Prohibition is the Problem

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

Prohibition is the Problem

an open letter to Caroline Chatwin & Richard G. Alexander, authors of 'Virtuous drug use in the neoliberal age'

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 18, 2025

Your paper is excellent ¹. Unfortunately, it stops just short of drawing the conclusion that follows so naturally from the facts that it adduces, namely, that the prohibitionist mindset is the problem, not drugs. It was the prohibitionist mindset that first taught us to inquire into the motives of various substance users, a notion which immediately opened a Pandora's box of conflicting opinions about drugs, giving everyone a chance to chime in on what they personally considered to be problematic given their own strategic interests in life.

Update: May 19, 2025
Update: May 20, 2025
Discussion Topics

As GK Chesterton wrote in "Eugenics and Other Evils":

"The [prohibitionist] argument is based on health ; and it is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea."²

This is why each country in the world has its own pet list of outlawed substances, because drug criminalization is based entirely on subjective viewpoints - albeit these foregone conclusions will often be backed up by cherry-picked research to give an air of objectivity to the politically made choices.

Take Sjostic's parochial musings about the supposed uselessness of cannabis ³. Does he not realize that the substance had religious uses in the Vedic era in the Punjab? Does Sjostic believe that religious use is not a valid use of drugs? Who made him an expert on such ultimate questions? Religious use aside, it is only a lack of imagination that blinds Sjostic to obvious benefits of cannabis use. I used to use cannabis on a regular basis, not just for the so-called "high" but because regular use lowered my overall anxiety level and so made life more enjoyable for me. What qualifies Sjostic to tell me that such use is improper? Is he miffed because I was not spending my money on Valium instead, a drug that is more addictive than heroin ⁴ ⁵?

This is the whole problem, that the prohibitionist mindset encourages us to pass judgment on drugs in the abstract, rather than evaluating them in context. This mindset is based, moreover, on the following inhumane and superstitious doctrine:

that a drug that can be misused by an American young person when used at one dose for one reason must not be used by anyone at any dose for any reason.

In reality, it is absurd to ask questions like, "Is MDMA ⁶ good?" or "Are psychedelics good?" Such questions are just like asking, "Is H2O water, steam, or ice?" The answer is: "Yes, but it all depends on context."

My main concern with your paper is that it might give the reader the impression that the push for a sane attitude about drugs is a special neoliberal project and not a movement that makes common sense to free thinkers everywhere. The Hindu religion owes its existence to the use of a substance that inspired and elated, after all ⁷. From that one fact alone, it follows that the Drug War is the outlawing of religion, insofar as it seeks to outlaw precisely those drugs that inspire and elate. This should be a concern for every democracy-loving westerner, not just neoliberals. Moreover, our very constitution granted us the right to the pursuit of happiness ⁸, whereas your paper makes it sound like only neoliberals have ever considered taking that right seriously ⁹. It is rather our birthright as Americans - or rather it was, until Drug Warriors took the unprecedented step of outlawing almost all psychoactive substances in the world - especially those that could inspire and elate, like the Soma of the Vedic religion.

It is the prohibitionist mindset that is at fault here: this is the mindset that teaches us to judge "drugs" up and down, outside of all context. Moreover, the drug prohibitionist believes two enormous lies:

1) that there are no upsides to drug use, and 2) that there are no downsides to drug prohibition.

Both of these beliefs are demonstrably false. Drug use has enormous potential benefits, once we evaluate drugs using common sense rather than looking at them through the jaundiced lenses of hypocritical drug-war morality and the passion-scorning tenets of scientific materialism ¹⁰ ¹¹. Consider these user reports from "Pihkal" by Alexander Shulgin ¹² and then try to tell me that the drugs in question have no potential uses - for the suicidal, for the anxious - and for those who merely want to increase their appreciation of life.

"I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world."

"I feel that it is one of the most profound and deep learning experiences I have had."

"I feel that I can learn faster. This is a 'smart' pill!"

