The Worst thing about the Drug War

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The Worst thing about the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 18, 2020

Americans are so determined to treat Mother Nature as a drug kingpin that I sometimes think the War on Drugs can never end. There are just too many parties that stand to benefit from it:

Big Pharma , Psychiatrists, Big Liquor, Law Enforcement, the Corrections Industry -- and above all politicians, who can give up on solving real problems in the real world thanks to the "Drug War," which allows them to blame everything that happens on the modern all-powerful boogeyman of "drugs," although the latter word is really just a pejorative term for the plant medicines that grow at our very feet.

April 2025 Update

Sometimes I just want to say, "Fine! The America I loved no longer exists. It has given up on Jefferson's natural law by giving the government the right to tell me which plants and fungi I can use. The only question now is, 'When will they start taxing the very air that I breathe?' Okay, then. If America is no longer going to stand for the freedoms that Thomas Jefferson prescribed for it, then I'm 'out of here.' I'll move to a country where the bounty of Mother Nature is considered to be mine by birth, as it was practically everywhere on earth until 1914, when racist American politician Francis Burton Harrison succeeded in toppling natural law by criminalizing a mere plant, the poppy, which he associated with the much-maligned Americans of Chinese ancestry."

But before I can even think about buying a plane ticket to a free country, I realize the sad truth:

America is not happy to violate natural law on its home turf alone. It is so deluded by its own jaundiced view of Mother Nature's plant medicines that it is blackmailing every other country in the world to follow suit and criminalize Mother Nature's bounty as well. And Western countries are all too happy to go along, for two main reasons: 1) because their politicians do not even realize the profound political principles at stake here and 2), because they themselves are ignorant of the magical healing powers of nature's psychoactive pharmacopoeia and therefore easy prey for American propaganda according to which psychoactive plants can bring about nothing but evil in the hands of a free citizenry.

Fortunately for America, the few countries that would refuse to go along with such blackmail are despotic in nature and so are naturally inclined to make a huge law enforcement issue out of the boogeyman of "drugs" without any prompting from the American Empire. It gives those despots just the excuse they need to crack down on opponents without inciting the wrath of the United Nations: they're cracking down on "drugs" after all, not on dissent.

And so there's no point in buying a plane ticket to escape America's Drug War: the Drug War has gone global, thanks to financial blackmail and the many cynical politicians who see that war as a way to further their own political agenda. And so America - a country that claims to despise the mentality of colonialism -- goes overseas in a Quixotic quest to make the world safe for Big Liquor, burning plants that have been used responsibly for millennia by non-Western cultures, under the pretext that they cause addiction in the States, failing to realize that, by that same selfish logic, the Islamic world should be able to come Stateside and burn America's grape vines.

And so it's Christian Science Uber Alles, we must all shun "drugs" or else -- because the entire world has now adopted America's anti-scientific notion that psychoactive plants can cause nothing but evil-- unless, of course, they are synthesized by Big Pharma into highly addictive pills that one must take every day of their life, until death do they part from the psychiatric pill mill.

That's morality for you in the age of the Drug War: addiction is fine, as long as Fortune 500 corporations are receiving the profits therefrom. And so Big Pharma has a free pass to addict 1 in 4 American women to antidepressants ¹, without even raising one Drug Warrior eyebrow.

What further proof do we need that terms like "drugs" and "addiction" are political, not scientific terms, as they are used today in a Drug Warrior society? Here we are, living in the midst of the biggest addiction crisis in human history -- the mass addiction to a class of antidepressants that were never even intended for long-term use -- and Americans are silent about it. The pill mill is turning faster than ever with Big Pharma now targeting toddlers with such pills under the pretext of "nipping ADHD in the bud" -- along with the child's psychological freedom and financial prospects, one might add.

What irony, that this addiction crisis goes unnoticed in a country that considers "empowerment" to be the ne plus ultra of human goals. What could be more DISEMPOWERING than to turn a human being into an eternal patient, who has to visit an expensive shrink every three to six months of their lives, in order to get yet another expensive prescription for a drug that has nothing to do with helping one thrive, merely with helping one "get by"?

This, then, is the worst thing about the American Drug War: the fact that the country that founded it has turned it into the law of the very globe, thus ensuring that folks who believe in natural law cannot access psychoactive plant medicine anywhere on the planet.

What a coup for the medical "professionals" and Big Pharma . What a loss for the mere human being. What a loss for freedom. What a loss for human potential.

Because, believe it or not, some people don't want to use "drugs" in order to behave irresponsibly: they want to use "drugs" in order to increase their creativity, in order to increase their passion for life, in order to increase their appreciation of Mother Nature, in order to increase their friendliness and caring for their fellow human being.

Of course, these goals won't make sense to the Drug Warrior, who holds the anti-scientific and counterfactual belief that illegal plant substances can cause nothing but evil. But those of us who study plant medicines (rather than demonize them) know that Mother Nature's psychoactive pharmacopoeia holds out the promise of changing attitudes for the better -- of inspiring creativity and helping us to come to terms with our place in the universe -- while potentially curing Alzheimer's ² disease and fighting depression into the bargain.

