The Philosophical Origins of the Drug War Mentality of Substance Demonization

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

The Philosophical Origins of the Drug War Mentality of Substance Demonization

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 23, 2025

There is something fundamentally wrong with western philosophy. This is clear from the fact that the debate in America over the Harrison Narcotics Act and similar prohibitionist legislation never concerns itself with the outlawing of creativity and religious insight that is implicit in drug prohibition. If these aspects of the debate were ignored merely by SOME of the players in the drug prohibition debates, it might be explained with reference to puritanism and ignorance, but the fact that literally no politicians (and very few pundits) have ever seen the matter in this light suggests that there is a more fundamental problem at work here. The reason for the silence on this topic - that is, on the topic of the BENEFITS of drug use - seems to stem instead from our assumption as westerners that there is but one genuine way of seeing the world - that is, from the supposedly unbiased perception provided by a hypocritically defined sobriety -- and that all other ways of seeing the world are bogus and made up of dreams and wishful thinking and imply a general penchant for hedonism on the part of their proponents.

Author's follow-up for November 13, 2025
Author's follow-up for November 25, 2025

This, I need hardly add, is the viewpoint that Francisco Pizarro entertained about indigenous drug use when he arrived in the New World in the 16th century. The mental states provided by inebriation were deemed to be illusory madness as compared to the "true" perceptions that one assumed would naturally flow from the sober mind. I claim further that this attitude toward so-called drugs can be traced back to the beginning of western philosophy in Greece, when emphasis was placed on reasoning things out - that is, on words - as opposed to feelings. To be sure, this viewpoint was partially tempered in the west by the impact of the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries ¹ , which suggested the existence of other ways of knowing about the world and which some claim gave Socrates his ideas about an afterlife, but the epistemology of the west has ever since presupposed that truth is to be found in cold, rational, and impersonal analysis, and not in the sort of rapture and sudden ineluctable insight which, as ethnobotanist Richard Schultes informs us, has been provided, time out of mind, to all so-called "primitive societies" through the strategic use of psychoactive medicines ² -- in light of which inconvenient truth, of course, drug prohibition is an inherently imperialistic policy.

test

This is not just a philosophical discussion. This built-in distrust of emotional states in the west has pernicious consequences in the real world. Consider the modern "scientific" attitude toward laughing gas . In a sane world, we would give laughing gas kits to the severely depressed under the common-sense hypothesis that using such substances was preferable to death by suicide ³ - and yet our materialist scientists profess to doubt whether substances like laughing gas could be of any benefit to the depressed whatsoever ⁴. Laughing gas, for God's sake! As a result of this rationally oriented distrust of elation and inspiration, we live in an absurd world, one in which we prefer that the severely depressed damage their brains with shock therapy - or that they become patients for life on a daily regimen of dependence-causing Big Pharma ⁵ ⁶ pills - rather than to give them drugs that could make both brain damage and drug dependency unnecessary. Such cruel blindness to common-sense psychology must have deep roots. There is nothing at all obvious, after all, about saying that laughing gas could not help the depressed. Such a counterintuitive proposition could only be arrived at based on behaviorist presuppositions that one has imbibed for a lifetime - the presuppositions of a western world that mistrusts feeling and has placed all its ontological bets on the power of rational thought. The problem, of course, is that rational thought depends on the imperfect and biased creation known as human language, and so a purely rational search for Truth eventually runs up against the limitations of ham-fisted words to fully capture conceptual nuances. Philosophy is starting to reluctantly acknowledge this fact under the influence of Kant's philosophy, which uses words themselves to demonstrate the inability of words to capture ultimate reality. And yet even Kant's insight was limited by his presupposition that there existed one single privileged perception - that of a supposed universal "sober" mind - and that all drug-induced variations on that mindset were to be ruled "out of court" as madness.

It never occurred to Kant that drugs can actually increase the power of the human mind to think rationally, a fact of which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took full advantage in creating a detective who out-deduced his competition with the help of the frequent use of cocaine ⁷ ⁸ ⁹ - until the prohibitionist mindset of his American publishers at Collier's magazine persuaded the author to turn Holmes's drug use into a morality tale and so have the detective ungratefully renounce the drug that had helped him become Sherlock Holmes in the first place ¹⁰!

