What Andrew Weil Got Wrong

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

What Andrew Weil Got Wrong

a philosophical review of 'From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs'

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 28, 2022

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Pull over to the side of the web page!

You're probably wondering why I stopped you. Well, according to Google Analytics, we have a problem with bouncing on this page, and, quite frankly, we suspect you of getting ready to bounce. I know, I know, it's your right as an American to bounce from any web page you please, but do you know what you're going to miss by doing so? This page will show you how even the best thinkers of our time are bamboozled by Drug War propaganda.

What's that, tell you more? Gladly.

You see, Weil believes that opiates should not be used for recreational purposes, but that is nonsense. He only says that because he has accepted the Drug Warrior lie that substances that can cause addiction MUST cause addiction -- that Americans are just too dumb to use such drugs wisely. Now, that may be true today, but it is only true because of drug prohibition and the ideology on which it is based, thanks to which we refuse to teach safe use, refuse to regulate product as to quality and dosage, and refuse to offer drug choice thanks to which no one need obsess on using any one drug in the first place.

Besides, the concept of "recreation" is a very fuzzy one. Consider the 1918 story by Fitz-James O'Brien in which two grown adults smoke opium in private to expand their minds and discuss pleasant topics.

"Those hours of opium happiness which the Doctor and I spent together in secret were regulated with a scientific accuracy. We did not blindly smoke the drug of paradise, and leave our dreams to chance. While smoking, we carefully steered our conversation through the brightest and calmest channels of thought." --Fitz-James O'Brien, What Was It? --¹

Now, is this recreational drug use? If so, why is it wrong, exactly? And if it is not, then are not we being snobbish when it comes to defining the word 'recreational'?

You see? These are the kind of valid philosophical points that you are going to miss if you just blindly bounce away from here without listening to or reading a thing.

I mean, bounce if you like, but you have been warned, sabe?

Here's another crucial point: westerners forget that body and mind are interlinked. Recreation is therapeutic when it relaxes the mind. We live in a world of context: you cannot separate mind and body without losing that context. Recreation and therapy cannot be neatly separated. They overlap in real life.

Oh, and I think your right rear taillight is out.

The Essay Proper

man straightening bowtie for his tuxedo

Despite his admirable honesty about drugs, Andrew Weil, too, has succumbed to some Drug War propaganda himself, at least when it comes to opiates.

Update: July 15, 2025

He tells us that they should never be used for 'recreational' purposes, which to Weil apparently includes the use of the drug by artists to inspire creativity, tho' Andrew never tells us why such use is to be considered as 'recreational,' as opposed to, say, occupational. Is coffee used for 'recreational' purposes in the morning? Is it not rather used for the practical purpose of waking ourselves up?

He has apparently bought into the Drug Warrior lie that some demonized substances can have no good use, for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in any dose, for any reason -- except, in this case, for bona fide pain relief due to some physical injury or illness.

That is just plain wrong. Poets used to use opium in the 19th century in what author Richard Middleton called "a series of quarterly carouses,²" in order to improve their creativity and give themselves new ideas. In other words, they knew that there was the potential for addiction and they scheduled their use accordingly. That's what happens when folks are educated about drugs rather than made to fear them.

And yet Andrew would agree with the Drug Warriors that even such wise use is to be forbidden -- or at least to be emphatically discouraged. If he had had his way in the 19th and early 20th century, we would have a far less inspiring oeuvre of horror stories by Poe and Lovecraft, who devised entire literary landscapes out of their opium -inspired dreams.

Much of his worry is over addiction -- and yet Andrew Weil says nothing about the Psychiatric Pill Mill to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted for life.

