The Invisible Drug War

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

The Invisible Drug War

How brainwashed Americans pretend that drug prohibition does not exist

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 2, 2025

If a reader of my essays should ever seek to enumerate the overall themes of my philosophy against drug prohibition, they will discover that I am routinely advancing one single proposition: namely, the idea that most of the push-button social issues of our time can be considered in two different ways - 1) in light of drug-war prohibition and 2) in a sort of dogmatic ignoration of that prohibition - and that the conclusions gleaned from these two different perspectives will be very different indeed. Take the subject of antidepressants ¹ and their value in therapy ². If we take drug prohibition as a natural baseline, then antidepressants are the only game in town, at least for the severely depressed, and so they warrant consideration in the treatment of deeply depressed individuals. However, if we consider antidepressants in the light of wholesale drug prohibition, our conclusion is very different indeed. For we then must acknowledge the inconvenient truth that there is a vast pharmacopoeia of drugs out there - both potential and actual - that can elate and inspire in real-time - indeed, that the Hindu religion itself was inspired by just such a drug ³ -- and so the question quickly becomes, "Why are we settling for a handful of Big Pharma ⁴ ⁵ treatments that have been formulated in such a way as to turn the depressed user into a patient for life by causing a chemical dependency that is tougher to kick than that of heroin ⁶?⁷"

Of course, those who consider antidepressants from the latter point of view still have to deal with the fact that all meaningful pharmacological alternatives to antidepressants are outlawed, but at least they do so without gaslighting ⁸ the depressed by implicitly denying the obvious therapeutic power of a vast pharmacopoeia of alternative godsends. These latter disputants at least acknowledge that there is a problem here! They speak up for the depressed who have lost the right to the best possible therapy thanks to substance prohibition. Those who discuss antidepressants while ignoring prohibition, however, are implying thereby that antidepressants are somehow good in and of themselves and that it is "good riddance" as far as the vast outlawed pharmacopoeia is concerned. They are essentially telling the depressed that they should be happy with their starkly limited pharmacopoeia and that there is no problem here whatsoever. They are, in short, doing their "patient" an injustice by failing to stand up for their right to the best possible therapy. They are working instead to normalize drug prohibition by pretending that it leads to the best possible outcome. They are pusillanimously joining the drug prohibition bandwagon rather than fighting on behalf of the rights of their patients.

It is as if a cafeteria's chefs were to outlaw everything but chicken livers and then swear by the health-giving properties of that viscera. Sure, there may be some role for chicken livers in some conceivable diet, but surely the headline news for the forced consumers of such dainties is that everything else has been outlawed - not that chicken livers are the new "wonder food"! True friends of such café patrons may not be able to legally provide them with alternative food - such as juicy rib-eyes and New York-style pizzas, for instance - but at least they can speak up for the nutritionally deprived and point out loudly and clearly on their behalf that food criminalization is wrong. Those, however, who take food criminalization as a natural baseline are implicitly saying something like: "A chicken liver diet is good in and of itself," because they refuse to even mention that food criminalization exists. This is essentially what modern psychiatrists are doing today when they tell us that antidepressants are good medicine, without simultaneously acknowledging that the Drug War has outlawed everything else.

But antidepressants are just one of the many modern topics about which our conclusions will vary sharply depending upon whether or not we acknowledge that drug prohibition exists and that this fact has consequences.

