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The Drug War as Religion

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 24, 2019



Those who support the Drug War do so based on a kind of materialist version of Christian Science. The Drug Warrior does not discount medical cures entirely, as does the Christian Scientist, but he or she insists that the medical pharmacy of Mother Nature "should not" be used to bring about psychological happiness and that such usage is somehow tawdry and unbecoming of a sane and sober American.

Author's follow-up for October 30, 2025

As a dissenter to this doctrine, I believe that there is no reason why Mother Nature's bounty cannot be justly used to improve my mind in the same way that I use Mother Nature's bounty to improve my physical health. In other words, I disagree with both the classic theology of Christian Science and its modern-day interpretation that is presupposed by the Drug Warrior. It is therefore a violation of my religious liberty to deny me access to Mother Nature's bounty on the theory that I should not require that bounty to live a happy and fulfilled life, for that is an unprovable and hence theological assumption and one that I do not share.



We talk about an aborigine's religious right to use time-honored natural substances such as peyote and ayahuasca, but this is beside the point. Indeed, to frame the issues in this way is to tacitly acknowledge the Drug Warrior's right to deny the rest of us our God-given right to access Mother Nature's bounty for the benefit of our own psyches. And how is this justified by the Drug Warrior? As stated above, it's justified based on a theological notion, a religious assumption, an article of faith: namely, that it is morally wrong to expand one's mind through the use of certain psychoactive substances.

To repeat, this is one possible way to look at life (namely the Christian Science way), but it is not MY way, and to insist otherwise is to force me to adopt the religious practices and taboos of Christian Science.



June 7, 2022



12-Step Programs 1 are religions, which require their devotees to confess their powerlessness in the face of problems like addiction. Why is this religion? Because the powerlessness is a necessary result of the substance criminalization upon which the 12-Step church is based. It is powerlessness by design, not by necessity. The generally WASP proponents of the 12-step group first render the "user" powerless in a practical sense by denying them access to all pharmacological godsends. Then they urge the former "user" to consider themselves powerless in a fundamental ontological sense, in a religious sense that is, a sense which is almost made explicit by the 12-step requirement that the user place their fate in the hands of a thinly disguised Christian God called a higher power. "We are all powerless sinners in need of higher help," rings the puritanical refrain. Yes, but would this be true had you not criminalized almost all the godsend psychoactive medicine in the universe?!

This proposition that we are powerless when faced with problems like habituation is by no means a logical truth that is self-evident to a rational mind. It is rather an article of faith of the modern Drug Warrior and a self-fulfilling prophecy thanks to Drug Warrior legerdemain in the civic and legal realms. The fact that this dour prognosis rings true statistically is meaningless in a world that has dogmatically shunned many hundreds of godsend psychoactive medicines that might have changed outcomes for the better. And so the Drug Warrior rigs the therapeutic deck in favor of failure when they deprive a human being of all psychoactive medicine that might actually empower them to thrive in the world, habituation or no habituation. It's as if the Drug Warrior takes away my Tylenol and then tells me, "We all must rely on God for headache relief," to which the sane response would be: "Well, yes, I guess so, but only because you've confiscated all the flippin' medicine that might otherwise have fixed my headache!"




Author's Follow-up:

October 30, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up





stamped on packing paper: Censored -- religious liberty (abolishthedea.com) Most people have no clue as to how completely drug prohibition has already screwed up America in blatant defiance of all time-honored democratic principles. Take religious freedom, for instance. In ruling on the rights of Native Americans to use peyote, the Justice Department invented the following outrageous new bizarre standard for religious freedom 2. It said in effect that:

You have no right to religious freedom if you practice a religion that was not practiced by your ancestors.

This is how the Justice Department "justifies" its continued outlawing of peyote for white Americans, while grudgingly permitting the heavily overseen use of the drug by the Native American Church. White people, we're told, have no history of using peyote for religious inspiration, and therefore the government concludes (in the Mother of All Non-Sequiturs) that we have no right to use the cactus in a religious manner.

This is nothing but the outlawing of religion. Worse yet, it is the outlawing of religion based on racial and ethnic considerations!

We see again why I am so baffled and bothered by the many drug pundits (like Rick Strassman 3 and Michael Pollan 4) who see no problem with drug prohibition provided only that it will protect young Americans from the "drug kingpin" called Mother Nature. I cannot believe that such clearly intelligent people are so purblind. I can only draw one of two conclusions: either they are, indeed, logically challenged, or they are knowingly catering to the prejudices of the Great Unwashed, in order to keep their books relevant in the brainwashed marketplace.

