Listening to Thomas Szasz

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Listening to Thomas Szasz

a philosophical review of Our Right to Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 7, 2025

I enjoy reading modern mainstream articles on the subject of drug use for the same reason that the narrator in Poe's short story ("Ms. Found in a Bottle") delighted in reading the works of the German moralists:

"Not from any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent madness, but from the ease with which my habits of rigid thought enabled me to detect their falsities.¹"

The modern arguments on the subject of drugs depend on so many problematic and false propositions that it is a positive delight for a philosopher to dissect them. It is really an ego boost to see how quickly, and in how few words, one can dispose of their attempts to pathologize and/or demonize drug use. It is a positive joy to speak concise home truths to their verbose superstitions.

Update: June 08, 2025

There are only a handful of authors on this topic who do not afford me this pleasure, their work being absent of any glaringly erroneous presuppositions. Chief among these rare exceptions to the brainwashed rule is Thomas Szasz, in reading whom I feel far more like a student than a teacher. It was a humbling experience yesterday when I re-read his 1992 book entitled "Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market.²" I realized that I -- yea, even I -- still had things to learn.

In philosophically reviewing this 1992 classic, then, I have to dispense with my usual procedure of flagging the author's obvious misunderstandings and derisively correcting them. Instead, I feel like I should just sit back and meekly point to Szasz's own perceptive words, as who should say: "What HE said," and thereby let Szasz speak for himself. He is the master on this topic, not I. I will add my own comments to each quotation, however, to flesh out the nuanced implications of the issues under discussion and to suggest relevant topics for further philosophical investigation.

"It is a grievous mistake to conceptualize certain drugs as a 'dangerous enemy' we must attack and eliminate, instead of accepting them as potentially helpful as well as harmful substances, and learning to cope with them competently." --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p. xv

What a breath of fresh air! It is amazing that so few people think this way today. So few people think that we should actually use drugs as wisely as possible for human benefit. Instead, they superstitiously say absurd things like "Fentanyl ³ kills!" and "Crack kills!" Such statements are philosophically identical to shouting "Fire bad!" All such statements would have us fear and demonize dangerous substances rather than to use them as wisely as possible for human benefit.

"The right to chew or smoke a plant that grows wild in nature, such as hemp (marijuana), is anterior to and more basic than the right to vote." --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p. xvi

Exactly. This is why the Founding Fathers never mentioned "drugs" in the Constitution. It was not because they thought that drugs were unimportant. They thought rather that it "went without saying" that we all have the right to Mother Nature and to sovereignty over the contents of our own digestive systems. They literally could not imagine a time when such anterior rights would be denied.

"How can a person lose the right to his body? By being deprived of the freedom to care for it and to control it as he sees fit." --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p. 6

Preach! Truths like these are so obvious that they hit home in just a few words; whereas falsehoods, like those inherent in Drug War ideology, have to be TAUGHT for a lifetime, by propaganda, and above all by ruthless censorship of all positive reports about drug use -- and of all negative reports about drug prohibition.

"Lacking the usual grounds on which people congregate as a nation, we [Americans] habitually fall back on the most primitive yet most enduring basis for group cohesion, namely, scapegoating." --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p. 32

As Szasz points out, only the Drug War could bring together such diverse public figures as Jesse Jackson, Charles Rangel, Nancy Reagan, and William Bennett -- all joining together in an attempt to outdo each other in demonizing people who use the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions. "Drug users" are vampires, bloodsuckers, murderers -- who need to be beheaded (William Bennett) or shot (Daryl Gates) -- or perhaps they need to have a stake driven through their evil hearts, preferably on the night of a full moon.

"Anybody who does not believe in the devil, think about drugs." -- Mario Cuomo --from Our Right to Drugs, p. 33

I think Mario stole this quote from Og the Caveman. Og was always saying, "Anybody who does not believe in the devil, think about fire." Og would then raise his notoriously bushy eyebrows and add: "Mog thought that SHE could use fire wisely and fire KILLED Mog. The fact is, NOBODY can use fire wisely!"

"We live in a society in which people have legal access to loaded guns but not to sterile syringes." --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p. 43

This is just one of the endless absurd outcomes of drug prohibition. We also live in a society in which people have legal access to shock therapy but not to the drugs that could make shock therapy unnecessary. We live in a society in which the suicidal are denied all the drugs that could obviously cheer them up in a trice, such as phenethylamines and laughing gas . This is why I say that the Drug War inverts all classical liberal values.

"The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs." --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p. 67

Thank you for that, Thomas! Sadly, hundreds of millions have to suffer in silence behind closed doors thanks to American drug policy. They are never considered as stakeholders in the drug criminalization debates. If a white American young person might misuse a substance for one reason at one dose, then we see to it that NOBODY in the world can use that substance for any reason at any dose, no matter how much suffering they may have to undergo thanks to this government-created privation. This is anti-scientific and anti-progress. It is also shamelessly imperialistic given that we impose our country's jaundiced view of drugs on the entire world.

"It was the Reagans who, through the repetition of a moronic anti-drug slogan, taught American children to spy on their parents and denounce them to the police." --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p. 78

Bush and Reagan encouraged kids to turn in their parents for using substances of which politicians disapprove. This is pure Stalinism. It is unforgivable. Suppose we had "turned in" Bush for drinking nightly cocktails. We are only concerned about his health, after all, right? It would be for his own good to stop him on his road to ruin via alcohol abuse. Speaking of which, you don't suppose that Bush was HOOKED on that junk, do you, drinking it every night like that? You know what they say: "One good sip deserves another." Besides, imagine the message that his nightly elbow lifting sends to our vulnerable little white young people when it comes to alcohol, a drug that kills 178,000 a year in America alone!

"The undertreatment of pain in hospitals is absolutely medieval." --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p. 125, quoting Russell Portnoy, M.D. Pain Service, Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital (1987)

Szasz alone, however, places the blame for this situation where it belongs, on modern drug policy, which places bureaucrats in charge of second guessing physicians when it comes to opiate prescriptions. Doctors are afraid to prescribe adequate opiates, that is why patients do not get adequate pain relief.

"When even so staunch a defender of the free market as Milton Friedman regards treatment as the proper response to the drug problem, how can we expect ordinary people to resist this deadly illusion?" --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p. 147

I feel vindicated here for my previous criticisms of Milton Friedman ⁴ ⁵. I sensed the economist's philosophical confusion myself when I read the following 1972 quote of his in an article by Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute.

"I readily grant that the ethical issue is difficult and that men of good will may well disagree.⁶"

What? We can disagree about our right to sovereignty over our own mind and mood? Please, Milton! The Hindu religion would not exist today had the Drug War been in effect in the Punjab in 1500 BCE. Those who sold the Soma ⁷ juice would have been beheaded and the Vedic religion would have disappeared from the face of the earth as just another suppressed religious movement.

Think, Milton, think!

As Szasz says:

"If we argue from principle, then it is moot whether drug prohibition works, because it is problematic what should count as its 'working.' The very existence of such a mass movement of scapegoating-- uniting a diverse people in a common hatred-- may be regarded as evidence that, simply put, it is working." --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs

How did we enter this Dark Ages in America in which we demonize substances rather than learning how to use them as wisely as possible for human benefit? Szasz explains our descent into inhumane superstition as follows:

"Step by step, generation after generation, habits of law engendered habits of mind, and vice versa, until in the Soviet Union the idea of a free market in land and houses became unthinkable, and in the United States the idea of a free market in drugs became unthinkable." --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p. 148

AFTERWORD

The biggest insight I obtained from re-reading "Our Right to Drugs ⁸" yesterday concerned the role that the crackdown on patent medicines has played in putting the medical establishment in charge of deciding what medicines we need -- or do not need -- when it comes to our mind and mood. It would have been far better to urge Americans to obey the maxim of 'caveat emptor' with regard to medicines than to begin deciding for them in advance whether a given substance will help them personally, psychologically speaking. This is something that government and doctors can never know, since the benefits of psychoactive drug use depend on a vast array of specific details. Moreover the final evaluation has to be based on how the individual actually feels, and as heretical as this will sound to modern doctors, the patient is the expert on how they feel, not the doctor. In other words, it was always a category error to put materialist doctors in charge of deciding whether mind and mood medicine performed as advertised. In the case of psychoactive medicines, that determination can only be made by the users of such substances.

Author's Follow-up:

June 08, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

Yesterday I traveled to Blue Plate Books in Winchester, Virginia, one of the largest used bookstores in the region. My plan was to buy books that would help me flesh out my understanding of drug-related issues. This was naive of me, however. Even though the store features tens of thousands of books, the vast majority of the authors of those books ignore the fact that drug prohibition even exists. The few books that treat of demonized drugs do so from the point of view of addiction and abuse. There are no books about how opium can improve your love of nature or about how phenethylamines can make the suicidal wish to live or about how the use of laughing gas can change your views of reality -- as the use of laughing gas ⁹ eroded William James's dogmatic fealty to passion-scorning materialism ¹⁰ and behaviorism.

Visiting Blue Plate Books merely reminded me of how censored Americans are when it comes to drugs. There is almost a total censorship in America on the topic of drug benefits -- with all censorship working to ensure that we consider drugs a problem rather than a solution.

Someday, in a sane world, there will be plenty of book titles like the following:

"How I used opium wisely to improve my life."

"How I used morphine ¹¹ wisely to improve my love of Mother Nature."

"How I got off of cigarettes and alcohol through the safe and informed use of phenethylamines."

"How I rose from my depression with the wise use of a variety of drugs, including opium ¹² , coca, and phenethylamines."

Notes for essay entitled Listening to Thomas Szasz: a philosophical review of Our Right to Drugs:

1: “MS. Found in a Bottle.” 2022. Poemuseum.org. April 2, 2022. https://poemuseum.org/ms-found-in-a-bottle/. (up)
2: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
3: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
4: How Milton Friedman Completely Misunderstood the War on Drugs DWP (up)
5: How Drug Prohibition Causes Relapses: an open letter to Jeffrey A. Singer of the Cato Institute DWP (up)
6: Scribd.com From Fighting The Drug War To Protecting The Right To Use Drugs Bandow, Doug, 2018 (up)
7: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
8: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
9: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
10: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
11: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
12: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)

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Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.

The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.

Ann Lemke's case studies make the usual assumptions: getting free from addiction is a morality tale. No reference to how the drug war promotes addiction and how banned drugs could solve such problems. She does not say why daily SSRI use is acceptable while daily opium use is not. Etc.

Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.

There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."

We should not be talking about the potential harm of drugs -- we should be talking about the well-established harm of drug PROHIBITION.

This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.

Freud found that cocaine CURED most people's depression and he "got off it" without trouble.

The Drug War is the ultimate example of strategic fearmongering by self-interested politicians.

Almost every mainstream article about psychology and consciousness is nonsense these days because it ignores the way that drug prohibition has stymied our investigation of such subjects.

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