We have an absolute right to use drugs

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We have an absolute right to use drugs

Why the utilitarian approach to drug prohibition is both misguided and wrong

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

November 20, 2025

Even the fans of drug re-legalization have been bamboozled by Drug War propaganda. Most actually think that we have to justify the use of each and every psychoactive drug to our government based on the drug's potential harm to others. This is a completely wrong and misguided approach to drug re-legalization, as should be evident to anyone who thinks through the consequences of such a strategy.

In order to establish that the use of a given drug does not cause unreasonable harm to others, we would have to do a risk/benefit analysis of that drug use. We would have to weigh the risk to others against the benefits of that use. And yet it is impossible to perform an objective analysis of the benefits of drug use. Drugs have inspired religions (as in the case of the Vedic religion ¹ ²) and motivated depressed procrastinators to do an immense amount of work (as in the case of Sigmund Freud ³). When we outlaw drugs in advance of their use, we are deciding that new religions and new theories are less important for the world than is the abstract safety of our white American young people.

This is a presumptuous, selfish and imperialistic conclusion that no one person, from any country, has the right to make. In other words, a cost-benefit analysis of drug use is always biased by the world view and self-interest of the individual doing the judging. If they are a nervous parent, determined to protect their kid at all cost and willing to let the rest of the world go to the devil, then they will mortgage the promise of the future in order to artificially shield their kids from the inherently drug-filled world in which they live.

OUTLAWING MORE THAN DRUGS

The bamboozled utilitarian does not realize that when we outlaw drugs, we outlaw far more than drugs: we outlaw the activities that the drug might have helped inspire, whether directly or indirectly. The music genre known as jazz owes its very existence to the use of marijuana. It therefore follows that we outlaw entire art forms -- both known and yet-to-be-invented -- when we outlaw psychoactive drugs. When we outlaw cocaine, we outlaw far more than cocaine: we outlaw the right of HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DEPRESSED to peace of mind ⁴! When we outlaw opium, we outlaw a whole world of poetic insight and inspired speculation in the creatively predisposed mind ⁵. When we outlaw psychedelics, we outlaw new religions (as, for instance, the Vedic religion was inspired by the use of a psychedelic drug or drugs ⁶). When we outlaw MDMA, we outlaw peace, love and understanding ⁷. When we outlaw morphine, we outlaw a surreally deep appreciation of the intricacies of Mother Nature (see, for instance, Poe's description of morphine intoxication in "The Tale of the Ragged Mountains"⁸).

Utilitarians like John Stuart Mill ⁹ are hopeless rationalists. They are passion-scorning mathematicians at heart. They think that the human mind can accomplish any task: just give it enough data, and it can make wise decisions about whether a drug should be legal or not. But this is just not so. We can never have enough information to determine the supposed propriety of drug use in general, as the prohibitionists would have us do, because the benefits of use are seldom obvious in the present but rather come about over time, and often in ways that cannot be easily referred back to usage in the linear and unequivocal manner demanded by our complexity-scorning utilitarians.

Suppose, for instance, that cocaine had been legal during my youth and I had succeeded in the vocation of my choice thanks to its wise use -- as opposed to essentially hiding from the world and becoming dead weight economically speaking and being shunted off onto underperforming antidepressants that turned me into a ward of the healthcare state ¹⁰. The benefit of cocaine use for me (and hence to the world to which I therefore would have contributed productively over my lifetime) would never be noticed by our rationalist utilitarian because it is something that develops over time and is only connected to cocaine use as part of a web of causation far too intricate for the human mind to tease apart. When we try to rationally determine the benefits of drug use, we are basically trying to determine the relative values of certain emotional and mental states -- and these are things that we as human beings can never know, no matter how thorough our analysis of the present-day facts may be. Indeed, these are metaphysical questions, not logical ones.