But America has a vested interest in the superstitious status quo thanks to which we turn psychoactive plant medicines into boogeymen that can't even be studied under pain of law. Just imagine such a state of affairs in America -- America, of all places! A country that prides itself on being "scientific" is actually a country in which the very scientific process is emasculated by politically motivated drug laws.

I really wish I could vote against this anti-scientific status quo with my feet and leave America, thereby evincing my disgust with the way that politicians have violated Jefferson's natural law and taken away my right to Mother Nature's bounty. But the Drug War virus has taken over the entire world, buoyed by Drug War propaganda, chiefly in the form of TV, movies ³ ⁴ and other media in which the positive and responsible use of criminalized substances is never ever depicted, leaving the viewer to conclude that Mother Nature's psychoactive substances are only used by scum bags and deviants.

Then there's the blatant lie by the Partnership for a Drug Free America ⁵, which claims that Mother Nature's psychoactive substances "fry the brain ⁶" the moment that they're declared illegal by politicians. This is surely the most mendacious public service advertisement in human history. The truth is exactly the opposite. Cocaine sharpened Freud's mind. Opium increased Benjamin Franklin's creativity and affability. Far from scrambling his brain, psychedelics helped Francis Crick discover the DNA helix. The Air Force itself has required its pilots to use what the Drug Warrior would derisively refer to as "speed" on long, crucial missions, not to scramble the pilot's brain but to sharpen it. If any drug actually 'fries' the brain, it is the modern Big Pharma ⁷ ⁸ antidepressant, which was never studied for long-term effects and which causes emotional flat-lining in long-term users.

And so, with such blatantly false propaganda, the Drug War has succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of the corrupt and racist politicians who started it - or rather who incited it with their self-serving demagoguery. It has taken over the entire world, with its jaundiced view of Mother Nature.

Indeed, the future looks dim for those of us who still believe in natural law and who think of Mother Nature as a goddess rather than as a drug kingpin. Where can we go in order to 'be all that we can be' with the help of Mother Nature's psychoactive godsend meds? We have only one life, after all. How dare politicians declare that we have no right to live it to the fullest? And this in a country that guarantees the pursuit of happiness? (If we ever find life on another planet, freedom lovers better get there fast before America 'persuades' those little green men to ban psychoactive medicine there as well.)

Yet there is hope. The state of Oregon is floating an initiative that will decriminalize all drugs. Portugal has already taken that step. And Israel has abolished its Drugs Agency. Maybe those of us who still value our rights under natural law will eventually be able to vote with our feet and relocate to a state or country that takes a rational view of psychoactive substances, refusing to demonize them on behalf of racist political agendas -- someplace where a citizen is judged by how they actually behave in life rather than by the substances that they choose to ingest.

Related tweet: May 15, 2023

I'm aware of course that there is a technical difference between addiction and chemical dependency, but such hair splitting is reserved for the Ivory Tower. On Main Street, addiction is confounded with dependency. Indeed, addiction is CREATED out of dependency by the War on Drugs. If you want to turn an opium habitue into an addict, just outlaw the poppy plant and then you will be able to point to the wretches that you yourself have created and cry: "See, they're all addicts!" If you want to see millions of more addicts, just outlaw SSRIs and within a week, there will be so many brain zaps in middle America that you could run a power plant off of them. Addiction, as the term is used today, is merely the regular use of substances of which botanically clueless politicians disapprove.

Author's Follow-up:

April 07, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

It's fun looking back on these relatively ancient essays of mine because I feel like a different person in doing so. I have learned more since writing them (or so I flatter myself), and so I feel like a schoolmarm who can now sit back while reading them and smugly critique the efforts of a novice.

With reference to this 2020 effort of mine, I am happy to say that I can sign off on the passion that it contains. Well done, me! It is quite clear that I am pissed by the status quo and not simply trying to show off rhetorical skills. I have, of course, become cognizant of more relevant philosophical considerations since 2020 thanks to which a modern version of this essay might have gone more directly to the jugular with the help of "wise saws and modern instances;" nevertheless, I still give a rating of 5-out-of-5 to this my chronological doppelgänger for the sheer "spirit" of his piece. This sense of heartfelt conviction on the part of the writer is a highly relevant aspect of an essay such as this, one whose very goal is to inspire an appropriate sense of outrage concerning an injustice about which the average American is all too apathetic, if not totally unaware.

That said, I am not sure that I made the answer to my essay's implicit question sufficiently clear. That question, as the essay title implies, was: What is the worst thing about the Drug War?

To be explicit, then, here is the answer.

The worst thing about the Drug War is the fact that it has spread worldwide. There is nowhere that one can go on Planet Earth where they will find that they have both the legal right and the practical ability to benefit from any and all psychoactive medicines that have potential benefits for them -- based on drug user reports, the history of substance use, and/or plain common sense. And you cannot get more colonialist than that: an unprecedented American social policy that ends up applying to the entire world. America has enrolled the entire world population in the Great Cult of Substance Demonization, with only the feeblest pushback from foreign governments.