The question that he fails to answer is: why is opiate addiction so much worse than a Big Pharma addiction, especially when we're talking about the time-honored smoking of opium ? Once you factor out the problems that are caused by the Drug War itself, we see that the difference between our reactions to addiction is an esthetic one: We are not upset when an SSRI patient suddenly goes off their meds because their suffering will be internal and take place in their home, where they will merely wish that they were dead. We can go about our business as usual. The heroin ³ addict, however, is more likely to show up on the street and rob banks and so forth because his unnecessarily expensive medicine is not regularly available. This impacts us personally and so we consider heroin addiction to be a huge problem.

When it comes to Big Pharma drugs, however, we are not troubled at all. To the contrary, if these people are off their meds, we simply tell them to get back on them. Sure, the SSRI user has been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by the psychiatric pill mill, but that's their problem. This is an odd reaction, by the way, given that Weil's main charge against heroin is that it leaves one in a constant state of dependence. At least the heroin addict is not forced to share his innermost thoughts every three months with a psychiatric intern who is 1/2 or even 1/3 his own age.

Thus Weil inexplicably ignores the great pharmacological dystopia of our time. But he did say at least one thing about antidepressants ⁴ that really struck home for me:

"Some commentators complain that widespread prescription of SSRIs has made many Americans less interesting and less creative."

I hate to say this, but that is so true in my experience -- and that's a down side that no one has ever ascribed to opiates. Meanwhile, the researchers who blissfully ignore the endless downsides of SSRIs and SNRIs are training their microscopes on MDMA even as we speak in an effort to find even the tiniest possible danger in that drug, so that they can dramatically cry: "See? MDMA ⁵ has to be kept illegal forever, for anyone, in any dose, at any time, ever!" Meanwhile, Big Pharma ⁶ ⁷ peddles drugs on prime-time television whose side effects include 'death' itself and no one bats an eyelash.

This is enormous hypocrisy to which Americans are blinded thanks to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.

Yes, we should teach folks to avoid opiate addiction -- and we can do that. The poets cited by Middleton managed to pull that off. But we should not so obsess over downsides as to pretend that upsides do not even exist. To the contrary, in a sane world we would be studying how opium achieves its amazing effect of giving us metaphorical dreams in which we can mentally separate ourselves from our pains and problems. We should be studying how the brain works in conjunction with opium to render such insightful reveries. But instead, Weil agrees with the Drug Warrior that we should deny, a priori, the psychological benefits of opium in preference for demonizing that drug.

Finally, Weil seems unaware of the fact that the Chinese were responsibly using opium as a culturally sanctioned practice centuries before the British started selling it to them. The downsides of opium use only came on the Western radar when the British Anti-Opium League came along in the 19th century and did for opium what the American Anti-Saloon League would eventually do for liquor, namely, painted its use in the darkest moralistic colors imaginable.

Oh, sorry, there is one more thing that Andrew Weil got wrong in his book. He keeps implying that heroin users have an underlying problem that needs to be addressed. But this is just a drug-war canard. Sure, we all have problems, but why do we pathologize the desire to be perky and alive and vibrant and bursting with energy? Surely, that's an understandable desire, the desire to feel euphoric and "good to go." That desire is not something that we have to refer to some Freudian trauma or other. If anyone has an underlying problem, it's those of us who (like myself) naively put their emotional lives in the hands of a psychiatric establishment that is going to addict them for life to ineffective meds that not only fail to make them euphoric, but which actually rob them of their creativity as well! When are the Gabriel Mate's of the world going to look into the underlying pathologies that turned folks like myself into custom-made patsies for the psychiatric pill mill?

But Weil is only human. We've all been told that the political category of "drugs" is junk for the last 100+ years and both academics and screenwriters have written accordingly. That's why I'm constantly reading on this topic, to uncover the false beliefs that I myself hold as a result of my life long indoctrination with Drug War ideology. So far in my reading, Weil seems to be one of the least brainwashed authors on Planet Earth, but even he could benefit from living by the following maxim which I have created for my own use: question everything you have ever been told or thought about so-called "drugs"? And after you've done so, question yourself again. For to paraphrase a line from William Shirer's classic book on Hitler: "No one who has not lived for years in a DRUG WAR SOCIETY can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."

