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There are no such things as drugs

the post that got me banned for life from the DRUGS subReddit

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 23, 2020



AUTHOR'S NOTE: This post got me banished for life from the Drugs Sub Reddit. Apparently even those who oppose the Drug War have been snookered into believing in "drugs" as an objective term, when it's really just a political pejorative for substances that politicians have chosen to demonize, often for strategic political reasons. This is unfortunate, because by calling substances "drugs," demagogues like Donald Trump can call for the execution of those who sell them -- whereas if we referred to "drugs" more honestly as "plant medicines from Mother Nature," the callousness of Trump's proposal would be obvious to us all. (I've actually received feedback from this post claiming that "drugs" is "already a neutral term." Well, yes, it should be, but it certainly is not in Drug War USA.)


There are no such things as "drugs," the way that the Drug Warrior defines that term. There are no substances that are bad in and of themselves. There are only morally neutral substances: substances that can be used for good or bad purposes, at good or bad times, in good or bad doses, by good or bad people. That's why the whole crackdown on "drugs" is madness. It's not just that the Drug War is wrong, but that it represents a whole wrong way of looking at the world, where we see evil in a substance by itself without regard for the way that the substance is actually used by any given human being. It's a way of thinking that Thomas Jefferson would not have even understood. If someone were to have told him that some of his garden plants were somehow criminal by nature, he would have considered that person to be a fool. And the idea that you could stomp onto his property in jackboots and confiscate such plants (as the DEA did in 1987) would have struck him as common law tyranny, blatantly at odds with the natural law upon which Jefferson himself had founded the American republic.

The word "drugs" as used today is a linguistic red herring invented by bigots and politicians so that they can crack down on their enemies without appearing to be bigoted when doing so. Under the banner of fighting this custom-made bugaboo of evil "drugs," politicians can throw their opponents in jail for mere possession of plant medicines while claiming to be fighting for public health and safety while they do so. That's nonsense, of course, because most full-time Drug Warriors are vehemently opposed to a so-called nanny state and vote down any efforts on the part of government to enforce public health through laws. Their interest in public health only arises when there are political opponents who require silencing. Then public health suddenly becomes priority number one for them (the government can never spend enough money on it, buying guns and building prisons) since a healthy populace, in the Drug Warrior's mind, is one in which their political enemies are no longer free to walk the streets. The answer: criminalize the plant medicines that are popular among the despised populations that you wish to disempower and (if possible) remove that population from the voting rolls entirely (by charging them with felonies under your new seemingly disinterested law against "drug abuse").

Thus the war on opium 1 originally targeted the Chinese, the war on cocaine 2 3 originally targeted Blacks, and the war on marijuana originally targeted Hispanics.

Of course, if this superstitious belief in the existence of evil substances known as "drugs" was held only by the right, there would probably be no Drug War. But the left also finds the pejorative "drugs" label useful as well, not because they want to punish drug users but because they want to treat them, chiefly by bringing the whole vast medical establishment into the picture and giving them a cut of the "drugs" pie. But both the left and right are coming from the same place, philosophically speaking: they both assume that there must be something wrong with a person who uses plant medicines of which the government disapproves. The left wants to "help" those people, the right wants to "punish" them. But it never occurred to either side that there was no problem in the first place: or rather that there are many "drug-related" problems, but they are all actually caused either by the Drug War itself, or by a combination of that Drug War and bad social policies.

Why is the drug user's drug supply uncertain both as to quality and quantity?

Because of the Drug War: it works tirelessly to disrupt such merchandise both as to quality and quantity.

Why is the drug user limited to purchasing only a small fraction of the vast psychoactive pharmacopoeia of Mother Nature's godsends, often including synthesized substances that are far more addictive than what nature has to offer?

Because of the Drug War: its prohibitions create a profit motive that incentivizes the sale of highly addictive substances.

Why does the user lack statistical information about the actual observed results of psychoactive substance use, knowledge whereby he or she could choose wisely?

Because of the Drug War: it produces lying propaganda stating falsely that all drugs fry the brain4. Such whole-sale demonization of nature's plant medicines leaves the user with no objective information with which to choose the substance of their choice, thereby increasing the likelihood that they'll choose unwisely.

Why do some folks get addicted?

Because of the Drug War: the profit motive that it creates ensures that dealers will be selling highly addictive synthesized versions of Mother Nature's psychoactive plant medicines. Meanwhile, many less addictive (and totally non-addictive) plant medicines are unavailable because the research-quashing Drug War ensures that most people will never even hear of them, let alone get a chance to use them to improve their life, spiritually and emotionally.