In light of this backstory, it can be clearly seen that the push for indigenous rights should dovetail into a push for the re-legalization ¹¹ of psychoactive medicine. Unfortunately, the west has been so successful in framing the drug debate as a public health issue that most proponents of indigenous rights take another tack entirely: they merely demand that the indigenous use of drugs be considered as a legally recognized exception from the prohibitions of the west. They thereby ignore the fact that prohibition is the imperialist policy par excellence in the first place, for it seeks to separate humankind from all drug use that inspires and elates, all drug use in which indigenous people have always engaged. This principle-free and historically challenged mindset about drug use on the part of indigenous boosters is clearly demonstrated in a 2018 post by a blogger known as Bitter Boop. Before providing a short and grammatically problematic account of the ritual ingestion of Cohoba by the Taino people of the Caribbean, the author tells us, in underlined and boldened text no less:

"Because of the nature of this post, I'm going to make something very clear: This post is written for educational purposes. In no way shape or form am I advocating for the use of any kind of drugs."¹²

After reading such a cringing disclaimer, I am reminded of the way that Duke Frederick chastised the kowtowing Oliver in As You Like It:

"More villain thou!"

With friends like this blogger, the pro-indigenous movement does not need enemies.

(abolishthedea.com)

A true friend of the Taino people would be denouncing the imperialistic mindset that seeks to besmirch the use of drugs as dirty and pointless in the first place - whereas Bitter Boop makes it clear that she shares the mainstream disdain for indigenous medicine; she merely does not want the Taino people to be held to modern "scientific standards," that's all: you know, those standards that place a premium on rational thought while completely ignoring the obvious beneficial powers of drug use. Indeed, Bitter Boop goes beyond the call of duty by reassuring her prohibitionist readers that "the side effects of cohoba use are particularly unpleasant, often resulting in nausea and vomiting." She acknowledges that these effects were deemed beneficial from the Taino point of view and yet she tells us that, "As you can imagine, its use isn't very common in present day." In this latter statement, she manifests the psychological blindness of the Drug Warrior, who does not see that folks use drugs to increase positive attitudes - not simply to attain problem-free states. She is merely channeling a "kinder, gentler" version of Francisco Pizarro, claiming that drug use makes no sense to the modern mind but that we should not go overboard in censoriously judging its practice in societies of yore. Above all, she misses the obvious fact, that if cohoba use "isn't very common in present day," this is because of drug prohibition itself, which renders all such use highly stigmatized and therefore highly problematic and unnecessarily dangerous.

This penchant for "rational" westerners to ignore all benefits of drug use is clear to anyone who researches the ecstatic Buddhist states of enlightenment online. Given what we know today from drug user reports - from Pihkal ¹³, from the stories of Edgar Allan Poe ¹⁴, from the insights of Humphry Davy ¹⁵, from the drug use of Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius ¹⁶, etc... - all research on such a topic clearly begs the question: "Why are we not using psychoactive medicines to help us achieve enlightenment in real-time, given that drug-free Zen states are so difficult to achieve by the sober mind and may even require a lifetime (or indeed more) to attain?" Had Poe's character, Augustus Bedloe, not attained a sort of enlightenment with the help of drugs when he wrote:

"In the meantime the morphine ¹⁷ had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf- in the hue of a blade of grass- in the shape of a trefoil- in the humming of a bee- in the gleaming of a dew-drop- in the breathing of the wind- in the faint odors that came from the forest- there came a whole universe of suggestion- a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought."¹⁸

That sounds like enlightenment to me.

Or consider this description of drug use in "Pihkal" by Alexander Shulgin:

"The view out of the window was unreal. The garden was painted on the window, and every petal of flower and tuft of grass and leaf of tree was carefully sculptured in fine strokes of oil paint on the surface of the glass. It was not out there; it was right here in front of me."¹⁹

That sounds like enlightenment to me.

