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In Praise of Opium

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 23, 2023



Relax, I am not here to encourage people to smoke opium every day, any more than I would encourage them to get drunk every day. That said, however, if they have to choose between one of those two vices, they should certainly smoke opium -- provided, of course, that they do not live in a country in which the government is going to do everything it can to persecute them for that latter vice. For, Drug War mythology notwithstanding, the Chinese people smoked opium daily for centuries without adverse effects. It was not until Christians on the other side of the globe took moralistic exception to the practice that we began looking upon those users as "fiends" and "addicts." And, of course, a power-hungry Chinese leadership was more than happy to crack down on a practice that allowed one's population to think for itself and to transcend the mind control of the state.


(abolishthedea.com)

To learn more about that politically incorrect story, I recommend "The Truth About Opium" by William BreretonFN0067 .

But the points I wish to make in this essay are philosophical in nature, not historical.

I begin by asking the heretofore unspoken question, what is so wrong with opium use?

If everyone on the planet used opium daily, we would have had no world wars. We would have had no Nazi Germanys. We would have had no atomic bombs -- let alone those hydrogen bombs that can despoil half of a continent in one fell blow.

Of course, the reader, like myself, has been taught to tremble before drugs, not to understand them, so I should add for their comfort that this peaceful utopia to which I refer could come about with MDMA as well, which would not have to be used daily and might therefore be more acceptable to folks who have been taught from grade school that they should detest psychoactive medicines.

That said, it is a little odd that Americans in particular should resent the daily use of psychoactive substances, given that 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent on Big Pharma 1 2 meds for life. Apparently, then, it is not drug use that Americans fear so much as the mental states that they produce. We are happy when drugs pacify the population, to the point that we actually encourage people to "take their meds" whenever they begin to grow obnoxious to us, but when a substance helps one to think for themselves and to tune out the sales pitches of corporate America, we begin to worry.

In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan tells us that Richard Nixon outlawed psychedelics because he feared that the users of such substances would be unable to fight in America's wars (particularly in Vietnam). I disagree with Michael - I think it's clear that Richard Nixon's goal was to crack down on dissent, pure and simple. (Otherwise he would have found ways to crack down on alcoholics.)

But the point here is that NO ONE would have to fight wars in the first place if everybody were disqualified from doing so thanks to their substance use. And surely that's a consummation devoutly to be wished. No more war, no more nuclear weapons, no more terrorism in the name of abstract causes. Just people who are ready to think the best of their neighbors thanks to their use of entheogenic substances like MDMA 3 , psilocybin and opium .

It is easy for Drug Warriors to parody such proposals and to decry them as completely unrealistic. Yet no matter how unrealistic they may sound, I have never heard of a more "doable" way to save the world from armageddon 4 . I only hope that it does not take the nuclear destruction of half the planet to encourage politicians to begin considering such a pharmacological corrective for the apparently innate hatred with which human beings have been infected since caveman days.

In Xerxes' time, it was customary practice to kill all adult males in the villages of one's enemy, rape and enslave all the women, and castrate all the boys. The Persians did this and what's more, "they liked it," as we say. And, of course, their adversaries were just as bad, or just as amoral.

It doesn't take a modern ethicist to tell us that something is very wrong with a species that adopts this default attitude toward "the other." That species is clearly pathological and has to be treated with "strong medicine" if we are to have any hope of eradicating these ultimately suicidal instincts, for such hateful attitudes in a nuclear world are a sure recipe for Armageddon.

So it is not enough to ask if opium is good or bad in the abstract. Nothing is good or bad in the abstract. Opium is not a moral agent, even though Drug War authors like John Halpern insist on blaming the poppy for the problems that human beings have in dealing with it*.

The real question is: Is a world of daily opium use better or worse than a world in which heartless despots fight pyrrhic wars in which they spare absolutely nobody?

Viewed in this light, the philosopher wants to say: BRING ON THE OPIUM!


Related tweet: February 25, 2023



In the 19th century, opium was in the medicine cabinet of the majority of Brits in the form of laudanum and there was no opioid crisis. Another proof that the Drug War causes all of the problems that it claims to be solving.


February 25, 2023

*John Halpern wrote the tellingly titled book "Opium: How an ancient flower shaped and poisoned our world." It's a typical Drug Warrior title. A flower did not poison our world: our world was poisoned by commercial interests, politics, racism5, misinformation and lies.


Related tweet: June 2, 2023


"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium 6 is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau









Notes for essay entitled In Praise of Opium:

1: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
2: 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)
3: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
4: 8 Nuclear Close Calls that Nearly Spelled Disaster Davidson, Lucy, History Hit, 2022 (up)
5: US Sentencing Commission: Over 65% of Federal Prisoners are Black or Hispanic Defender Services Office Training Division (up)
6: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




New article in Scientific American: "New hope for pain relief," that ignores the fact that we have outlawed the time-honored panacea. Scientists want a drug that won't run the risk of inspiring us.

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.

Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.

Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.

@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?

Pundits tell us that there are medical reasons not to "snort" cocaine. So what? There are medical reasons not to drive a car: you may have an accident. The question is: does cocaine use or car driving make sense in a given case! Details matter!

Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.

State-assisted suicide for the depressed is murder in a world in which the state outlaws all substances that could make the depressed wish to live.

This is why "rock stars" use drugs: not just for performance anxiety (which, BTW, is a completely UNDERSTANDABLE reason for drug use), but because they want to fully experience the music, even tho' they may be currently short on money and being hassled by creditors, etc.

ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."


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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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