"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."¹³

Consider the following quote about morphine use from Edgar Allan Poe in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains."¹⁴

"In the meantime the morphine had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf- in the hue of a blade of grass- in the shape of a trefoil- in the humming of a bee- in the gleaming of a dew-drop- in the breathing of the wind- in the faint odors that came from the forest- there came a whole universe of suggestion- a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought."¹⁵

Is acquiring a deep appreciation of Mother Nature not a reasonable use of drugs? Who do the Sjostics of the world think they are when they implicitly draw such conclusions by trashing so-called "hard drugs" outside of all context? Speaking of which, the terms "drugs" and "hard drugs" are political terms as used today, something that ideally your paper would point out before using such terms uncritically. The so-called "hard drug" of opium used to be considered a panacea by ancient doctors like Avicenna and Paracelsus. The government's desire to reclassify it as demonic is easily understood when we recognize the enormous power grab of a government that controls our level of pain relief in life.

As for the downsides of drug prohibition, where does one start? It has destroyed the 1st and 4th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, turned inner cities into shooting galleries, destroyed the rule of law in Latin America, and encouraged us to outlaw drugs that have inspired entire religions, as the use of Soma ¹⁶ inspired the Vedic. Drug prohibition even led to the election of Donald Trump because it took over a million minorities off the voting rolls by throwing them in prison with the help of laws that were written for that very purpose.

The neoliberals whom you have described are seeking merely to carve out white-friendly exceptions to a prohibitionist policy that is rotten to the core. The prohibitionist mindset has to be rejected in its entirety before America can treat drugs with common sense, rather than succumbing to the temptation to use drug laws to disempower minorities. In such a world, we would recognize that saying things like "Fentanyl ¹⁷ kills!" makes no more sense than saying "Fire bad!" Both are attempts to demonize dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humankind. Besides, if Fentanyl kills, then alcohol massacres, leading to 178,000 deaths a year in America alone ¹⁸, as compared to the mere thousands who die from opiate use. Moreover, the vast majority of those opiate deaths are caused by our failure to educate and regulate, not because of opiates themselves.

A final word about the presumptuous morality of Sjostic and his judgmental friends. Even if he personally cannot think of any benefits for a given drug, it is absurd for politicians to outlaw research in advance under the belief that no one will ever be able to think of any. The drug in question could eventually prove a psychoactive godsend in combination with other drugs or at certain doses, etc. To decide about such substances in advance is to outlaw human progress. Again, the whole problem is the prohibitionist's desire to judge substances in advance and outside of all context, based only on our existing biases as determined by the cradle-to-grave brainwashing that media provides us in the age of the Drug War, above all by suppressing all stories about the positive uses of drugs.

The prohibitionist mindset is the whole problem when it comes to drugs. Your paper helps to make this clear, even though its authors do not seem to have consciously grasped this fact. Drug prohibition causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some. Most people cannot see this because the media always blames drugs themselves for the problems caused by drug prohibition. However, young people were not dying on American streets when opiates were legal in America. It took prohibition to accomplish that. How? By refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate the drug supply as to quantity and quality, and refusing to re-legalize a vast pharmacopoeia of potential alternatives to opiate use.

AFTERWORD

What's the difference between a "meth head" and someone taking Ritalin as a "cognitive enhancer" as you call it? The difference is a branding campaign that categorizes the former user as a filthy redneck and the latter as a responsible, upstanding American. Of course, this is a self-fulfilling classification since the users take it to heart and tend to act accordingly. Like all of us, they live and breathe the Drug War zeitgeist, as promulgated by conglomerate media, above all through the censorship of stories about the safe and positive use of the substances that we have demonized as "drugs." And so we set up our drug laws to make the "meth head" fail by refusing to teach safe use, refusing to regulate product, and refusing to re-legalize many meth alternatives.

These problematic outcomes are to be expected until such time as Americans reject the whole Drug War ideology of substance demonization and the politically strategic prohibition for which it stands.