Or consider this description of the use of laughing gas in "The Emperors of Dreams" by Mike Jay:

"To breathe the gas was, simply and literally, inspiration."²⁰

That sounds like enlightenment to me.

Yet almost no online sites on spiritual and mental enlightenment reference drugs, except perhaps in a sanctimonious effort to have us eschew them in favor of attaining a supposed "real" enlightenment, whatever that might mean. Such metaphysical moralizing reminds one of the language of our materialist scientists who even today are telling us that laughing gas cannot "really" help the depressed. They too will tell us that drugs do not provide "real" answers, with the implication being in this latter case that real cures are those that are discovered on a rational basis, through a search based on reductive dogma, a search under a microscope, and that all other approaches are "unscientific." In other words, if a depressed person is laughing after using laughing gas , then they are laughing unadvisedly. They are not "really" happy. And if they go on to enjoy life more because they are looking forward to further use of laughing gas ²¹ , yes, they may be feeling better, but again, they are doing so unadvisedly.

This is the absurd implication of our reliance on rationally derived approaches to mind and mood medicine: it leaves us counting biochemical angels on the head of a pin - meanwhile dogmatically ignoring the testimony of the folks whom, as drug researchers, we are ostensibly attempting to cheer up. We act instead according to the hubristic assumption that it is our job to tell the depressed when they are cured, thank them very much, and that they would have to be scientists like ourselves to know what would constitute a real cure for them in any case - namely a cure that can be justified in words, not by mere results, not by mere feelings. And so we have come to this absurd pass thanks to our rationalistic biases: we live in a world in which a drug dealer could cheer up a depressed person in a trice, no questions asked, whereas our medical establishment insists that depression is a huge problem that can only be surmounted with generous funding for theory-driven experimentation -- on those few substances that politicians will allow them to use, of course. Only then can we "really" solve depression, whatever that means. The obvious question here is cui bono? Who benefits from this foot-dragging approach to the treatment of mental health conditions? (Hint: it is not the chronic depressive.)

I hope that this essay has exposed the inhumanity and racial prejudice that is implicit in the west's self-satisfied reliance on the epistemology of rationalism, at least when it comes to mind and mood medicine. Let me end, however, by attempting to actually prove that this rationalist (i.e., word-based) approach to mood medicine must be rejected. This can be done in the form of a syllogism beginning with an observation of Alfred North Whitehead in "The Concept of Nature":

Premise 1: "The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us."

Premise 2: The reductive-rationalist approach to mind and mood medicine leads to an absurd world in which we ignore all the glaringly obvious benefits of drug use.

Conclusion: The reductive-rationalist approach to mind and mood medicine must be rejected.

In other words, it was always a category error to place materialist medicine in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. Unfortunately, it was such a lucrative category error that Americans will have to claw back their rights to self-treatment over the self-interested bodies of their healthcare providers.

Let me conclude by stealing a line from the bamboozled indigenous advocate quoted above:

Because of the nature of this post, I'm going to make something very clear: This post is written for educational purposes. In no way shape or form am I advocating for the demonization of any kind of drugs!

AFTERWORD

It is impossible to overestimate the bias of the west when it comes to drugs. Even most of our drug-law reformers have fallen victim to Drug War propaganda. Take Alan Watts, for instance. Despite the English writer's association with the use of psychedelics, he has written with disdain of their regular use, implying that such drugs may show us the way - but that once they do so, they should no longer be deemed necessary, just as we do not have to keep asking the way to a local venue after having once asked for directions. But it was a mistake for Watts to assume that he knew what people should need in general, based on his own predilections, his own education level, his own upbringing, his own biochemistry, his own genetics, etc. How could Watts know the inner dialogue to which any given human being is subjected thanks to their totally unique upbringing? And what did he know about the mindset of the Taino people, for that matter? Should those Caribbean natives have used the Cohoba snuff one time only and then spent the rest of their lives imagining the effects of having done so? Watts' presumption is to be expected, however, since the Drug War encourages each of us to set ourselves up as experts when it comes to the psychological needs of our fellow mortals, as to what drug use is good and which is bad.

