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Kevin Sabet and What-About-Ism

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 19, 2022



Cannabis basher Kevin Sabet likes to taunt his detractors for the supposed crime of "whataboutism," presumably because they keep asking him questions like, "What about the fact that alcohol is responsible for almost 178,000 deaths a year in the US1 while marijuana is responsible for zero?"

Author's follow-up for October 02, 2025

What Kevin doesn't realize, however, is that such protestors are taking it easy on him. They could ask him, "What about the 60,000 Mexicans who have been "disappeared" by YOUR Drug War since 20062?" Or, "What about the fact that the prohibition that YOU champion has filled American cities with guns and dealers, resulting in thousands of Black deaths every year?" Or, "What about the fact that YOUR prohibition has empowered a self-described Drug War Hitler in the Philippines and encouraged Vietnam in its barbaric practice of killing anyone who dares use Mother Nature's godsend psychoactive medicines for mental improvement?"

No wonder Kevin is eager to depict such questions as invalid, because merely to pose them points to the cruel hypocrisy of his position on so-called "drugs."

Like all Drug Warriors, he wants to blame the politically created category of "drugs" for all social problems, a practice that makes just as much sense as blaming cars for traffic accidents. In both cases, the scapegoat is full of marvelous potential benefits for humankind, which we jettison the moment we pretend that the drugs and cars are themselves responsible for the problems that result from their misuse.

I am not interested in the nitty-gritty of Sabet's alleged findings about marijuana, simply because government never had the right to outlaw plant medicine in the first place. It's called Natural Law, Kevin, the same Natural Law that the Reagan DEA violated when they stomped onto Monticello 3 in 1987 to confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants. It is nevertheless the basis upon which the Founding Fathers founded this country, and no stealth Christian Science "drug expert" is going to convince me to abandon it, nor any Stalinist drug-testing campaign run by government collaborators in the business sector, though it threaten to deprive me of work in America if I dare to partake. To put it another way, plants and fungi are under no obligation to meet the safety guidelines of America's FDA.

The irony is, I agree with Kevin Sabet: there is a disproportionate and perhaps even unhealthy focus on marijuana right now as the go-to drug for young people. But why is this so, Kevin? It is so because of YOUR Drug War, which has outlawed all the naturally occurring competition for the plant in question. Take the coca leaf, for instance. The long-lived Peruvian Indians have a time-honored practice of gaining both mental focus and physical power by chewing the leaf daily. If you want an America full of bright-eyed, mentally sharp and long-lived Americans, the answer is obvious: re-legalize the leaf and give Americans that choice -- along with the choice of hundreds of other psychoactive plant medicines of which we know nothing today precisely because the Drug War has criminalized the substances in question and all but forbidden our scientists to study them, and this in the supposedly "scientific" country called America.

Ever since the Drug War first outlawed a plant medicine in 1914 in violation of Natural Law, the Drug Warriors have been doing their best to frighten America about the boogieman called "drugs." The government helped by suborning the media to depict "drugs" only in a bad light while funding only those studies which focused on misuse and abuse. But Americans are slowly starting to awaken from the programming they have received since childhood, when they received their first teddy bear for saying "no" to the kinds of substances whose use had inspired entire religions. Today's Drug Warrior, like an embattled Wizard of Oz, has to scream ever louder to make his subjects cringe.

So Kevin can shout "boo!" as loud as he likes in an effort to make me fear drugs. I, for one, will no longer react as desired. What scares me today are the prohibitionist policies that make drugs dangerous: chiefly, those sponsored by Kevin Sabet, which incarcerate and kill minorities, meanwhile impeding our study of neuron-stimulating medicines that hold prima facie promise in the fight against conditions like Alzheimer's 4 and autism.

What prohibitionists like Kevin fail to understand is that human beings want self-transcendence. You can outlaw drugs, but you cannot outlaw the desire for self-transcendence. When you bring in law enforcement to combat this desire, you create what DEA agents themselves describe as an unwinnable war, in which law enforcement plays "whack-a-mole" in confronting the media-anointed "killer drug" of the moment. Yes, it's a real job creator for law enforcement and fearmongering speakers who travel the globe catering to the prejudices of authoritarians and bigots, but it's an approach that militarizes police forces, causes civil wars overseas, and turns Americans against each other. In doing so, it keeps our eyes off the prize of the social policies that could render drug use safe and effective: namely, the re-legalizing of Mother Nature and the establishment of the Drug EDUCATION Agency, which would teach the world honestly about all psychoactive medicines (the harms and benefits, both objective and subjective), using the billions that are currently spent instead on locking "users" up.

What about that, Kevin?

Author's Follow-up: April 26, 2023


Prohibition also criminalizes human progress. William James' whole philosophy was inspired by his use of psychoactive substances, especially laughing gas 5 , but folks like Kevin would outlaw such substances, thereby censoring science more profoundly than the Church ever censored Galileo.


Related tweet: June 10, 2023

Check out these prohibitionists who whine about the popularity of weed. It's like they outlawed steak and pork and then they complained about the popularity of chicken. I'd be more than happy to diversify my medicine cabinet once these clowns stop outlawing Mother Nature.



Author's Follow-up:

October 02, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




Here's a good "What About" question for the prohibitionists. What about the fact that Big Pharma drugs are much harder to quit than heroin 6? Studies show that 34% of soldiers used heroin regularly when in Vietnam. That's hundreds of thousands of soldiers. And yet only 5% had trouble getting off the drug upon re turning to the Stateshttps://www.abolishthedea.com/coding/biblio_edit.php. Meanwhile, the antidepressant that I am on has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users -- and those who DO get off the drug have problems with cognition. I know this from experience. Withdrawal not only brought about the worst depression of my life, but I found it impossible to concentrate.

Drugs are not the problem, Kev, it's a lack of choice. For in a world with choice and education, most people use wisely. Freud knew this. He knew that cocaine 7 8 was a cure for depression -- but the medical industry was terrified. They wanted to TREAT depression, not cure it. So they judged the drug by its worst possible use -- and held it to a standard which we hold for no legal drugs, nor for alcohol. Aspirin use results in the deaths of 3,000 a year in the UK alone -- alcohol for 178,000 in the U.S. alone. Nor do the prohibitionists care that 1 in 4 American women are wards of the healthcare state thanks to the dependence-causing meds of Big Pharma 9 10 .

prohibition is the problem 11 , Kev. How can you not know this when liquor prohibition created the Mafia out of whole cloth?

Speaking of "What about?" -- What about the minority communities that have been destroyed around the globe thanks to drug prohibition? YOUR drug prohibition, Kev.














Notes for essay entitled Kevin Sabet and What-About-Ism:

1: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
2: Mexico's war on drugs: More than 60,000 people 'disappeared' 2020 (up)
3: The Dark Side of the Monticello Foundation DWP (up)
4: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
5: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
6: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
7: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
8: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
9: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
10: 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)
11: Drug Prohibition is the Problem, not Drugs: what the movers and shakers get wrong in the drug re-legalization debate DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Drug warriors are full of hate for "users." Many of them make it clear that they want users to die (like Gates and Bennett...). The drug war has weaponized inhumanity.

Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."

The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.

Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!

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.

Americans have learned nothing but half-truths and lies about cocaine and opium thanks to the total censorship of drug benefits.

Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.

Prohibition never ended. Busybody Americans just gave alcohol a big Mulligan for killing 178,000 a year in America alone and then began fighting to outlaw everything else.

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 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.


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