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License to Hate

How the drug war brings out the worst in us

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 21, 2024



Dear Jerel:

Thanks so much for sending me the full version of your highly informative paper entitled "Stigmatize the use, not the user?"1 Having read it in its entirety, the title now makes perfect sense to me.

I find all such papers very difficult to read, however, partly because they are depressing (as when I read about the 46,082 opioid-related deaths that occurred in America in 2018) and partly because my philosophical temperament causes me to wince at the many false but unspoken assumptions behind the hate speech that one hears on this topic. I am thinking particularly of your quote from the probation officer who said:

"I would say that the perception is that people don't deserve to receive Narcan; that they deserve to die."


This quote, in fact, inspired me to post the following Tweet.

Prohibition is all about justifying hate for specific social groups. It has given a veneer of "health concerns" to American prejudices. That's why there was no crack down on elderly white suburban women who were using oxy, only on the impoverished young people who did so.


My own elderly mother was one of those white women who spent a decade on legal oxy. It never occurred to any of us family members that she was a drug "scumbag" for so doing. She wasn't even a "drug abuser" in our eyes, but simply a person with medication issues2. Had she been a minority or an impoverished young person living in the rust belt, the case might have been very different.

I agree with pastor Debra that addiction is not a sign of spiritual weakness or an ethical fault, but neither is it fundamentally a medical problem. Framing the issue that way avoids the real problem and gives prohibition a big mulligan for the problems that it causes. To catch the real forces at work here, we should be framing the drug situation in America as a result of "Prohibition Spectrum Disorder3," a category that comprehends all the negative effects from drug use that are bound to occur in a country that outlaws all mind- and mood-improving drugs while insisting that the public know as little about those drugs as possible.

If oxy is the only drug that is readily available for me to gain transcendence from a tough life, then we should not be surprised if I use oxy. The fact that we do not understand this as Americans brings me to the two big lies of the prohibitionists:

1)That there are no downsides to prohibition.

Prohibition has killed over 100,000 Mexicans in the last two decades4 and turned inner cities into shooting galleries5. It has nullified the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution and outlawed entire religions, based on the Christian Science notion that drugs are bad and therefore cannot be properly used in religious rituals - as if the DEA should be in charge of deciding if a religion is valid. Prohibition has helped authoritarians like Donald Trump win office by effectively removing millions of minorities from the voting rolls. So when the Drug Warrior says that there are no downsides for prohibition, they mean there are no downsides for the prohibitionists. Even this, however, is false, since the Drug War discourages and/or outlaws research on a vast array of drugs, some of which could be of use in fighting autism and Alzheimer's 6 given their ability to grow new neurons in the brain. But this brings us to one of the craziest assumptions behind the Drug War: the idea that a drug which causes problems for white American young people must not be used by anyone, anywhere, for any reason, at any dose, in any circumstance, ever. This is nothing less than a ban on human progress on the pharmacological front.

2) That there are no upsides to drug use.

Meanwhile, the psychedelic renaissance is slowly (glacially, in my book) teaching materialist scientists that "drugs" may have some positive uses after all, a fact that they might have already gleaned from history7. The Hindu religion was inspired by Soma8; the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries thrived for millennia9 10, and the Peruvian Inca considered the coca leaf to be semi-divine11.

Finally, it's ironic that Americans consider dependence on opioids to be so demeaning, given that 1 in 4 American women are dependent upon Big Pharma 12 13 "meds" that they take every single day of their life14. We not only accommodate this use, but ensure a "clean drug supply," meanwhile telling the depressed and bipolar that it is their medical duty to take those drugs15. This in my view is nothing less than the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time, and yet it is not even an issue for Drug Warriors, which is yet another indication that Americans are bewitched, bothered and bewildered when it comes to the subject of "drugs"16.

Thanks again, Jerel, and best of luck in your continued research on this extremely "fraught" subject!

PS In December of 2023, the Atlantic published an op-ed piece declaring that we need to double-down on stigmatizing drug users. This is wrong for so many reasons, one scarcely knows where to begin. In fact, I wrote a whole essay about it called "Stigmatize THIS!"17 and submitted it to the Atlantic as a letter to the editor, but of course, they did not publish it.









Notes for essay entitled License to Hate: How the drug war brings out the worst in us:

1: Stigmatize the use, not the user? Attitudes on opioid use, drug injection, treatment, and overdose prevention in rural communities Ezell et al., Jerel M., National Library of Medicine: National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2020 (up)
2: Moreover, she had medication issues only because we had outlawed all the transcendence-giving drugs that might have helped her change substances. Oxy was the only effective drug the doctor could legally give her for anxiety, and yet we're surprised when it's prescribed! (up)
3: Prohibition Spectrum Disorder DWP (up)
4: ThriftBooks. 2026. “Drug War Capitalism.” ThriftBooks. 2026. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/drug-war-capitalism/9217021/?resultid=e8667266-257a-41bf-83e3-78200e3527f3#edition=8539401&idiq=10283063. (up)
5: The Invisible Mass Shootings DWP (up)
6: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
7: How Scientific Materialism Keeps Godsend Medicines from the Depressed DWP (up)
8: History of Hinduism: Prevedic and Vedic Age Marbaniang, Domenic, 2018 (up)
9: The road to Eleusis: unveiling the secret of the mysteries Wasson, Gordon (up)
10: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
11: Inca Lands Bingham, Hiram (up)
12: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
13: 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)
14: Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection, from Soul to Psychedelics Holland, Julie, HarperWave, New York, 2020 (up)
15: The Depressing Truth About SSRIs DWP (up)
16: The modern blindness to this dystopia stems from two sources: 1) America's naive conception of science as a god, and 2) our belief that human beings are interchangeable widgets, amenable to a one-size fits all cure from reductionist science. (up)
17: Stigmatize THIS DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Doc to Franklin: "I'm sorry, Ben, but I see no benefits of opium use under my microscope. The idea that you are living a fulfilled life is clearly a mistake on your part. If you want to be scientific, stop using opium and be scientifically depressed like the rest of us."

American businesses judge people, not by the color of their skin but by the contents of their digestive systems.

Check out the 2021 article in Forbes in which a materialist doctor professes to doubt whether laughing gas could help the depressed. Materialists are committed to seeing the world from the POV of Spock from Star Trek.

If we can go overseas to burn poppy plants, then Islamic countries should be free to come to the United States to burn our grape vines.

This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.

I don't have a problem with CBD. But I find that many people like it for the wrong reasons: they assume there is something slightly "dirty" about getting high and that all "cures" should be effected via direct materialist causes, not holistically a la time-honored tribal use.

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

We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).

Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.

Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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