Editor's Comments:

May 18, 2025

The reader should feel free to replace the term "American" with "westerner" in the above essay, whenever it makes sense to do so. Brian tends to think of the problems created by the Drug War as being distinctly American, since Americans were so instrumental in bringing them about. He sometimes forgets that the problem has long since gone global -- as America has hoodwinked and blackmailed its friends into joining in the unprecedented counterproductive folly of outlawing godsend medicines. As for America's anti-democratic enemies, there was no need to convince them of anything, since the Drug War is naturally appealing to societies that seek to control their people by any means necessary.

Author's Follow-up:

May 19, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

Here is my reply to a thoughtful response from Caroline Chatwin, one of the two authors of "Virtuous drug use in the neoliberal age':

Thanks so much, Caroline, for your thoughtful response. I have been writing to researchers on these subjects for seven years now and my letters and emails have almost always been ignored. At best, I will receive a curt "Thank you." So I was delighted to read your substantive reply!

I think we are on the same page. I am so used to encountering drug-war-inspired prejudices that I sometimes find them where they do not exist. I would be happy to publish your letter as a response to my essay, if you so desire. Just let me know.

I have written a number of articles that address this attempt to carve out virtuous "exceptions" to our negative attitudes about drugs. In his lecture series "History Ends in Green,¹⁹ " Terence McKenna exudes a disdain for the use of cocaine ²⁰ ²¹ ²² and opiates while basically charging us with a moral duty to explore psychedelics. I contested this outlook in the following essay:

(abolishthedea.com)

Even Andrew Weil (in "From Chocolate to morphine "²³) insists that opiates should only be used for medical reasons, and then only for pain relief. This is an attempt to carve out a virtuous space that excludes all potential religious and creative use for opiates. For more, please see my essay:

(abolishthedea.com)

When I read such things, I think of the following lines from "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" by Edgar Allan Poe.

"In the meantime the morphine ²⁴ had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf- in the hue of a blade of grass- in the shape of a trefoil- in the humming of a bee- in the gleaming of a dew-drop- in the breathing of the wind- in the faint odors that came from the forest- there came a whole universe of suggestion- a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought.²⁵"

I ask myself, does Weil look down on such use? Why exactly does it not qualify as virtuous? It can only be that Weil has fallen for the big Drug Warrior lie: namely, that a substance that can be misused by white young people when used at one dose for one reason, must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason - no, not even for appreciating Mother Nature.

Finally, in my essay on the book "Whiteout," I describe how my elderly mother's use of "oxy" had been defined as "virtuous" by society, whereas those who received the drug in other ways would be classed as druggie scumbags.

(abolishthedea.com)

At least in her case, she herself was not doing the classifying, but rather society was pronouncing her drug use as "blessed" on her behalf.

So I agree completely with your paper. My main point in commenting was merely to point out that this presumption on the part of "virtuous" folk like Weil and McKenna can be traced in turn to the whole problem with prohibition: namely, that it encourages us to judge substances "up or down" in the first place. Drugs have become a Rorschach test for our sensibilities about altered states and what each of us, personally, finds to be useful or problematic. But our views of drugs in general should count for nothing - least of all in a world in which we are never allowed to learn about beneficial uses for drugs, like, for instance, the fact that the Hindu religion owes its existence to the use of a drug that inspired and elated ²⁶. The fact is that all psychoactive substances have potential positive uses at some dose, for some person, in some situation, at some time, alone or in combination, etc. etc. etc. That is what science tells us, properly so called. It is also psychological common sense - at least in the absence of the passion-scorning doctrines of Behaviorism ²⁷. But the Drug Warriors will never acknowledge this fact, because it would reveal the outrageous presumption behind drug prohibition itself, the idea that it makes sense for us to judge medicines in the abstract. This is why the Drug Warrior avoids specifics. Their goal is simply to make us feel a certain way about drugs, not to educate us about drugs in any way.