Why is addiction treatment in America barbaric, consisting of three days of cold turkey on a cot, followed by monthly doses of Naltrexone, all for a price tag of around $3,000?

Because of the Drug War: it outlaws all psychoactive drugs (especially psychedelics) that can be used to change attitudes and thus make withdrawal easier.

Why is the great addiction of our time completely ignored by the Drug Warrior (i.e., the fact that 1 in 8 American men are addicted to antidepressants 5 and 1 in 4 American women)?

Because of the Drug War: In addition to demonizing illegal "drugs," the Drug War also canonizes legal "medicines," so much so that those latter substances can do all the damage in the world yet we're completely blind to it.


Why are there vast empires selling drugs and fomenting violence in countries around the world? Why have America's inner cities been turned into shooting galleries?

Because of the Drug War: prohibition causes violence from the dueling profit-seekers that it empowers. It's a lesson that we should have learned from liquor prohibition but that politicians decided to ignore when they realized how they could turn the Drug War to their political advantage by using it to disempower their enemies.

Why do formerly freedom loving Americans now believe that extrajudicial murder and torture is good public policy, at least when it comes to fighting "drugs"?

Because of the Drug War and the Drug War propaganda films put out by Hollywood, which turn torturers and murderers into American Heroes. Example: the movie "Running with the DEA" from 2019, in which Leslie Bibb plays a DEA agent who tortures one drug suspect and shoots another at point-blank range. Why? Because they had the nerve to sell Mother Nature's plant medicine, the coca leaf, which had been used responsibly by non-western cultures for millennia. As if to rub our freedom-loving noses in the injustice, Leslie Bibb is hypocritically smoking tobacco while she shoots the movie's plant-selling "bad guy." In fact, she does all but hold up a banner saying: "This has nothing to do with health and safety: this is all about raw power."



But what can we expect when America launches a Drug War based on the false and superstitious notion that there are such things as "bad substances," i.e. "drugs"?

For psychoactive substances are just as morally neutral as any rock or tree. If we are looking for good and evil, we have to start talking about human behavior, and that includes the human-guided social policies that lead to bad outcomes. But this is exactly why the Drug War hangs on like an unwelcome guest: because politicians know that once the whipping boy of "drug abuse" is taken from them, they will have to actually address the vast inequities in American society that lead to misbehavior. They'll have to stop punishing the pre-crime of drug use and start dealing with bad behavior only. Bigots and overzealous do-gooders both prefer to believe in "evil drugs" because it gives them a mission: one to punish and one to rescue. But if they really wanted to help Americans and advance the cause of freedom, they would give up on their superstitious belief in evil substances and stop demonizing this thing they call "drugs."

Of course what politicians really mean when they use the word "drugs" is: "psychoactive plant medicines of which politicians disapprove." But they'll never use that language, because to do so would reveal the hidden Christian Science assumptions of America's Drug War, according to which there's something metaphysically wrong about using plant medicine to alter, adjust and improve cognition. That, however, is a religious point of view, not a scientific one, and should not inform public policy, let alone become the law of the land, as it has ever since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, when the US government first took the fateful step of criminalizing a mere plant. Since then, the Drug War has stood in stark contravention of at least two of the basic tenets upon which America was founded: the supremacy of natural law over common law and the separation of church and state as called for in our Bill of Rights.









Notes for essay entitled There are no such things as drugs: the post that got me banned for life from the DRUGS subReddit:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
2: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
3: “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)
4: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)
5: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)




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This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.

The outlawing of coca and opium is a crime against humanity.

Properly speaking, MDMA has killed no one at all. Prohibitionists were delighted when Leah Betts died because they were sure it was BECAUSE of MDMA/Ecstasy. Whereas it was because of the fact that prohibitionists refuse to teach safe use.

America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.

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

Scientists are so used to ignoring "drugs" that they don't even realize they're doing it. Yet almost all books about consciousness and depression (etc.) are nonsense these days because they ignore what drugs could tell us about those topics.

If drug warriors were serious about saving lives, they'd outlaw guns, cars, and all pleasure trips to Mars.

Attempts to improve one's mind and mood are not crimes. The attempt to stop people from doing so is the crime.

It is a violation of religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate. The Hindu religion was inspired by just such a drug.

Health is not a quality, it's a balance. To decide drug legality based on 'health' grounds thus opens a Pandora's box of different points of view.


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