Take the problem of suicide ⁹. When we consider the problem in light of drug prohibition, we immediately see a terrible injustice here: namely, the fact that we have outlawed all sorts of medicines that could cheer up the suicidal in a trice and which could be part of an endless list of psychologically common-sense protocols based on individual circumstances. See the drug-user reports in Pihkal ¹⁰ for proof of the ecstatic and inspirational potential of phenethylamines, for instance. Instead, almost everyone thinks of suicide as having nothing to do with drug prohibition. Just try to discuss drugs in a suicide forum and you will see what I mean: they will ask you to go elsewhere. And what is the practical result of this dogmatic oversight on our part? We actually prefer that the depressed commit suicide rather than that they use "drugs." Let me repeat that: We actually prefer that the depressed commit suicide rather than that they use "drugs."¹¹ Nor are we honest enough to admit this openly. We merely shut our mouths about prohibition. If these anti-suicide organizations really wanted to stop suicides, they would demand the re-legalization ¹² of godsend medicines and call for a complete dissolution of America's superstitious and fearful attitude toward drugs. If they really wanted to make progress and were not subconsciously interested in toeing the drug-war party line, then the anti-suicide movement would become, first and foremost, an anti-prohibition movement.

And the list goes on. Electroshock therapy ¹³ is yet another topic about which we will draw very different conclusions depending upon whether or not we acknowledge the existence of drug prohibition.

If we simply ignore prohibition and look at a deeply depressed individual, we might say, "Well, we have tried everything else, and so now we have to take drastic measures by damaging the patient's brain." But, of course, the fact is, we have NOT tried everything else: we have tried only the sorts of drugs and treatments that politicians will allow us to try. When we consider electroshock therapy in light of substance prohibition, we see a huge injustice. We see that people like my uncle have their brains damaged so that they will be less depressed - but NOT so that they can thrive in life. We do not WANT such individuals to thrive in life. We specifically deny them the drugs that could help them do just that. And yet if you try to discuss drugs in an anti-ECT forum, you are likely to be booted from the group. It is clear, however, that anti-ECT organizations should be anti-prohibition organizations if their number-one goal was really to end shock therapy. But just like the anti-suicide folk, they have a "prior commitment" to supporting the drug-hating ideology of the War on Drugs. They would rather that we damage a patient's brain than to have them use drugs. Let me repeat that: they would rather that we damage a patient's brain than to have them use drugs.¹⁴ If this were not the case, then enemies of shock therapy would be standing outside the clinics whenever such procedures were performed, holding signs that read: "End shock therapy! Re-legalize godsend medicines NOW!"

Here is yet another topic that will be seen in two different ways, depending upon whether or not we acknowledge the existence of drug prohibition: police brutality and the rights of minorities.

If we consider drug prohibition, we see that drug laws have given racist white police officers carte blanche to be as evil as they want to be when it comes to minorities. The George Floyd ¹⁵ case is just one case in point. It is a particularly "telling" example insofar as the officers on the scene actually told the bystanders to "Just say no to drugs" as they were throttling their victim. (The perpetrators were all but telling the minority onlookers: "See, folks? Drug prohibition gives us this power over you guys in the first place! And we cops LOVE IT!") When we fail to acknowledge this connection between injustice and substance prohibition, when we pretend that prohibition does not exist, then the problem of police brutality becomes much more diffuse and hard to deal with. Fans of civil liberties have to look at themselves in the mirror and ask: "Do we wish to end the blatant misuse of power by the police or do we prefer to keep supporting Drug War prohibition by our silence on the subject?" They cannot do both. When we acknowledge the role of the Drug War in instigating violence against minorities, we can imagine concrete measures to fight back, namely by ending drug prohibition; when we treat the instigated violence as just generically "systemic" in origin, however (i.e., as having no direct connection with the drug prohibition which enabled it in the first place), then we are left with a laundry list of merely "secondary targets" to attack in our war against injustice. We have ceded the principal battlefield to our opponents. This is why I say that the Black Lives Matter movement should be, first and foremost, an anti-prohibition movement, and for the same reasons that I have called upon the anti-suicide ¹⁶ and anti-ECT movements to adopt the same strategy above.

