How the Internet Archive Censors Free Speech about Drugs
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 28, 2025
Websites like the Internet Archive take the concept of "Kafkaesque" to a whole new level. They use algorithms written by anonymous techies to flag Drug War protest and remove it from the public discourse. Then they feel no compunction to discuss the issue with the authors of the banished material.
Three days ago, I reviewed a NIDA article about MDMA "abuse" by pointing out that NIDA was a political organization because it refuses to consider both the upsides of drug use and the downsides of prohibition. The Archive algorithms told me they had detected "spam" in my review and would not allow it to be published.
Spam?
I invite the reader to take a look at the review I had written (below) and tell me how anyone could call it spam. The Archive's algorithms were obviously written with a goal of suppressing free speech on the subject of drugs1. This suspicion is not allayed by the fact that the Archive has been ghosting me ever since they blocked my review. When I wrote them a few months ago about a technical problem that I was having with donating to them, they responded so quickly that my head was spinning. When I object about their censorship of free speech, they go silent for days.
I can understand that the Archive might not want to render their site controversial by allowing free speech on the subject of drugs, but if that is the case, they should not be soliciting reviews of their stored content.
Instead of discussing the censorship with me, the Archive chose the cowardly option of hiding behind algorithms to remove drug-war opponents from the public discourse.
Bill Gates once mused that "The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow." I think rather it is becoming the self-congratulatory echo chamber for bad ideas.
Banned
The following is my Banned Review of the NIDA article on the Internet Archive entitled "Research Report Series 2017 MDMA (Ecstasy) Abuse"2.
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 CDC3, 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 forces4!
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 years5, and yet NIDA 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.
It may be objected that I am expecting a lot from a presumably large organization such as the Internet Archive when I demand that it respond quickly to my complaints. The censorship of my article only happened a few days ago after all. But these are no ordinary complaints. These are complaints about my basic freedoms as an American citizen, viz my right to take part in public dialogue about issues vital to the republic. Nor did the Archive take long in ejecting me from the public forum. That was the eerie part. They did so instantaneously based on the implicit suspicions of a totally anonymous techie -- one who, like all Americans, was raised since childhood in the drug-hating ideology of the Drug War and grew up in a world in which the media never published any positive accounts of drug use. This was a world in which he was never told of the opium 6 use of Benjamin Franklin, nor of the DEA raid on Monticello 7 to confiscate the poppy plants of Benjamin's "dealer," Thomas Jefferson8, nor of the fact that psychedelic medicine inspired the very creation of the Hindu religion, nor that coca inspired the indigenous people of Peru.
And yet this anonymous techie, who is probably less than half my age, is going to decide on his own that my ideas are "beyond the pale" when it comes to drugs? To the contrary, the modern western idea of drugs is beyond the pale. This deadly hysterical approach that the west has adopted took shape beginning just over 100 years ago, whereas humankind has lived for tens of thousands of years without the wholesale demonization and criminalization of naturally occurring medicines. If anyone is beyond the pale it is the NIDA scientist who pretends that this unprecedented prohibition is a natural baseline for drug-related research, that drugs can fairly be seen to have no positive benefits. If anyone is beyond the pale it is the NIDA scientist who sees no downsides in drug prohibition, despite the fact that it has created violence and torture out of whole cloth and destroyed American liberties -- including free speech. How ironic when you consider that folks like Gates and Kurzweil saw such a rosy online world in which new ideas could thrive and grow. Instead, the Internet as made censorship efficient and given publishers a way to block unwelcome ideas and social criticism through the craven use of algorithms written by anonymous cowards.
Author's Follow-up: February 28, 2025
The Archive got back to me and, as expected, they said that the article had to cover specifics. But my whole point was that NIDA is not qualified to opine authoritatively on such topics as MDMA.
If Archive had posted an article by the NAZI party, would I not be allowed to point out why we should not be listening to such a source and rather explain why they are evil? I dismissed NIDA 9 on the grounds that they are evil insofar as their attitude toward drugs is anti-scientific, ignoring as it does both obvious drug benefits and obvious prohibition downsides, and that this anti-science has evil consequences in the real world.
Q: Where can you find almost-verbatim copies of the descriptions of religious experiences described by William James? A: In descriptions of user reports of "trips" on drugs ranging from coca to opium, from MDMA to laughing gas.
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
No wonder conservatives are terrified of drugs. It is not safety that worries them, else they would demand education. They are terrified of new ways of seeing life. The outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of whole mindsets. It is a meta injustice.
The fact that some drugs can be addictive is no reason to outlaw drugs. It is a reason to teach safe use and to publicize all the ways that smart people have found to avoid unwanted pharmacological dependency -- and a reason to use drugs to fight drugs.
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.
The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.
Drug War censorship is supported by our "science" magazines, which pretend that outlawed drugs do not exist, and so write what amount to lies about the supposed intransigence of things like depression and anxiety.
We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
"The Legislature deliberately determines to distrust the very people who are legally responsible for the physical well-being of the nation, and puts them under the thumb of the police, as if they were potential criminals."
-- Aleister Crowley on drug laws
My cousin says we should punish drug dealers. I say we should punish those politicians who created those drug dealers out of whole cloth by passing unprecedented laws against the use of Mother Nature's bounty.
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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