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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




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?

Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!

The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.

Prohibitionists are responsible for the 200,000-plus killed in the US-inspired Mexican drug war in the 21st century.

Drug warriors abuse the English language.

The existence of a handful of bad outcomes of drug use does not justify substance prohibition... any more than the existence of drunkards justifies a call for liquor prohibition.

Over 45% of traumatic brain injuries are caused by horseback riding (ABC News). Tell your representatives to outlaw horseback riding and make it a federal offence to teach a child how to ride! Brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.

Endless drugs could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for materialists and drug warriors to understand -- let alone materialist drug warriors!).

Before anyone receives shock therapy -- or the right to assisted suicide -- they should have the option to start using opium or cocaine daily -- in fact, any drug that makes them feel that life is worth living again.

When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.


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