu religion today. And that is why I remain puzzled as to the failure of the Hindu community at large to push back against the War on Drugs.

Notes:

1: Complete Rig Veda in English (Sakala Shakha). n.d. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/rigvedacomplete. (up)
2: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
3: Beheading of Convicted Drug Dealers Discussed by Bennett LA Times - Reuters, 1989 (up)
4: ‘Yeah, I Mean It!’ Gates Says of Idea to Shoot Drug Users Serrano, Richard A., Los Angeles Times, 1990 (up)
5: A Hindu View on Drug Use and Abuse Frawley, David, Vedanet.com, 2012 (up)
6: Equestrian Sports Are The Leading Cause of Sports-Related TBI Neurologic Rehabilitation Institute at Brookhaven Hospital, 2016 (up)
7: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
8: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
9: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
10: Complete Rig Veda in English (Sakala Shakha). n.d. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/rigvedacomplete. (up)
11: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
12: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
13: Mexico's war on drugs: More than 60,000 people 'disappeared' 2020 (up)
14: Howard Zinn. Collins, Harper. 2015. “A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present.” HowardZinn.org. 2015. https://www.howardzinn.org/collection/peoples-history/. (up)
15: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
16: Open Letter to Lisa Ling DWP (up)
17: Johnson, Paul. 2001. Modern Times : The World from the Twenties to the Nineties. New York: Harperperennial. (up)

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Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.

The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.

The benefits of outlawed drugs read like the ultimate wish-list for psychiatrists. It's a shame that so many of them are still mounting a rear guard action to defend their psychiatric pill mill -- which demoralizes clients by turning them into lifetime patients.

In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.

As great as it is, "Synthetic Panics" by Philip Jenkins was only tolerated by academia because it did not mention drugs in the title and it contains no explicit opinions about drugs. As a result, many drug law reformers still don't know the book exists.

Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.

In 1886, coca enthusiast JJ Tschudi referred to prohibitionists as 'kickers.' He wrote: "If we were to listen to these kickers, most of us would die of hunger, for the reason that nearly everything we eat or drink has fallen under their ban."

Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.

Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.

Psychedelics and entheogens should be freely available to all dementia patients. These medicines can increase neuronal plasticity and even grow new neurons. Besides, they can inspire and elate -- or do we puritans feel that our loved ones have no right to peace of mind?

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How the Drug War Outlaws Religion

and why Hindus should be speaking up about it

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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