As GK Chesterton wrote in "Eugenics and Other Evils":

"It is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things."²²

And so Watts protests what he considers to be the unnecessary use of psychedelics. Brazilian politicians protest what they consider to be the unnecessary use of marijuana. American pundits protest what they consider to be the unnecessary use of ayahuasca.

Everyone has their own "hit list" of evil drugs. No one recognizes the obvious truth that Paracelsus recognized half a millennia ago: that "only the dose determines that a thing is not a poison."²³ In other words, there are no such things as good or bad substances. The usefulness of any drug always depends on the many details of use. To outlaw substances in advance, under the idea that they can never have any positive uses in any circumstances, is the height of anti-scientific presumption... and it is racist into the bargain. America has outlawed drugs for everybody in the world on the grounds that their use may prove problematic for the white American youngsters whom we have refused to educate about safe use! How's that for racism and xenophobia -- and paleolithic selfishness, for that matter? The cavepeople of yore shouted "Fire bad!" The cavepeople of today shout "Fentanyl ²⁴ kills!" and "Crack kills!" The caveman M.O. remains the same: demonize dangerous substances rather than learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity.

The lesson is clear but so far invisible, even to most proponents of drug-law reform: namely, that prohibition is the problem ²⁵ , not drugs. If the reader is not persuaded of this fact by the arguments adduced above on behalf of religious liberty and the rights of the depressed, then I urge them to consider the censorship of academia ²⁶ brought about by drug laws, or the 67,000 deaths in American inner cities over the last decade due to drug prohibition ²⁷, or the 60,000 disappeared in Mexico thanks to the War on Drugs ²⁸. One should also consider all the therapeutic breakthroughs that we are denying ourselves by outlawing drug research - as when we suffer from Alzheimer's and autism because we refused to study drugs that might ameliorate the effects of such conditions. And why? Because politicians in their wisdom have decided a priori that free research would be of no benefit in such cases, as if they could really know anything of the kind. What childish and superstitious nonsense! Indeed, one is spoiled for choice when it comes to reasons to despise the War on Drugs - including the fact that the Drug War has led to the end of democracy in America by throwing millions of minorities into jail - an outcome that one cannot help but believe in retrospect was the political reason for drug prohibition in the first place.

Author's Follow-up:

June 24, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

Of course, Alan Watts is no doubt "onto" something. Who knows the power of the human mind? We should obviously leverage that power to the hilt to create useful mental vistas and to mimic or perhaps even improve upon certain substance-promoted effects. But it is far too early to opine ex cathedra on what works -- or SHOULD work -- for everybody in this regard. We are not yet even living in a world that values the powers of mind, let alone one in which the extent of its abilities are being strategically plumbed. Nor is it clear that there is a moral problem with using drugs for any given purpose, as Alan comes dangerously close to suggesting. Alan is guilty of considering "drugs" -- or at least psychedelics -- as one single thing, a shorthand first invented by Drug Warriors so that they could hate on psychoactive substances "en masse," without having to be bothered with details. The extent to which the one-time use of a given psychedelic today could help inspire subsequent transcendent states in the future surely depends on a vast array of variables, concerning not simply the individual undertaking the experiment (their physiology, their belief system, their upbringing, etc.) but also the precise drug used (the dosage, the setting, and so forth).

Alan has been taught by the Drug Warrior to focus obsessively on the "waster" who uses drugs indiscriminately, hence Alan's desire to obscure or gloss over the connection between drugs and enlightenment. Since drugs must be associated with irresponsibility, Alan concludes that his job is to deny the obvious association between substance use and inspiration. In some utopian world, the P. Diddy's of the world might be creatively inspired without drugs -- or merely thanks to the example that drugs set for them once and for all -- but everyone knows that this is not how the real world works, that human consciousness is seldom up to the task of soaring free without real-time biochemical assistance. Of course, we can then begin to quibble about how much creativity is enough in this life, but this just reminds us that the discussion is ill-conceived in the first place: we simply do not know the mental and physical needs of Homo sapiens viz. enlightenment, and from this alone it follows that we should not set fast and hard rules for its attainment based merely on what we find works for ourselves.

