John Locke on Drugs

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John Locke on Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

January 20, 2020

It's funny. I've read and re-read Locke's Treatises on Government, and I have yet to discover a principle whereby government can justifiably confiscate the naturally occurring substances to which we have legally claimed ownership. To the contrary, section 26 of his Second Treatise of Government (Book 2) tells us:

"The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being."

You'll notice that Locke did not say, ""The earth, and all that is therein, with the obvious exception of psychoactive plants, which the government may justifiably confiscate at will, while vigorously persecuting the owner of the property upon which said demon-plants reside."

Thomas Jefferson shared Locke's views on property, insofar as he wrote to Virginia Lawyer Samuel Kercheval:

"A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings."

In other words, Jefferson understood the right to property as existing under natural law.

We cannot therefore suppose that Jeffersonian democracy would countenance a common law exception to property rights based on a politicized scare campaign about dangerous substances - least of all one in which the Drug Warriors claim that alcohol and tobacco, the two most dangerous drugs in the world, are going to be exceptions to the substance criminalization that they otherwise advocate.

Certainly, Jefferson had no need of referencing a list of government-banned plants before arranging his extensive and ever-changing gardens at Monticello . Why? Because Jefferson considered that his right to his own botanical property was self-evident, based on natural law, and thus not subject to abridgement by the common law of a politically motivated government. What's more this ban on government meddling was meant for all time, insofar as natural law is considered to be both universal and immutable.

{^We conclude therefore that the DEA violates the rational dictates of natural law when it criminalizes naturally occurring plants, and that it is therefore not simply the right of Americans to protest this usurpation, but their duty.}{ For the Drug War represents a repudiation of the principles upon which this country was founded, especially property rights as defined by John Locke (i.e., the right to "the earth and all that is therein").

Considered in this light, the DEA's 1987 confiscation of poppy plants from Monticello should have been a wakeup call for America. In this action, the DEA was demonstrating its scorn for both Locke's natural law and the unalienable rights as alluded to (and partially enumerated) by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson's poppy plants simply had to go. Why? Because the government had decided that this particular bit of personal property was somehow "bad" in and of itself.

Thus the common law was suffered to triumph over natural law, getting things precisely backwards from the Founding Fathers' point of view. And so the champions of Big Government won the day, committing brazen-faced robbery - of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, no less -- under the disingenuous and hypocritical banner of a superstition: the idea that some plant medicines are evil and somehow beyond the ability of free human beings to use wisely.

It was the age of the Christian Science propaganda campaign known as "just say no," when Americans were not only persuaded by the government's superstitious beliefs about plant medicines, but went so far as to renounce their privacy rights in a bid to show their patriotic support of America's new secular religion known as the Drug War, practically vying with one another to be the first to offer their urine for drug testing to demonstrate their allegiance to the new anti-Jeffersonian status quo. Through drug testing ¹ , the true believers could be separated from America's new class of enemies, those who, like Jefferson, dared to consider their right to Mother Nature's bounty as unalienable, as established by natural law. Thus big business conspired with government to ruin the lives of those who dared help themselves to Mother Nature's plants in defiance of politically motivated common law.

It was in this anti-American atmosphere that the sight of jackboots invading Monticello failed to arouse so much as a whimper in the hoi polloi. (But was not the freedom-loving Thomas Jefferson literally spinning in his grave!) But then values were all askew back then. This was the era when Bush and Reagan were encouraging children to turn their parents in to the police for using politically stigmatized substances, a law-enforcement strategy that would have earned kudos from Joseph Stalin. What better proof that the drug-war is anti-democratic than that it leads to the normalization of such chilling totalitarian political tactics.

Ominously, this normalization of government evil has continued apace since the DEA's Monticello ² raid, as the latest Drug War movies ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ from Hollywood openly extol the virtues of torture and murder as means of separating humankind from the therapeutic plants of Mother Nature. In "Running with the Devil," DEA agent Leslie Bibb tortures one "drug suspect" and murders another, in a plot whose script seeks to render her as the hero of the film, a no-nonsense fascist determined to separate humankind from Mother Nature's plants at any price - even that of turning America into a totalitarian police state. If millions of the depressed and lonely have gone without godsend rain forest medicines for 50 years thanks to her agency's ban on drug research, that's not Natalie's problem. She's just doing her job, that is, killing "scumbags" (meaning any Americans who dare to make use of the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet).