Sadly, even enemies of drug prohibition have fallen for this trap. Instead of taking a principled stand against the whole prohibitionist notion that drugs can be meaningfully designated as bad in the first place, in the absence of all specifics, they seek instead to carve out those supposedly "virtuous" exceptions for drug use based on their own convenience and their censorship-inspired prejudices. This selfishness on their part has racist overtones, for while they may have essentially "paid off" the SWAT teams with their high-and-mighty words, appealing to white protestant values, the police remain as free as ever to treat the rest of the world like scumbags, especially those minorities against whom drug prohibition was always meant to be targeted in the first place.²⁸

But I find that I am merely summarizing your own paper with that closing paragraph -- or so it seems to me - and so I think that we truly are on the same page. That's not to say that I did not learn anything from your paper. Although I was aware, generally speaking, of the problem that you highlighted, your paper has helped frame that problem in a new light for me, so thanks!

My additional two-cents' worth is simply the fact that the ideology of substance prohibition - in which drugs are judged by how we feel about them -- leads naturally to such calls for virtuous exceptions, and that this perhaps could be a subject for future papers and essays.

Thanks again and feel free to contact me any time on related topics!

Author's Follow-up:

May 20, 2025

While we're holding Terence McKenna and modern psychedelic boosters to account for their claims to a "virtuous" exception to drug law, let us remember that one in four American women take a Big Pharma ²⁹ ³⁰ drug every day of their lives and that this, too, is held by society to constitute a "virtuous" exception to the idea that drug use is evil. The whole Drug War is premised on the supposed existence of two types of drugs, good and bad ones, so it is pre-loaded with assumptions about the existence of a class of virtuous drugs. So it is not just the psychedelic booster who should be protesting this stage-managed dualism and its pernicious effects for minorities and the poor; people who use psychoactive drugs of any kind (legal or illegal) should be pushing back against this targeted a priori demonizing of psychoactive substances. They must finally learn that the whole point of these political branding operations with regard to psychoactive substances is to render drug use and dealing as stigmatized and as problematic as possible for the poor and minorities, thereby giving police an excuse to crack down on the same with the goal of disempowering that entire demographic and so ensuring electoral victories for racist conservatives. This has been the obvious baseline story of drug prohibition, ever since Americans outlawed opium in 1914 thanks to their fear and hatred of the Chinese ³¹.

Folks like Terence McKenna and Andrew Weil merely exacerbate (or rather take advantage of) a built-in problem when they claim to tell us which drug use is virtuous and which is condemnable. Putting aside the elitist racism of such prescriptions, it is monstrous presupposition on their part to claim that they know what is best for humanity when it comes to mental and emotional states. Anyone familiar with the true story of time-honored opium use in China -- as distinguished from the self-interested lies of western missionaries about widespread death and debilitation -- could readily imagine positive uses for the drug -- for certain people, in certain situations, at certain times, in certain doses -- but McKenna and Weil are going to assure us in advance that there are no such positive uses. To really know that, however, they would have to be demigods, at the very least, capable of experiencing the world through other people's minds. Could they do so, they would see, for just one example, that a person's nightly opium smoking would be immensely preferable to their nightly bingeing on alcohol. Besides the implicit racism of the "virtuous" user, then, one also sees a remarkable lack of imagination on their part, a total inability to imagine glaringly obvious benefits to the use of ostensibly "unvirtuous" drugs in a wide variety of specific situations.

In browsing my related essays, I came across the following observations that relate importantly to the question of virtuous (versus evil) drug use.

"If drug use is really bad, then it is absurd to consider drug users to be helpless shills without moral self-agency while yet considering dealers to be morally challenged monsters. This is not to say that we should blame drug users, merely to do them the credit of thinking of them as real human beings that make real choices. Rather than trying to whitewash their decisions by blaming everything on "dealers," we should be recognizing the "meta" problem, the overarching problem, which is that drug prohibition started this whole ball of counterproductive outcomes rolling in the first place. It was drug prohibition that put users in harm's way and incentivized dealers to meet a marketplace demand. It is the drug policy that we should be detesting, not those who have been purposefully set up to fail thanks to that policy."³²

Discussion Topics

May 23, 2025

Attention Teachers and Professors: Brian is not writing these essays for his health. (Well, in a way he is, actually, but that's not important now.) His goal is to get the world thinking about the anti-democratic and anti-scientific idiocy of the War on Drugs. You can stimulate your students' brainwashed grey matter on this topic by having them read the above essay and then discuss the following questions as a group!

