Thomas Szasz1 was an American-Hungarian doctor who saw through the unprecedented madness of America's drug-related attitudes like no one else. He revealed the philosophical inanity of those attitudes in clear language. He has a special place in my heart since he is the only drug pundit who not only answered a letter of mine on the subject of drugs, but responded to it in detail, and in a handwritten letter no less. This was in the 1980s, unfortunately, when I had yet to appreciate the full evil of drug prohibition. I wish our years on earth had aligned more felicitously so that I could bounce my ideas off the man today, rather than to continue tossing them in vain at the brick walls erected by the bamboozled pundits of our time.
The following are just a few of the insightful citations found in Szasz's philosophical analyses of the origin, nature, and consequences of America's drug-related madness. (See also After Szasz)
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 competently2. Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
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, Our Right to Drugs
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, Our Right to Drugs
In the psychiatric drug market, we as a society are saying, "The patient is always wrong": The psychiatrist decides what drug the mental patient "needs" and compels him to consume it, by force if necessary.3 Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
The principal role of medical, and especially psychiatric, professionals in the administration and enforcement of this system of chemical statism is to act as double agents-- helping politicians to impose their will on the people by defining self-medication as a disease4, and helping the people to bear their privations by supplying them with drugs. Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
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, Our Right to Drugs
Although there is no evidence that the American consumer ever complained about the free market in drugs, there is plenty of evidence that his self-appointed protectors complained bitterly and loudly. Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
Although initially the drug laws were intended to protect people from being "abused" by drugs others wanted to sell them, this aim was soon replaced by that of protecting them from "abusing" drugs they wanted to buy. The government thus succeeded in depriving us not only of our basic right to ingest whatever we choose, but also of our right to grow, manufacture, sell, and buy agricultural products used by man since antiquity. Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
We live in a society in which people have legal access to loaded guns but not to sterile syringes5. Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty or property... Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
Truly we are the redeemer nation, our centuries-old ambivalence toward alcohol seemingly entitling us to assume the role of moral savior not merely of our own people, but of people everywhere. Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
The various drug-regulatory measures enacted during the prewar years of Roosevelt's presidency... led inexorably to the present situation of virtually complete state control of the drug economy, which I call 'chemical statism' (drug socialism). Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
It is this longing for a holy utopia that leads to the fateful obliteration of the distinction between vice and crime, and the tragic transformation of the virtue of temperance into the vice of prohibition. Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
If our love of the Constitution and gratitude for our heritage cannot keep us united as a nation, then hatred of 'dangerous drugs' must do the job. Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs. Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
Actually, as a slogan, 'Just say no to drugs' is simply witless, in both senses of that word: It is at once humorless and stupid, leaving unsaid to what drugs, in what doses and under what circumstances one ought to say no. Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
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, Our Right to Drugs
Drug education... is the name we give to the state-sponsored effort to inflame people's hatred and intolerance of other people's drug habits, which is as indecent as it would be to inflame people's hatred and intolerance of other people's religious habits and call it 'religion education.' Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
Who would have thought back in 1776 that Americans would eventually have to petition their government for the right to even possess a damn mushroom. The Drug War has destroyed America.
It's just plain totalitarian nonsense to outlaw mother nature and to outlaw moods and mental states thru drug law. These truths can't be said enough by us "little people" because the people in power are simply not saying them.
Why don't those politicians understand what hateful colonialism they are practicing? Psychedelics have been used for millennia by the tribes that the west has conquered -- now we won't even let folks talk honestly about such indigenous medicines.
This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.
There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.
We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.
The massive use of plea deals lets prosecutors threaten drug suspects into giving up their rights to a fair trial.
The Shipiba have learned to heal human beings physically, psychologically and spiritually with what they call "onanyati," plant allies and guides, such as Bobinsana, which "envelops seekers in a cocoon of love." You know: what the DEA would call "junk."
Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!
No drug causes addiction after one use. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis.
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
Thomas Szasz1 was an American-Hungarian doctor who saw through the unprecedented madness of America's drug-related attitudes like no one else. He revealed the philosophical inanity of those attitudes in clear language. He has a special place in my heart since he is the only drug pundit who not only answered a letter of mine on the subject of drugs, but responded to it in detail, and in a handwritten letter no less. This was in the 1980s, unfortunately, when I had yet to appreciate the full evil of drug prohibition. I wish our years on earth had aligned more felicitously so that I could bounce my ideas off the man today, rather than to continue tossing them in vain at the brick walls erected by the bamboozled pundits of our time.
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