We live in a world surrounded by drugs -- and there are plenty more to come for westerners -- thanks both to ethnobotanical studies and laboratory research, legal and otherwise. We could be adults about this and teach safe use -- or we can be children and pretend that Mother Nature herself is wrong and that we have to physically change the world by burning plants to conform to our prejudices against mental and spiritual improvement.

Americans read books like Fahrenheit 451 and think that they concern a fictional world -- but we are living in a philosophically identical dystopia: it's just that we burn plants instead of books. And yet the government's motivation is the same in both cases: to control what the people think. Actually, our government's motivation is far worse than in the Bradbury classic. The book burners just wanted to control what the people think. When our government burns plants, they are thereby controlling what -- and how much -- the people can think and feel. If I had to choose between the dystopias, I would choose the Bradbury world in which thought, at least, was still free. One can ignore the government and thrive apart in such a world. This, incidentally, is why the government outlawed opium in China in the 19th century. The Mandarins had no interest in the health of the Chinese -- which was not adversely affected by opium in any case. They wanted power, a power that was felt. How can you feel powerful when your people can transcend your authority -- and even make you laughably irrelevant -- with a few puffs on an opium pipe? What good is power if the people do not FEEL it as such?

For more on that latter subject, see The Truth about Opium by William H. Brereton 5 6.












Notes:

1: Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing DWP (up)
2: Peyote Way Church of God, Inc., Plaintiff-appellant, v. William F. Smith, Attorney General of the United States JUSTIA US LAW (up)
3: Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman DWP (up)
4: Michael Pollan and the Drug War DWP (up)
5: Scribd: The Truth About Opium Brereton, William, Anna Ruggieri, India, 2017 (up)
6: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)


Religion




The Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. It is therefore a crime against religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate.

Prohibition is a crime against religious freedom.

William James found religious experience in substance use. See his discussion of what he calls "the anesthetic revelation" in his book entitled "The Varieties of Religious Experience."

The drug war is a meta-injustice. It does not just limit what you're allowed to think, it limits how and how much you are allowed to think.

The Drug War violates religious freedom by putting bureaucrats in charge of deciding if a religion is 'sincere' or not. That is so absurd that one does not know whether to laugh or cry. No one in government is capable of determining whether the inner states that I achieve with psychoactive medicine are religious or not. This is why Milton Friedman was so wrong when he said in 1972 that there are good people on both sides of the drug war debate. WRONG! There are those who are more than ready to take away my religious liberty and those who are not. If the former wish to be called 'good,' they will first need a refresher course in American democracy and religious freedom. They need to renounce their Christian Science theocracy and let folks like myself worship using the kinds of substances that have inspired entire religions in the past. Until they do that, do not expect me to praise the very people who have launched an inquisition against my form of experiencing the divine.

There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.

"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda



  • Addicted to Christianity
  • America's Puritan Obsession with Sobriety
  • Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Heroin versus Alcohol
  • How the DEA determines if a religion is true
  • How the Drug War Banned my Religion
  • Libertarians as Closet Christian Scientists
  • Meister Eckhart and Drugs
  • Psychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches: LSD, Cannabis, and Spiritual Sacraments in Underground America
  • Take this Drug Test
  • The Christian Presuppositions of the Drug War and Why They're Important
  • The Church of the Most Holy and Righteous Drug War
  • The Drug War = Christian Science
  • The Drug War as Religion
  • Using Ecstasy in Church
  • Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than a Religion





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol massacres. The problem is drug prohibition, not drugs.

    We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.

    I have nothing against science, BTW (altho' I might feel differently after a nuclear war!) I just want scientists to "stay in their lane" and stop pretending to be experts on my own personal mood and consciousness.

    Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."

    Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.

    It's funny to hear fans of sacred plants indignantly insisting that their meds are not "drugs." They're right in a way, but actually NO substances are "drugs." Calling substances "drugs" is like referring to striking workers as "scabs." It's biased terminology.

    Democratic societies need to outlaw prohibition for many reasons, the first being the fact that prohibition removes millions of minorities from the voting rolls, thereby handing elections to fascists and insurrectionists.

    They still don't seem to get it. The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.

    The healthcare industry turns all the emotional downsides of drug prohibition into "illnesses."

    How else will they scare us enough to convince us to give up all our freedoms for the purpose of fighting horrible awful evil DRUGS? DRUGS is the sledgehammer with which they are destroying American democracy.


    Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






    The Drug War = Christian Science
    Americans have the right to pursue happiness but not to attain it


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    Thanks for visiting The Drug War Philosopher at abolishthedea.com, featuring essays against America's disgraceful drug war. Updated daily.

    Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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