Author's Follow-up:

November 13, 2025

I do not mean to disparage the power of "drug-free" meditation as facilitated by Pranayama and related breathwork -- though I would be quick to point out that we are never really drug free in life as human beings. We are drug-driven individuals by design (or by mindless evolution, if you prefer). They call it our "biochemistry" for a reason, after all. And I say nothing here of our consumption of caffeine and alcohol and antidepressants... or our subconscious awareness of the pheromones unknowingly emitted by our neighbors.

There are people who have achieved transcendent states without any apparent help from the kinds of substances that we would call (or rather demonize as) "drugs" today, and that's great. There are also people who achieved such states with the help of drugs, only to be inspired thereby to pursue their "drug-free" meditations more effectively.

It's a big world: the less we generalize the better. That's the problem with the whole Drug War: it is a free-for-all of prejudicial generalizations about life situations in which details make all the difference!

Author's Follow-up:

November 25, 2025

I am happy to say that I can still "sign off" on the adumbrations vouchsafed above after re-reading this essay in November 2025. I have uncovered one embarrassing error, however. I inadvertently pegged Paracelsus as operating half a century ago, which would have made him a contemporary of mine in my misspent youth. If only that had been so. Not only did the chemist create the tincture of opium known as laudanum ²⁹, but he was wise enough to see that the drug had obvious symptomatic uses for a vast variety of complaints, whereas the psychologically obtuse researchers of our time can imagine no common-sense benefits for any drugs, insisting instead that drug efficacy be proven under a microscope. But then what can we expect? If drug use was judged based on mere effects in the real world, it would be glaringly obvious that cocaine was a cure for depression ³⁰ -- and then where would the doctors be who made a comfortable and guaranteed living by treating depression instead of curing it? If we could use drugs as we please, including opium and coca, then hospital buildings would no longer be the cathedrals of our times. Healthy people would instead be able to flaunt a little of that massive wealth that goes into perpetuating the disempowering status quo.

Another word about the censorious Bitter Boops of the world. Imagine the hypocrisy of their concern about glorifying drug use in a world in which Jim Beam targets ads for bourbon at young people on prime-time television. This proscription against "glorifying" drug use is purely political in nature. The Drug Warriors had already connived with media to keep us from hearing anything positive about drug use. But this was not enough for them. They needed the public itself to be cowed into silence about beneficial drug use. They therefore promoted the lie that we are somehow giving medical advice whenever we talk about the positive use of drugs, whether in history or in anecdote. This is just an attempt to censor us, insofar as liquor can be glorified to the ends of the earth and these Drug Warriors will say nothing about it. The fact is that we SHOULD be glorifying drug use. Imagine if penicillin were a little known drug in America -- we should be glorifying its use in that case rather than letting its benefits exist in vain. Just so, we need to remind a brainwashed humanity that there are godsend medicines that can be a blessing to those in pain and to the depressed -- to say nothing of the endless other uses of drugs, including spiritual enlightenment and the sharp improvement of mental powers -- all of which are actually GOOD things, notwithstanding the puritanical metaphysics of the prohibitionists, for more on which, see the new book by Andrew Monteith entitled Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs ³¹.

For more on America's hypocritical glorification of alcohol, see my recent essay entitled Herman Melville and Drugs. It shows how America has a long history of glorifying alcohol use. In other words, Drug Warriors are not concerned with safety but with the promotion of ostensibly white western protestant lifestyles. This is especially obvious when we consider that America has created an entire movie genre* to glorify both drinking and gunplay. And yet we are "shushed" by the Bitter Boops of the world should we even suggest that time-honored panaceas like opium and coca have any positive uses whatsoever.

*That genre of course is the western. There is also a genre -- or at least a subgenre -- of movies about drug-war violence, in which cigarette-smoking DEA agents trash the Constitution in their attempts to maim and kill those who dare to have anything to do with time-honored panaceas. These are the gladiator shows of modern times.