We see then that the downsides of substance prohibition are hidden in plain sight thanks to the fact that Americans refuse to talk about them. We refuse to hold substance prohibition responsible for the evil that it both creates and facilitates: like unnecessary suicides, unnecessary shock therapy, and unnecessary violence against Blacks, etc. Instead, we take this unprecedented outlawing of godsend medicines as a natural baseline from which to evaluate the issues of our time. In fact, we even take substance prohibition as a natural baseline in science! This is why readers of magazines like Psychology Today and Science News and Scientific American come away with the impression that depression is a tough nut to crack - that we need to spend more millions on studying chemical pathways and dopamine levels - when the simple fact is that we could end depression in real-time with the common-sense use of psychoactive medicines. Unfortunately, scientists do not believe in common sense thanks to their adherence to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism when it comes to mind and mood medicine. But history does not lie. The use of psychoactive Soma ¹⁷ inspired and elated, to the point that it inspired the creation of the Hindu religion. Only a dogmatic materialist could fail to see the obvious implications of this fact for the treatment of depression and other mood disorders: namely, that we do not need more behaviorist studies by the NIH: we simply need to end prohibition once and for all and to start using godsend drugs in common-sense protocols, unhindered by the dehumanizing tenets of behaviorism.

AFTERWORD

I hope I have made my case that America's public discussion on the push-button problems of our time is biased by our refusal to acknowledge the role that drug prohibition plays in causing and/or exacerbating those very problems. This is the result of the cradle-to-grave brainwashing that we have all received from a government and media determined to shield us from any reports of positive drug use for positive purposes. The success of that propaganda campaign of censorship is alarming when you consider that most history books about the 20th century do not even MENTION the War on Drugs. Nor is it simply conservative historians like Paul Johnson ¹⁸ who ignore the Drug War: progressive Harold Zinn never once mentions drug prohibition in his "A People's History of the United States.¹⁹" And yet the Drug War is an unprecedented power grab by government, putting bureaucrats in charge of how and how much the citizen is allowed to think and feel in this life. It is the unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine under the childish belief that the plants and fungi of Mother Nature pose a threat to the national security of our country. The failure of American historians to even mention this unprecedented government coup should be alarming to freedom lovers anywhere. It is just another sign that the Drug War is the enemy of both democratic freedoms and common sense.

Notes:

1: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
2: The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
3: Complete Rig Veda in English (Sakala Shakha). n.d. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/rigvedacomplete. (up)
4: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
5: 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)
6: 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)
7: Richard Louis Miller. 2017. Psychedelic Medicine : The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press. (up)
8: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
9: Suicide and the Drug War DWP (up)
10: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
11: Of course this is not a conscious wish on our part. The point of this essay is to render our false drug-related beliefs explicit so that we can avoid acting on them in future.
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12: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
13: Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War DWP (up)
14: Of course this is not a conscious wish on our part. The point of this essay is to render our false drug-related beliefs explicit so that we can avoid acting on them in future.
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15: The Racist Drug War killed George Floyd DWP (up)
16: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
17: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
18: The Birth of the Modern Johnson, Paul, Harper Collins, New York, 1991 (up)
19: Howard Zinn. Collins, Harper. 2015. “A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present.” HowardZinn.org. 2015. https://www.howardzinn.org/collection/peoples-history/. (up)

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That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.

Scientists cannot tell us if using drugs is worth the risk any more than they can tell us if free climbing is worth the risk, or horseback riding or parkour.

Just saw a prosecutor gloating about the drug dealers she has taken down.How much is she getting paid to play whack-a-mole?

There are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???

The FDA will be accepting comments through September 20th on the subject of ways to fight PTSD. PTSD@reaganudall.org Ask them why they support brain-damaging shock therapy but won't approve drugs like MDMA that could make ECT unnecessary.

Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.

Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.

Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks. People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took your prohibition to accomplish that! Stop arresting, start teaching safe use!

Drug prohibition is a caustic lye that destroys every democratic freedom that it comes in contact with.

Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy. It is based on the following crazy idea: that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.

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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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The Invisible Drug War

How brainwashed Americans pretend that drug prohibition does not exist

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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