OUR BIG MISTAKE

We encounter all these problems only because of one big mistake: we have accepted the Drug Warrior lie that the use of substances has to be justified in the first place. As Americans, we recognize that certain freedoms are absolute. They are based on first principles, namely, the first principles of the Founding Fathers. It is therefore inappropriate to ask questions such as: "How many people are harmed by freedom of speech and freedom of the press and the freedom of religion?" The great sin of the Drug Warriors is that they have convinced Americans to ask this question about harm when it comes to our innermost mental and emotional states! As Thomas Szasz wrote:

"The right to chew or smoke a plant that grows wild in nature, such as hemp (marijuana), is anterior to and more basic than the right to vote." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p xvi ¹¹

Do I have a right to spiritual feelings? Do I have a right to take care of my own psychological health? The fact that we are even asking these questions shows how Drug Warrior propaganda has destroyed the American mind, above all by the ruthless censorship of all talk (and writing) about beneficial drug use ¹². Just check your local library for books on the positive effects of cocaine use or on the responsible smoking of opium as a healthy replacement for liquor consumption. Such books are almost never even written by drug-hating westerners -- and they would not be stocked by most libraries even if they did exist ¹³.

YOU HAVE BEEN BRAINWASHED

This is why I wish that all drug pundits would stop for a moment and consider the fact that they have been indoctrinated for a lifetime in Drug War orthodoxy. Few Americans understand this fact -- and even those who do tend to underestimate the pernicious effects of such propaganda. Historian William Shirer could have been referring to Drug War America when he wrote the following in his authoritative book about Nazi Germany:

"No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda." --William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany ¹⁴

My point here is that the outlawing of drugs is wrong based on principle -- and we should never stoop so low as to justify our drug use based on utilitarian considerations. To do so is to play the Drug Warrior's game, to argue on the backfoot, to sign off on the lie that drugs are a problem as opposed to the policies that render them dangerous in the first place.

OUTLAWING HUMAN PROGRESS

I have already shown how the utilitarian approach to the justification of drug-use must always end with a prejudicial evaluation -- since all the facts of the case can never be known: i.e., the long-term benefits of freedom are never apparent to us in the immediate present. But there are two other major problems with the utilitarian approach:

First, it is based on the anti-scientific idea that we should outlaw drug use for all people -- at any dose, for any reason, in any circumstances -- merely because the drug in question might be misused by certain demographics at another dose, when used for another reason and in other circumstances. (This is nothing less than the government control of research and the outlawing of psychopharmacological progress.) In other words, the utilitarian has fallen for the drug-war lie that drugs can be evil in and of themselves and not because of the laws and cultural values that might encourage their misuse among certain demographics in certain countries. The outlawing of drugs is always an attempt to artificially shield one privileged population from drug dangers by throwing the rest of the world under the bus. When you create laws to protect your kids from cocaine, you are consigning the Sigmund Freuds of the world to an unsuccessful life and hundreds of millions to an unproductive life of disabling depression; when you create laws to save your kids from psychedelics, you are outlawing the creation of entire new religions.

Second, when America outlaws drugs because they refuse to educate their kids, they thereby outlaw drugs for countries where the kids ARE educated! It is the ultimate case of aggressive denial for America to export its scapegoating conception of drugs overseas -- though sadly most countries are more than happy to accept our invasive species of freedom-scorning law, either because they share the drug-demonizing ideology of westerners themselves and/or are blackmailed into doing so by the U.S. government and/or because they are tyrants by nature and will make use of any excuse to control the masses -- and what better way to control the public than in the name of protecting them from an all-purpose scapegoat like drugs, the scapegoat par excellence!

PROHIBITION KILLS, NOT DRUGS

In short, social policies are the killers, not drugs. Prohibition kills, not drugs. To say things like "Fentanyl kills!" and "Crack kills!" is the psychological equivalent of saying "Fire bad!" Those who make such statements are trying to get us to fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity ¹⁵.

Let me end by reminding the reader that these are not merely philosophical considerations in the negative sense of those words. Drug prohibition is having a direct effect on yours truly even as I type this (and hence on the quality and amount of material that you yourself are allowed to read on the subject of drugs). For the fact is that I would write far more essays, update far more essays, proofread far more essays, and be far more involved in online discussions if I could use drugs like cocaine strategically to boost my motivation. I am as sure of that as that I breathe. I would create non-spammy doorway pages on subjects like utilitarianism and drugs and I would engage in Reddit chat. I would even buy some new clothes and start taking part in occasional conferences on related topics.

This brings me to the point of this essay: namely, the fact that such potential benefits of drug use are completely off the radar of the utilitarians!