The popularity of such fascist-friendly films is a measure of the Drug War's success in alienating Americans from the Jeffersonian legacy of personal freedom and goading us toward the acceptance of a new totalitarianism based on the demonization of Mother Nature's plants. This is an anti-American power grab by anti-Jeffersonian fascists who tell us: "Your pursuit of happiness may go thus far and no farther, lest we confiscate your property and throw you in jail."

The government thus legislates as if Thomas Jefferson had added the following footnote to the Declaration of Independence: "Of course, these natural rights must give way should the government find it politically expedient to insert common law in their stead."

Such a fascist power grab cries out for refutation and pushback by freedom lovers throughout the country - and throughout the world, in light of America's Drug War colonialism, whereby we financially blackmail our trading partners into toeing our government's own superstitious party line about naturally occurring psychoactive substances.

"But actual liberty is dangerous!" cries the Chicken Little Drug Warrior.

Of course, any naturally occurring object can be dangerous when misused -- whether we're talking about Jefferson's riding horses or his poppy plants -- but so what? Nothing in Lockean theory limits a citizen's right to Mother Nature's bounty based on the danger that such liberty might seem to pose in the jaundiced eye of a busybody observer, let alone in the impersonal eye of a jealous and power-usurping government. For when it comes to the natural law on which our rights are founded, John Locke understood what the Drug Warrior has long forgotten, that mere things are neither good nor bad: only people are. Hence it follows that correcting behavior in a free society involves working with people to improve their lives, not scapegoating the ever-changing list of personal property with which we associate their bad or dangerous behavior as time goes by.

This basic understanding is implicit in everything that Locke wrote about natural rights: that people, not things, may be good or bad. If he did not always mention this explicitly, it was only because he never thought that a rational people could be so misled by political propaganda as to come to doubt such a manifest truth.

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editor note from abolishthedea.com

May 27, 2022

Modern philosophers and legal experts have little to say about natural law these days. That's understandable, because if they acknowledged its role in America's founding, they'd be logically obliged to point out that the criminalization of plant medicine constitutes the triumph of common law over natural law. The late Father Joseph Koterski gave 24 wonderful lectures on modern jurisprudence for the Great Courses company -- in which, however, he never once even mentioned the Drug War. Not once. Drug war ideology, it seems, is so pervasive in American society that even professors of law consider its plant-demonizing presuppositions to be a natural baseline from which to opine about political and social affairs, as if the criminalization of plants and fungi played no role in fomenting inner-city violence, nor in facilitating the psychiatric pill mill ⁷ , nor in censoring scientific study, nor in disfranchising millions of minorities a year, nor in forcing millions (perhaps even billions) around the world to go without the sort of godsend natural medicines that have inspired entire religions.

Not only do modern professors self-censor themselves on this topic, but they've been brainwashed so effectively that they do not even realize that they're doing it. That's why I'm forever writing unwelcome letters to modern non-fiction authors reminding them of this fact, that they're "reckoning without their host" when they pronounce on modern wrongs without even acknowledging the existence of the Drug War, let alone the part it plays in creating and/or facilitating the evils of which they write. Of course it's little wonder that so many authors (indeed practically all modern non-fiction writers) have been bamboozled. Like all Americans, they've been raised from infancy to despise psychoactive plant medicines, and probably even were given a teddy bear by the state police in grade school in return for having "just said no" to plant medicine of which politicians disapprove. For more on how this indoctrination process works, see . My only point here is, that whatever academia may think of natural law these days, America was founded on it, and we Americans therefore have the right (and indeed the duty) to point out that the Drug War is in violation of the core principle of that doctrine, namely that there are some rights that are so basic to humans qua humans (like our right to Mother Nature's bounty) that they can never be justifiably taken away from citizens, for any reason -- least of all by racist politicians who want us to fear unpopular substances so that we can demonize them and disfranchise those who use them.

Notes for essay entitled John Locke on Drugs:

1: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition DWP (up)
2: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
3: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
4: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
5: Blast-off for Planet Hypocrisy! DWP (up)
6: Drug War Quotes in TV and Movies DWP (up)
7: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)

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The line drawn between recreational and medical use is wishful thinking on the part of drug warriors. Recreation, according to Webster's, is "refreshment or diversion," and both have positive knock-on effects in the lives of real people.

Thomas Szasz was not an extremist when it comes to drugs. The extremists are those who feel that psychiatrists know more about our mind and mood than we do.

There are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???

"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda (There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)

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.

Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.

Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.

America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.

The "scheduling" system is completely anti-scientific and anti-patient. It tells us we can make a one-size-fits-all decision about psychoactive substances without regard for dosage, context of use, reason for use, etc. That's superstitious tyranny.

Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.

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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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John Locke on Drugs

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