From Chocolate to morphine : Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drug

Author's Follow-up: August 26, 2023

follow-up on essay by the Drug War Philosopher

The term "recreational" is very problematic when it comes to psychoactive drug use, since recreation itself can be therapeutic. The term seems to be a puritanical put-down of certain kinds of use, as who should say, "Use opiates for pain, but for God's sake, don't enjoy it!"

Author's Follow-up: September 7, 2023

This sounds like humor, but this is in fact the ideology that the DEA follows: folks are to use opiates for pain and if they enjoy that, then the prescribing doctor must be penalized. This is puritanism run amok. If you want to know if a newly discovered drug is going to be "scheduled," just ask yourself, does it bring about unseemly laughter or mirth? Then the answer will be yes. This is not science, of course, but Christian Science.

Author's Follow-up: January 31, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

This is why the drug-war is so insipid. Even the most progressive writers on this topic are brainwashed. When we contrast a dependence on heroin with a dependence on big pharma meds, heroin comes out looking very good, with all its shortcomings being traceable to its illegality. Why do people use heroin in the first place? Because opium was outlawed, and then morphine was seen as problematic. Drug war prohibition started the entire problem by outlawing opium . Young people were not dying in the streets from opiates when opium was legal. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that.

Even Weil does not understand: prohibition is the problem ⁸ , not drugs!

Moreover, Weil knows little about the downsides of being an eternal patient. It is humiliating and extremely expensive and time-consuming to be a ward of the healthcare state -- whereas illegal drug users only have to deal with a businessperson to get THEIR medications. They do not have to discuss their personal life. All the dangers of illegal drug use are clearly traceable to prohibition -- the uncertainty of product and the lack of education, for instance.

But Weil is not alone. I have yet to read any pundit who acknowledges the economic and personal disempowerment inherent in turning a depressed or anxious person into a patient for life. And yet these same pundits feel free to trash heroin for causing dependency.

They fail to see that drug prohibition causes that dependency by ruling out all alternatives. The user has to buy what's available, not what makes sense. When we outlaw all psychoactive godsends and refuse to educate, we should not be surprised when people make problematic choices. Meanwhile, we should have the honesty to recognize that the healthcare option is just as problematic, if not more so: it is not an ideal choice either insofar as it turns users into patients for life.

And what about this much-ballyhooed dependency? Does no one but myself recognize that there are common-sense ways to fight dependency by using drugs to fight drugs? This is just psychological common sense. Sadly, behaviorism is the ruling paradigm in modern psychology today, and so common sense is in short supply among so-called drug use "experts." For more on this topic, read my essay entitled Fighting Drugs with Drugs.

One despairs of making folks understand: our whole attitude toward drugs is wrong. Prohibition causes all of the problems it purports to solve AND THEN SOME!

And yet Weil is about as enlightened as they come with respect to drugs. The problem is that we need to become far more enlightened than that. His views are still informed by Drug War hysteria for all his honesty.

But if you want to see how much more ignorant Americans can be, consider the Florida state legislature, which worked to get Weil's book "From Chocolate to morphine ⁹ " out of school libraries. There is nothing that Drug Warriors hate so much as honesty and education about drugs. Ignorance was good enough for their prehistoric counterparts, and they demand ignorance for their kids!

As such, these modern Neanderthals are murderers, if we are honest. They are responsible for the fact that young people are dying on the street from opiates. Opium was used responsibly at home before their kind started screaming about Chinese influence and so decided to start calling opium users junkies and addicts, meanwhile supporting a psychiatric pill mill that made 1 in 4 Americans reliant on Big Pharma for life. They were the ones who created a whole new occupational field full of "addiction" experts. What we need, however, are prohibition "experts": philosophers who point out how the outlawing of psychoactive drugs and a lack of choice and information is causing all of these problems that are social workers and scientists are now making a career out of "solving" -- always with Drug War precepts in mind about the infantile nature of human beings with respect to drugs ¹⁰.

