a philosophical review of Saying Yes by Jacob Sullum
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 13, 2025
he takeaway message from books like "Saying Yes" by Jacob Sullum1 is that it was always a mistake to put government in charge of ensuring the public health of the community. The moment we do so, as GK Chesterton reminds us, "there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea.2" Suddenly, literally any substance can be plausibly depicted as unhealthy from one perspective or another and drug policy becomes a political effort to "brand" drugs as dangerous in the public mind: as, for instance, when Harry Anslinger branded hemp as marijuana to underscore the drug's supposed connection with Mexican immigrants or when subsequent Drug Warriors branded cocaine as the evil-sounding 'crack' when used in a format favored by minorities. This is why I sigh with frustration whenever I see pundits chiming in on the presumed healthiness or lack thereof of this drug or that. Who cares about your own opinion of a drug in general, especially one which you yourself have never even used? Drug use is all about the specifics of use by a specific person, how it affects a particular person in a particular situation in life, or in other words, all those specifics that Drug Warriors ignore in their anti-scientific effort to demonize drugs a priori and in the abstract.
Sullum understands this, as is clear when he writes:
"Reformers will not make much progress as long as they agree with defenders of the status quo that drug use is always wrong." --Jacob Sullum, from Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, p. 293
Of psychedelics in particular, Sullum writes:
"As with other forms of recreation, the relevant standard has to be the value that psychedelics offer to a given individual, weighed against the risks they pose." --Jacob Sullum, from Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, p. 1564
Of course, when it comes to setting drug policy, one has to keep something else in mind as well: the dangers that one will create by outlawing desired substances. These downsides are obvious and enormous and yet are never noticed by Drug Warriors. The enforcement of substance prohibition has resulted in 67,000 deaths in inner cities over the last 10 years5, 60,000 "disappearances" in Mexico over the last two decades6, and thousands of unnecessary deaths of American young people in the streets from opiate use thanks to our failure to educate and provide users with real choice. But the Drug Warriors never take responsibility for the blood bath that they are causing, nor for the fact that their hysteria has repealed a raft of basic freedoms, to the point that free speech about drug benefits is almost impossible these days because media venues simply will not publish such inconvenient truths and thus violate the caveman prejudice that "Fentanyl kills!" and "Crack kills!" and "PCP kills! and "Oxy kills!" In reality, of course, to say such things is philosophically identical to shouting "Fire bad!" All such statements would have us demonize a dangerous substance rather than to learn how to use it as wisely as possible for human benefit.
Sullum describes this paleolithic view of drugs as a kind of "voodoo pharmacology," the idea that drug use abolishes free will. This voodoo status has been attributed to all drugs at some point, from alcohol, to marijuana, to cocaine, to opium -- and continues to "inform" drug policy to this day.
In reading "Saying Yes," I am particularly revolted by the pretended 'omniscience' of the Schumers and the Bennetts of the world as to my own particular emotional needs. They sit back and tell me that the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions can have no beneficial uses for me in my life -- as if they have been inside my mind and understood how I see the world and know how I feel within my own skin. What enormous cavalier presumption on their part, especially as they say nothing about the monopoly that their drug policies have given to Big Pharma to make me a ward of the healthcare state. Had such strategic worrywarts been around in the Indus Valley in 1500 BCE, there would be no Hindu religion today7. Drug warriors would have told us that nobody needs to drink the Soma juice and that such drugs take over our minds and give us super-human powers to disobey authorities. If only I could respond to the fearmongering of Drug Warriors by arresting them for using alcohol and tobacco and caffeine -- and then confiscating their houses for harboring such substances -- and then removing them from the voting rolls for their unnecessary use of drugs. Let us deny them the ability to work in America should they be discovered to have used alcohol or tobacco or caffeine. Then maybe they would start to see that it was a mistake to judge substances in advance, without regard for how or why they are used.
Though highly informative, Sullum's book has at least two shortcomings in my estimate:
1) The book fails to sufficiently stress the enormous downsides of drug prohibition, thereby helping to normalize the Drug War lie that drug prohibition has no negative consequences. Drug prohibition has turned inner cities around the world into shooting galleries, it has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America, it has ended academic freedom. It has led to unnecessary deaths by refusing to teach safe use and refusing to provide drug choice. It has helped to bring an end to democracy in America by the mass incarceration of minorities and the resulting electoral success of fascists. We have to start recognizing these downsides as actual downsides, assuming that it is not already too late to do so!
2) The book ignores the fact that drug prohibition gave Big Pharma a monopoly on mind and mood medicine and thereby brought about the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time: the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma 'meds' for life8. I believe that no one fully understands the evil of drug prohibition without recognizing this fact -- and not simply recognizing it, but recognizing it to be a problem, rather than simply telling folks like myself to "keep taking your meds." We are a science-worshiping country so we assume that science has "sorted" depression, as the Brits would say, this despite the fact that "We don't know how antidepressants work,9" as Noam Shpancer wrote in Psychology Today in 2022, to which I would add, we don't know that antidepressants work at all, except thanks to the cherry-picked user reports of the well-heeled and self-interested advocates of the pill mill status quo. If they "work," they do so only as tranquilizers, making life livable rather than enjoyable and insightful.
I have a few more criticisms, but they apply to literally everybody in the world who writes about drugs and not just to the efforts of Jacob Sullum.
When we do a cost/benefit analysis about psychoactive drug use, we must talk about the potential downsides to the would-be user of NOT using a drug: such as failing to succeed at one's job, failing to ensure that life is sufficiently worth living, the downsides of making suicide and shock therapy more likely, and so forth. Only the naive and the behaviorist could deny the relevancy of such considerations.
