I don't want to pick on Snoop, but I cannot resist because her confusion about so-called "drugs" is so typical of the muddle-headed thinking of Americans in general on this subject. So hopefully in clarifying her confusion, I'll be of assistance to others who may be similarly bamboozled.
First, let's be honest about what we Americans mean by drugs, Snoopie: We do not mean liquor. We do not mean tobacco. And we certainly do not mean Big Pharma 's massively prescribed antidepressants 1 to which 1 in 4 American women are currently addicted.
No, by "drugs" we merely mean natural substances that our government has decided are bad for us. In other words, our hatred of drugs is simply Christian Science with respect to psychological well-being, it is the metaphysical idea that we have some moral duty to forego the mind-improving pharmacopeia of Mother Nature.
Why? It's hard to say*. But our mistrust of Mother Nature is "all of a piece" with our historic fear of witches in the west and the way that they freely availed themselves of psychoactive plants. This fear in turn no doubt dates to societal PTSD from the Garden of Eden debacle. More recently, the psychoactive bounty of Mother Nature has become a threat to traditional medical practitioners, and they're right to be concerned.
If the government allowed humanity to access its natural birthright of Mother Nature's pharmacy, then who in their right mind would use the handful of addictive and inadequately effective synthesized drugs that Big Pharma has created to take Mother Nature's place? No one, at least if the cure and/or benefit that we seek is psychological.
That's why, to keep that bounty off-limits, Hollywood has to keep cranking out films to support the Drug War, to remind Americans how incapable they are of handling freedom, how incapable they are of wisely using the bounty of Mother Nature that grows at their very feet. And so those seeking increased mental acumen and expanded consciousness are forced to seek out white-coated professionals who tell us what we "really" need - and you can be sure that it's not the plants of Mother Nature, but rather the addictive nostrums of Big Pharma , in particular the brand name drugs that a Big Pharma huckster brought to their door that very morning with a promise to reward the doctor for prescribing.
Thus humankind gets a one-two whammy by the unconstitutional Drug War: we're deprived of our natural birthright of Mother Nature's plants and then we're treated as children by the medical industry, to which we have to sue for psychological help, only because government has told us that the medicines that grow at our feet are somehow now illegal.
What's more, if we dare to act in defiance of the Drug War, we are removed from the job market by the extrajudicial punishment of drug testing 2 . Sharia is enforced by businesses, who check urine to ensure that only Christian Scientists can earn a living in "free" America.
Turning to our friend Snoop's crazed Drug War mentality, let's consider her statements on this subject during her appearance on Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations." In that show, she brags to the host about her scorn for cocaine , insisting that "I would never put nothin' in my nose." She says her mother taught her better than that.
This from an actress who killed two people as a youngster and who allegedly peddled "drugs" herself in her pre-television incarnation. Apparently obeying the government's ban on natural substances is so important that even murderers will stop short of transgressing our government-sponsored holy war on these matters.
Does Snoop know that Sigmund Freud was a prolific user of cocaine 34? Does she realize that he did not use the substance to party hearty, but rather to achieve self-fulfillment in life, insofar as the drug made possible the prolific output without which the famous Austrian would never have achieved self-actualization? Does she realize that Amazon tribes use the substance to this day in life-affirming ritual?
Snoop, like the rest of America, doesn't think in this way, because Hollywood shows us nothing but hedonistic substance misuse - thereby constantly encouraging Americans to think that they can't handle the freedom of actually having access to Mother Nature. And so the government and Hollywood 5 slander psychoactive drugs, essentially turning the US Government into a theocracy based on the principles of Christian Science.
*Then again, it's not so hard to say. If you're a millionaire Senator with a portfolio that's loaded with pharmaceutical stocks, the last thing you want is for non-addictive plants to become available that would render Big Pharma 67 's addictive nostrums obsolete.
Author's Follow-up:
July 13, 2025
This essay was naive, and so my apologies to Snoop. She was herself a victim of the drug prohibition which first brought violence to inner-city streets. As Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014:
"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 8 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist." --Heather Ann Thompson, from Inner-City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration9
In the age of the Drug War, we can never trust what ANYBODY says about drugs. That is one of the main reasons why the Drug War is wrong: it turns lying and duplicity into a way of life in America. Why? Because as a practical matter, most Americans have to toe the party line in public about drugs -- for their very livelihoods depend on it!
I should also add that the Drug War is anti-minority in the extreme. Consider this quote from Charles Winick in Artificial Paradises, the drugs reader by Mike Jay:
"The contempt with which the jazzman is regarded can be seen in a story which famed trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie tells about being searched for drugs by police in Philadelphia. He refused to be searched and asked the police if they searched violinist Isaac Stern when he played in Philadelphia. Obviously, the police applied different standards to Stern than to Gillespie, although both men are great musicians.10"
Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.
We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.
My consciousness, my choice.
The outlawing of opium eventually resulted in an "opioid crisis"? The message is clear: people want self-transcendence. If we don't let them find it safely, they will find it dangerously.
There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.
If we cared about the elderly in 'homes', we would be bringing in shamanic empaths and curanderos from Latin America to help cheer them up and expand their mental abilities. We would also immediately decriminalize the many drugs that could help safely when used wisely.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
Wanna show drug warriors the error of their ways? Legalize all less dangerous drugs than alcohol and then deny work to those who test positive for liquor and confiscate their property if beer cans are found on-site.
The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.
Q: Where can you find almost-verbatim copies of the descriptions of religious experiences described by William James? A: In descriptions of user reports of "trips" on drugs ranging from coca to opium, from MDMA to laughing gas.
Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.