The question is, why is the pushback so feeble?

The answer is obvious for totalitarian countries, where drug prohibition will be seen as a good excuse for keeping their people in subjection. The real question is then why is the pushback against the Drug War so feeble in the allegedly free world?

The answer is that even the enemies of the Drug War have failed to realize that health (or lack thereof) consists of the balance of a wide array of inputs -- inputs of a psychological, biochemical and genetic nature. The mere use of a psychoactive substance does not bring about either a healthy or an unhealthy state. Context is all important. A drug that may be deadly for one person in one situation when used for one reason at one dose can yet be a godsend for another person in another situation when used for another reason at another dose. It is thanks to our failure to recognize this fact that everyone and their brother feels free to come up with their own personal list of substances that are "good" and "bad" based on their own personal experiences. When government leaders believe like this that health can be created or prevented by just one single input, i.e. by drug use, the question of drug law just devolves into a subjective question of personal prejudices with respect to the merely abstract propriety of various substances.

The fact that such judgments are subjective is clear from the fact that no such government officials today conclude that alcohol warrants criminalization. Yet one country (like Brazil) will still tell us that marijuana must be outlawed for health reasons while ayahuasca can remain legal. Another country (like the U.S.) will outlaw ayahuasca for supposed health reasons while yet legalizing the use of marijuana. Still another country (like Mexico) will outlaw marijuana and yet legalize psilocybin mushrooms. Bolivian politicians, for their part, will legalize coca while taking special care to punish cocaine use aggressively. In other words, everyone will have a different idea of what is harmful, in a world wherein we fail to realize that health is a balance of factors.

This is why we need a philosophical study of the Drug War, because our ideas about drug use are based on presuppositions that need to be exposed and rebutted. Until then, every country, every region, and every person will come up with their own ideas about what drugs are "good" and which are "bad." Even Terence McKenna ⁹ was bamboozled in this way. In his world, cocaine ¹⁰ ¹¹ is bad merely because he associates its use with the kind of uneducated and irresponsible people that he dislikes. Michael Pollan thinks psychedelics are bad (or at least should remain illegal until further notice) because they may cause problems for some white American young people. Andrew Weil can see no positive reason for using drugs like opiates except for purely physical ailments.

All these judgments have one thing in common. They are completely subjective and based on the life experiences and resultant attitudes of the people doing the judging.

But subjectivity is not the only problem here. When Rick Strassman tells us that DMT use may cause issues at high doses, we can no doubt take his word for that statement. The problem is with the conclusion that he draws from that fact, namely, that DMT should remain criminalized.

So we see that both those who judge drugs subjectively and those who judge objectively draw the same unwarranted conclusion from their judgments: namely, that a substance that can be misused by one person at one dose for one reason in one circumstance must not be used by anyone at any dose for any reason in any circumstance.

No conclusion could be more antiscientific, more illogical or more antithetical to human happiness. This is clear to anyone with a little imagination. There are, in fact, endless potential positive uses for psychoactive drugs when we consider all the possible creative common-sense protocols whereby they could be used in a free world.

As Richard Middleton writes of his protagonist in his short story entitled "The Last Adventure":

"He took life as young poets take opium : in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses."

In other words, those young poets used opium ¹² wisely! It can be done! It is pure defeatism to say otherwise -- defeatism that has the collateral effects of outlawing human creativity, outlawing novel ways of seeing the world, and outlawing new religions. Yes, outlawing new religions. Just read the Rig Veda if you doubt me. You will find that the Hindu religion was inspired by the use of a drug called Soma ¹³ that inspired and elated. From this fact alone it is clear that the outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of religion.

That, too, is "the worst thing about the Drug War." But then one is spoiled for choice when selecting for such a category.

Notes:

1: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
2: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
3: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
4: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
5: Horses Kill The Partnership for a Death Free America (up)
6: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)
7: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
8: 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)
9: McKenna, Terence. 2026. “History Ends in Green.” The Library. 2026. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/history-ends-in-green. (up)
10: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
11: “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)
12: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
13: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)

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In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."

Why does no one talk about empathogens for preventing atrocities? Because they'd rather hate drugs than use them for the benefit of humanity. They don't want to solve problems, they prefer hatred.

The Drug Warriors say: "Don't tread on me! (That said, please continue to tell me what plants I can use, how much pain relief I can get, and whether my religion is true or not.)"

Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.

Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.

Heroin versus Antidepressants https://abolishthedea.com/heroin_versus_antidepressants.php

In the 2015 movie "No Escape," the only place that was safe from anti-American hysteria was an opium den. How ironic that the U.S. forced Iran to outlaw opium.

The scheduling system is a huge lie designed to give an aura of "science" to America's colonialist disdain for indigenous medicines, from opium, to coca, to shrooms.

Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.

"There has been so much delirious nonsense written about drugs that sane men may well despair of seeing the light." -- Aleister Crowley, from "Essays on Intoxication"

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The Worst thing about the Drug War

Related tweet: May 15, 2023

Author's Follow-up:

April 07, 2025

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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