Notes for essay entitled The Philosophical Origins of the Drug War Mentality of Substance Demonization:

1: The Eleusinian Mysteries: A Gateway to the Afterlife in Greek Beliefs (up)
2: “Schultes, Hofmann Plants of the Gods ( Healing Arts, 2001) : Alberto Hoffman : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2015. Internet Archive. 2015. https://archive.org/details/SchultesHofmannPlantsOfTheGodsHealingArts2001. (up)
3: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
4: Glatter, Robert. 2021. “Can Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide) Help People with Treatment-Resistant Depression?” Forbes, June 9, 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2021/06/09/can-laughing-gas-nitrous-oxide-help-people-with-treatmentresistant-depre (up)
5: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
6: 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)
7: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
8: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
9: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
10: “Emperors of Dreams : Drugs in the Nineteenth Century : Jay, Mike, 1959 December 14- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/emperorsofdreams0000jaym/page/n3/mode/2up. (up)
11: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
12: Cohoba: Sacred Tobacco and it's [sic] Rituals Bitter Boop, Amino Apps, 2018 (up)
13: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
14: “Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (Text-02A).” 2026. Eapoe.Org. 2026. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/raggeda.htm. (up)
15: “Emperors of Dreams : Drugs in the Nineteenth Century : Jay, Mike, 1959 December 14- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/emperorsofdreams0000jaym/page/n3/mode/2up. (up)
16: Meditations Aurelius, Marcus, East India Publishing Company, London, 2021 (up)
17: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
18: “Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (Text-02A).” 2026. Eapoe.Org. 2026. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/raggeda.htm. (up)
19: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
20: “Emperors of Dreams : Drugs in the Nineteenth Century : Jay, Mike, 1959 December 14- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/emperorsofdreams0000jaym/page/n3/mode/2up. (up)
21: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
22: “The Project Gutenberg eBook of Eugenics and Other Evils, by G.K. Chesterton..” 2019. Gutenberg.Org. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25308/25308-h/25308-h.htm. (up)
23: Levy, Joel. 2011. Poison. Lyons Press. (up)
24: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
25: Drug Prohibition is the Problem, not Drugs: what the movers and shakers get wrong in the drug re-legalization debate DWP (up)
26: Coverup on Campus DWP (up)
27: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
28: Mexico's war on drugs: More than 60,000 people 'disappeared' 2020 (up)
29: “Paracelsus, the Alchemist Who Wed Medicine to Magic.” n.d. Science History Institute. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/paracelsus-the-alchemist-who-wed-medicine-to-magic/. (up)
30: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
31: Monteith, Andrew. 2023. Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs. New York University Press EBooks. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479817993.001.0001. (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

State-assisted suicide for the depressed is murder in a world in which the state outlaws all substances that could make the depressed wish to live.

If the depressed patient laughs, that means nothing. Materialists have to see results under a microscopic or they will never sign off on a therapy.

It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.

Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.

Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.

Psychiatrists never acknowledge the biggest downside to modern antidepressants: the fact that they turn you into a patient for life. That's demoralizing, especially since the best drugs for depression are outlawed by the government.

Our tolerance for freedom wanes in proportion as we consider "drugs" to be demonic. This is the dark side behind the new ostensibly comic genre about Cocaine Bears and such. It shows that Americans are superstitious about drugs in a way that Neanderthals would have understood.

In America, they save the depressed from cocaine and opium by turning them into patients for life with dependence-causing "meds." Now 30-year-old doctors get to treat 67-year-olds like children, with new visits every damn three months.

What attracts me about "drug dealers" is that they are NOT interested in prying into my private life. What a relief! With psychiatry, you are probed for pathological behavior on every office visit. You are a child. To the "drug dealer," I am an adult at least.

Prohibitionists are responsible for the 200,000-plus killed in the US-inspired Mexican drug war in the 21st century.

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

No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).

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.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

(up)

The Philosophical Origins of the Drug War Mentality of Substance Demonization

Author's Follow-up:

June 24, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

November 13, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

November 25, 2025

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend