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 religion12) and motivated depressed procrastinators to do an immense amount of work (as in the case of Sigmund Freud3). 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 mind4! When we outlaw opium, we outlaw a whole world of poetic insight and inspired speculation in the creatively predisposed mind5. When we outlaw psychedelics, we outlaw new religions (as, for instance, the Vedic religion was inspired by the use of a psychedelic drug or drugs6). When we outlaw MDMA, we outlaw peace, love and understanding7. 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 Mill9 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 state10. 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 xvi11
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 use12. 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 exist13.
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 Germany14
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 humanity15.
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 purpose16.
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 globe1718 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.
There would be almost no recidivism for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
And we should not insist it's a problem if someone decides to use opium, for instance, daily. We certainly don't blame "patients" for using antidepressants daily. And getting off opium is easier than getting off many antidepressants -- see Julia Holland.
Cocaine is not evil. Opium is not evil. Drug prohibition is evil.
The problem for alcoholics is that alcohol decreases rationality in proportion as it provides the desired self-transcendence. Outlawed drugs can provide self-transcendence with INCREASED rationality and be far more likely to keep the problem drinker off booze than abstinence.
Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.
Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.
Meanwhile, no imaginable downside could persuade westerners that guns and alcohol were too dangerous. Yet the DEA lies about almost all psychoactive drugs, saying there are no good uses. That's a lie! Then they pass laws that keep us from disproving their puritanical conclusion.
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.
There would be almost no recidivism for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.