How did the prohibitionist mindset open a Pandora's box?

How is this Sjostic character naive and unimaginative when it comes to evaluating drugs?

The prohibitionist mindset would have us judge substances either "up" or "down," as good or bad. Explain why this is anti-scientific and even anti-progress.

Explain the problem of "trashing drugs outside of all context."

Fentanyl

Notes for essay entitled Prohibition is the Problem: an open letter to Caroline Chatwin & Richard G. Alexander, authors of 'Virtuous drug use in the neoliberal age':

1: Virtuous drug use in the neoliberal age Caroline Chatwin &Richard G. Alexander, Taylor & Francis Online, 2024 (up)
2: “The Project Gutenberg eBook of Eugenics and Other Evils, by G.K. Chesterton..” 2019. Gutenberg.Org. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25308/25308-h/25308-h.htm. (up)
3: Virtuous drug use in the neoliberal age Caroline Chatwin &Richard G. Alexander, Taylor & Francis Online, 2024 (up)
4: 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)
5: “Emperors of Dreams : Drugs in the Nineteenth Century : Jay, Mike, 1959 December 14- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/emperorsofdreams0000jaym/page/n3/mode/2up. (up)
6: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
7: How the Drug War Outlaws Religion DWP (up)
8: At least here in the United States of America. (up)
9: Americans have the right to pursue happiness but not to attain it DWP (up)
10: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
11: Behaviorism and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
12: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
13: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
14: “Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (Text-02A).” 2026. Eapoe.Org. 2026. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/raggeda.htm. (up)
15: “Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (Text-02A).” 2026. Eapoe.Org. 2026. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/raggeda.htm. (up)
16: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
17: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
18: 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)
19: McKenna, Terence. 2026. “History Ends in Green.” The Library. 2026. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/history-ends-in-green. (up)
20: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
21: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
22: “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)
23: Weil, Andrew, and Winifred Rosen. 2004. From Chocolate to Morphine : Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. (up)
24: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
25: “Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (Text-02A).” 2026. Eapoe.Org. 2026. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/raggeda.htm. (up)
26: How the Drug War Outlaws Religion DWP (up)
27: Behaviorism and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
28: “Emperors of Dreams : Drugs in the Nineteenth Century : Jay, Mike, 1959 December 14- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/emperorsofdreams0000jaym/page/n3/mode/2up. (up)
29: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
30: 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)
31: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
32: My review of Fentanyl Inc. DWP (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

The December Scientific American features a story called "The New Nuclear Age," about a trillion-dollar plan to add 100s of ICBM's to 5 states, which an SA editorial calls "kick me" signs. This Neanderthal plan comes from pols who think that compassion-boosting drugs are evil!

Scientists are so used to ignoring "drugs" that they don't even realize they're doing it. Yet almost all books about consciousness and depression (etc.) are nonsense these days because they ignore what drugs could tell us about those topics.

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.

There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill.

I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."

It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.

Imagine if we held sports to the same safety standard as drugs. There would be no sports at all. And yet even free climbing is legal. Why? Because with sports, we recognize the benefits and not just the downsides.

Prohibitionists have the same M O they've had for the last 100+ years: blame drugs for everything. Being a drug warrior is never having the decency to say you're sorry -- not to Mexicans, not to inner-city crime victims, not to patients who go without adequate pain relief...

I'm told that most psychiatrists would like to receive shock therapy if they become severely depressed. That's proof of drug war insanity: they would prefer damaging their brains to using drugs that can elate and inspire.

"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau

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(up)

Prohibition is the Problem

an open letter to Caroline Chatwin & Richard G. Alexander, authors of 'Virtuous drug use in the neoliberal age'

Editor's Comments:

May 18, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

May 19, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

May 20, 2025

Discussion Topics

May 23, 2025

Fentanyl

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend