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The Christian Presuppositions of the Drug War and Why They're Important
The Christian Presuppositions of the Drug War and Why They're Important
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 18, 2024
There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than afterwards to offer them their prescriptions for making life easier -- their Christianity, for example. -- Nietzsche1
I keep getting Tweets along the lines of: "Well, that's all well and good, but the Drug War is REALLY about A, B, or C..."
I'm told by one that it's all about militarization, by another that it's all about money, by still another that it's all about racism. If you ask me, it is all about materialism 2 as well (a connection that I appear to be the only one to have noticed so far, however, which has turned me into the Ignaz Semmelweis of the Drug War3).
Of course, they're all correct. The Drug War is "about" a lot of things. But the real question, philosophically speaking, is how a program that is dramatically failing even on its own supposed terms, that of saving lives, can be not only tolerated by Americans of all political stripes, but actually promoted by them. (The Washington Post recently reported that the shipment of opioid pills dropped 45% between 2011 and 2019 thanks to law enforcement crackdowns. During the same time, the deaths by overdose skyrocketed!4)
This stubborn illogical embrace of drug-war ideology cannot be explained by militarization, greed or racism. It has something to do with the very psyche of westerners, which, as Nietzsche warned us, has maintained the puritan notions of Christianity while discarding the religion5. It has something to do with our historical disdain for the tribal people that we have conquered and their belief in drug cures. It has something to do with our puritanical distrust of laughter and unfettered self-expression. It has something to do with America's ongoing need for sin, redemption, and the existence of a devil. It has something to do with America's concoction of a faux morality whereby we can resurrect a world where there is a clear good and bad: drug dealers bad, prohibitionists good. The sinner is the "user" who comes home to a 12-step group and recognizes a thinly disguised Christian god known as a "higher power." These 12-step groups, of course, teach the "addicts" that they are powerless6. (Of course, the reason they are powerless is because the drug law has made them so, just as a flu victim might be powerless to overcome the flu were we to outlaw all antibiotics.)
Otherwise the Drug War would be inexplicable. For it is not common sense to hate drugs. That is something one must learn. And even in order to learn that, you must be predisposed to that belief by the history of your people. Certainly such anti-drug attitudes never occurred to tribal peoples, all of whom used drugs for various psychosocial purposes, as ethnobotanist Richard Schultes reports7. The Drug War, in fact, can be seen as the west's final step in destroying these aboriginal peoples: we first destroyed them physically, and now we are bent on destroying their nature-friendly view of life, their metaphysic about what life is all about, and replacing their shamans with our materialist doctors, doctors who are so obsessed with looking down their microscopes that they cannot acknowledge that drugs like laughing gas 8 and MDMA 9 could help the depressed.
Those who ignore this background story cut the ground out from under the legalization movement (or rather the RE-legalization 10 movement). For the strongest argument that can (and should) be made against the Drug War is the fact that it is the unconstitutional enforcement of a religion: namely, the religion of Christian Science, which tells us that using drugs is morally wrong, that the moral state of mind is the "drug free" state of mind11.
With this argument, we can (and should) make a strong and undeniable case that the Drug War must end NOW, declaring that it is SELF-EVIDENTLY wrong to tell people how and how much they are allowed to think and feel in life, and that is exactly what we do when we outlaw psychoactive medicines. This is government overreach of unprecedented proportions, and it is supported by hypocrisy of equally unprecedented proportions, insofar as the most rabid Drug Warriors fiercely defend their right to guns, which kill 50,000 a year in America alone12.
They'll say, of course, that guns do not kill people - but then turn around and tell us that drugs do indeed kill people. It's such enormous hypocrisy that such gun worshipers should be photographed and placed in the Webster's Illustrated Dictionary under the term "hypocrite."
Author's Follow-up: January 18, 2024
As you philosopher types should already know, nothing that I've written above need be construed as Christianity bashing, or even Christian Science bashing. If you believe that drugs are bad, then more power to you. All I ask is that you keep that belief to yourself and do not insist that the rest of the world live by your theology. For I personally believe that life is all about becoming all you can be and that psychoactive medicine has been provided to human beings for a reason. Again, if you're a materialist, you will disagree. But again, all I ask is that you keep that belief to yourself and not insist that the rest of the world live by your faith in reductive materialism as the sole method whereby truth may be known.
Almost every article about suicide is shallow because it takes drug prohibition as a natural baseline, even though drug prohibition outlaws substances that could so clearly elevate mood.
William James claimed that his constitution prevented him from having mystical experiences. The fact is that no one is prevented from having mystical experiences provided that they are willing to use psychoactive substances wisely to attain that end.
America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own depression by making opium and cocaine illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.
We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.
It's disgusting that folks like Paul Stamets need a DEA license to work with mushrooms.
The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.
Big pharma drugs are designed to be hard to get off. Doctors write glowingly of "beta blockers" for anxiety, for instance, but ignore that fact that such drugs are hard -- and even dangerous -- to get off. We have outlawed all sorts of less dependence-causing alternatives.
Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.
Now the US is bashing the Honduran president for working with "drug cartels." Why don't we just be honest and say why we're REALLY upset with the guy? Drugs is just the excuse, as always, now what's the real reason? Stop using the drug war to disguise American foreign policy.
America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
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.
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