They care nothing about my potential self-actualization in life or the future benefits that might accrue to humanity when we return to the pharmacological freedom of the past. They only care about what they can see in the here and now. And so they look to see if my drug use might somehow be negatively impacting a white American young person whom we have refused "on principle" to educate about safe drug use -- on the warped and anti-democratic principle that education is actually a BAD thing when it comes to drugs. This is a rigged game from the start. It is a kind of whack-a-mole for philosophers, one that places them in the high-and-mighty position of deciding on a drug-by-drug basis what both individuals and the world at large need in the way of inspiration, motivation, philosophy and religiosity -- a decision, based moreover on an extremely limited sampling of relevant facts that are biased in favor of the Chicken Little concerns of the prohibitionists.

CONCLUSION

We should not be talking about the potential harm that drug use can cause: we should be talking about the GLARINGLY OBVIOUS HARM that drug prohibition HAS CAUSED AND IS CAUSING even as we speak -- including the end of the rule of law in Latin America, the destruction of minority communities around the globe, and the daily deaths of American children by drive-by shootings in the no-go zones that prohibition has created out of whole cloth. Indeed, the list of "harm" caused by prohibition is far too long to be enumerated in this closing paragraph. Suffice it to say that it includes the censorship of academia, the destruction of America's Bill of Rights, and the election of a would-be fascist as President of the United States thanks to the mass incarceration of minorities brought about by drug laws written specifically for that purpose ¹⁶.

For these reasons -- AND MANY MORE -- we have an absolute right to drugs! What we really have no right to is the policy of drug prohibition, which we know full well creates violence out of whole cloth. We have no right to a drugs policy that has killed hundreds of thousands around the globe ¹⁷ ¹⁸ while outlawing human progress and putting the government in charge of deciding on the propriety of the innermost mental states of once-free human beings. That is not just some inconvenience, it is a meta-tyranny. The tyrants of the past sought merely to control the information that we could access. But they were mere tyros when it came to injustice. The far more ambitious tyrant of our times seeks to control how and how much we can think and feel in our lives -- and the utilitarians assist this tyranny by pretending that it could, in theory, be justified, under the bizarre belief that we have no right to control what matters most to all of us in life: namely, our own mental and emotional states.

Notes for essay entitled We have an absolute right to use drugs: Why the utilitarian approach to drug prohibition is both misguided and wrong:

1: “Blue Tide - Mike Jay.” 2025. Mike Jay. May 18, 2025. https://mikejay.net/books/blue-tide/. (up)
2: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay 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: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
5: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
6: “Blue Tide - Mike Jay.” 2025. Mike Jay. May 18, 2025. https://mikejay.net/books/blue-tide/. (up)
7: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
8: “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)
9: Why John Stuart Mill is irrelevant to the drug debate DWP (up)
10: How materialists turned me into a patient for life DWP (up)
11: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
12: How the Drug War Censors Free Speech DWP (up)
13: How the Drug War Censors Free Speech DWP (up)
14: Shirer, William Lawrence. 1984. The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199576.The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Adolf_Hitler. (up)
15: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
16: Incarceration Rates by Country 2024 World Population Review, 2024 (up)
17: Gun Deaths in Big Cities Big Cities Health (up)
18: Gun Deaths Per Year: Trends In The U.S. (2025) Consumer Shield (up)

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We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).

What is the end game of the drug warrior? A world in which no one wants drugs? That's not science. It's the drug-hating religion of Christian Science. You know, the American religion that outsources its Inquisition to drug-testing labs.

Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity.

The International Observer says the "core issues" causing Mexican drug violence are: "corruption, inequality, and the demand for narcotics in the U.S." Wrong, wrong, wrong. The core issue is DRUG PROHIBITION.

The worst form of government is not communism, socialism or even unbridled capitalism. The worst form of government is a Christian Science Theocracy, in which the government controls how much you are allowed to think and feel in life.

"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau

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

It's funny to hear fans of sacred plants indignantly insisting that their meds are not "drugs." They're right in a way, but actually NO substances are "drugs." Calling substances "drugs" is like referring to striking workers as "scabs." It's biased terminology.

A generally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear. --James B. Stockade.

"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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We have an absolute right to use drugs

Why the utilitarian approach to drug prohibition is both misguided and wrong

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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Diary of a Drug Fiend