The Philosophical Origins of the Drug War Mentality of Substance Demonization
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 23, 2025
here 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.
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, 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 medicines1 -- in light of which inconvenient truth, of course, drug prohibition is an inherently imperialistic policy.
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 - and yet our materialist scientists profess to doubt whether substances like laughing gas could be of any benefit to the depressed whatsoever2. 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 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 - 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 place3!
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 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."4
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.
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 Pihkal5, from the stories of Edgar Allan Poe6, from the insights of Humphry Davy7, from the drug use of Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius8, 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 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."9
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."10
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."11
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, 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."12
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 century ago: that "only the dose determines that a thing is not a poison."13 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 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, 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 brought about by drug laws, or the 67,000 deaths in American inner cities over the last decade due to drug prohibition, or the 60,000 disappeared in Mexico thanks to the War on Drugs. 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
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.
It's "convenient" for scientists that their "REAL" cures happen to be the ones that racist politicians will allow. Scientists thus normalize prohibition by pretending that outlawed substances have no therapeutic value. It's materialism collaborating with the drug war.
America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.
I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.
There are endless drugs that could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for drug warriors to understand).
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.
Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use the many drugs that improve and speed up mental processes.
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.
I will gladly respect the police once we remove them from Gestapo duty by ending the war on drugs. Police should also learn to live on a budget, without deriving income from confiscating houses and dormitories, etc.
If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"
Drug warriors aren't just deciding for us about drugs. They're telling us that we no longer need Coleridge poems, Lovecraft stories, Robin Williams, Sherlock Holmes, or the soma-inspired Hindu religion.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, The Philosophical Origins of the Drug War Mentality of Substance Demonization published on June 23, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
here 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. 
You have been reading an article entitled, The Philosophical Origins of the Drug War Mentality of Substance Demonization published on June 23, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