The most important point, unfortunately, is one which writers on this topic never sufficiently stress (assuming they notice it at all) -- and that is the fact it is wrong to judge drugs "up" or "down" in a popular plebiscite and that misuse as we call it is never caused by a drug itself but by social conditions surrounding the use of a drug. When we ignore this fact, America ends up creating drug policies not just for itself, but for the entire world. This is why I have no patience with those who say that drug re-legalization cannot work given the way that things are set up now in America. They are thereby saying that the entire world has to go without time-honored medicine and obvious psychoactive godsends simply because Americans are too immature to use them wisely. This is surely the greatest case of mass denial in history -- it is an aggressive denial in which the sick person (the Drug Warrior) insists that the entire world adopts the sick person's viewpoint and passes laws accordingly.
Also, I do not think that we can ever overemphasize the role that censorship plays in biasing our views on drugs. To understand this claim, I ask readers to perform a little experiment, to ask themselves, "When was the last time that I read an article about the beneficial use of outlawed substances like opium and coca?" Such positive news is ruthlessly suppressed by the conglomerate media, often under the problematic pretext that merely implying that drugs are not evil amounts to medical advice and medical advice about what drugs to use can only be given by doctors. And who are these doctors? They are the materialists who made America dependent on Big Pharma drugs in the first place, by helping to outlaw all of Big Pharma's competition. So before we think that we have a free and unbiased view of the terrain on these topics, we must consider that the government is spending literally billions of dollars to ensure that we maintain a jaundiced view of all but a handful of hypocritically shielded psychoactive medicines.
Here is another aspect of the drug story that no author explicitly highlights. In discussing the supposed 'flower children' and holding them up to scrutiny for their supposed utopian and unrealistic mindset, we should be fair and also scrutinize the nature of the mindset against which these peace lovers were rebelling. What were the enemies of the hippies 'up to' as the flower children were using drugs and talking about world peace? Answer: Their opposition was waging a war and amassing a nuclear arsenal that could destroy the world. In fact, both anglophone Summers of Love (in America in the '60s and in Britain in the 1990s10) were shut down by cracking down on substances that helped to bring people together. And yet many writers on this topic simply speak of the peace-lovers being unrealistic, as if this were the end of the story. The fact is these peace-lovers were promoting drug use that could theoretically stave off nuclear annihilation -- and so we can ask, who was really crazy when it comes to drugs like psychedelics and Ecstasy: those who wanted to bring the world together or those who saw no benefits in peace, love and understanding, Timothy Leary or Richard Nixon?
The 1990s rave scene brought together folks of all ethnicity in unprecedented peace and harmony on the dance floor11 -- and yet no one classes this as a drug benefit! Why not? For the simple reason that Drug War ideology insists that there can BE no benefits to drug use.
Finally, let us explicitly identify the M.O. of the prohibitionists that is made clear from the citations contained in this book. Their approach to drugs is identical with that of the members of the Anti-Opium Society in the early 19th century, about whom William H. Brereton, author of 'The Truth About Opium,' wrote the following:
"All these anti-opium articles, speeches, and resolutions are based upon the same model. They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts.12"
JOURNALIST FEARMONGERS
Finally, a long ignored point of which Sullum's book reminded me:
If the world is to regain its freedom of mind and mood, it must, first and foremost, educate its journalists on how to cover drug-related deaths and injuries without bias. Until then, any statistically irrelevant incident can be parleyed by journalists into a cause célèbre for drug prohibitionists, as, for instance, when Ann Landers slammed LSD use based on her own total ignorance of the drug and its effects.
"The exchange [between Ann Landers and her readers on the subject of LSD use] nicely illustrated how the conventional wisdom about LSD (and other illegal drugs) is propagated: People who don't know what they're talking about pass on hearsay and misinformation, blithely reinforcing each other's ignorance." --Jacob Sullum, from Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, p. 13713
The FDA is not qualified to tell us whether holistic medicines work. They hold such drugs to materialist standards and that's pharmacological colonialism.
And where did politicians get the idea that irresponsible white American young people are the only stakeholders when it comes to the question of re-legalizing drugs??? There are hundreds of millions of other stakeholders: philosophers, pain patients, the depressed.
It is a violation of religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate. The Hindu religion was inspired by just such a drug.
Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.
Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.
Think you can handle a horse? So did Christopher Reeves. The fact is, NOBODY can handle a horse. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. These are the people who think Electro Shock Therapy is not used often enough! What sick priorities.
Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.
The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Our Minds, Ourselves: a philosophical review of Saying Yes by Jacob Sullum, published on June 13, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
he takeaway message from books like "Saying Yes" by Jacob Sullum1 is that it was always a mistake to put government in charge of ensuring the public health of the community. The moment we do so, as GK Chesterton reminds us, "there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea.2" Suddenly, literally any substance can be plausibly depicted as unhealthy from one perspective or another and drug policy becomes a political effort to "brand" drugs as dangerous in the public mind: as, for instance, when Harry Anslinger branded hemp as marijuana to underscore the drug's supposed connection with Mexican immigrants or when subsequent Drug Warriors branded cocaine as the evil-sounding 'crack' when used in a format favored by minorities. This is why I sigh with frustration whenever I see pundits chiming in on the presumed healthiness or lack thereof of this drug or that. Who cares about your own opinion of a drug in general, especially one which you yourself have never even used? Drug use is all about the specifics of use by a specific person, how it affects a particular person in a particular situation in life, or in other words, all those specifics that Drug Warriors ignore in their anti-scientific effort to demonize drugs a priori and in the abstract. 
You have been reading an article entitled, Our Minds, Ourselves: a philosophical review of Saying Yes by Jacob Sullum, published on June 13, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