Author's Follow-up:

July 15, 2025

Since writing the above, I have uncovered evidence suggesting that Weil understands these issues better than I might have originally imagined. Consider the following intelligent words from the doctor/writer as quoted by Mike Jay in his drugs reader entitled Artificial Paradises:

"People who take amphetamines in order to use the stimulation they trigger for positive ends -- for example, students who take them only to study for exams -- do not tend to get in trouble with amphetamines."

This is the fact that drug-hating America refuses to understand: drugs CAN be used wisely -- and, in fact, most people do use them wisely, as Carl Hart reports in "Drug Use for Grown-Ups," even in this age of drug prohibition, a time when lawmakers are doing everything they can to make drug use as dangerous as possible, by refusing to teach safe use, refusing to ensure product quality, and refusing to provide for drug choice so that human beings can exercise their inalienable right to take care of their own health -- to have sovereignty over their own mental and emotional states.

What Weil may not have sufficiently appreciated is that this general rule applies just as well to opiate use as well. Opiates too can be used for good reasons and indeed have been so used for millennia, until America began a racist-inspired and xenophobic branding campaign to associate opium only with misuse. As 19th-century author Richard Middleton reminds us, poets of his century smoked opium ¹¹ "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses," seeking inspiration from the drug on a sensible schedule that would not lead to unwanted dependency.

Weil also has some important insights about the Catch-22 nature of some psychoactive substances when used by a currently depressed individual. Some drugs serve to amplify an existing state of mind, from which it follows that the drugs in question have to be used advisedly -- and in some cases, avoided -- if the goal of use is to fight depression. Unless one's default state is already relatively optimistic, one cannot expect that the use of a substance like marijuana will "make one happy." In a sane world -- one in which we learned how to use drugs for human benefits -- we would identify a wide variety of drugs (from phenethylamines to laughing gas ¹² to coca) that could be used in common sense protocols by the depressed to give them new ways of seeing the world and remind them that the world of consciousness is not, ontologically speaking, a realm of doom and gloom. Instead, we outlaw everything that could "work" for the depressed and then are surprised and upset when we see this demographic using marijuana. But why are they using marijuana instead of other drugs? Because of drug prohibition, of course. In other words, not because of user irresponsibility but because racist and xenophobic politicians have outlawed everything that would work for the depressed.

My only concern here is that the Drug War invites us to speculate at will on the propriety of drug use by others, and I think it is all too easy for us to make snap judgments about others on this topic, failing to realize that we would have to be God to understand all the psychological, social and biochemical factors that obtain at any time in the life of the person whom we decide to judge based on abstract principles alone.

As Voltaire reminds us, Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. The best is the enemy of the good. We should remember this dictum before we presumptuously judge drug use based on abstract principles that do not -- and indeed cannot -- take into account all the many circumstances of use: the user's biochemistry, genetics, and psychological predispositions given their unique upbringing, etc. etc. Other typically unknown factors in drug use are the dosage and "strains" of product used, the substances with which they are potentially being combined, the attitudes of the people with whom the user consorts while in a state of intoxication, etc. etc.

Suppose we see a depressed individual using marijuana. We do not have enough data here to form any judgment.

For all we know, that individual may be using marijuana to take their mind off of the psychological effects of withdrawing from an antidepressant. Now, it is true that in the abstract, marijuana would not be the drug of choice for such an endeavor, but for this particular unique individual at least, such marijuana use obfuscates the downsides of that withdrawal process and so renders withdrawal actually possible. That is a benefit of use, albeit one that will be invisible to most armchair moralizers, busybody onlookers who may not even know that the user in question is trying to get off of antidepressants in the first place. The downsides of marijuana use in such a case have to be weighed against the upsides. The use of marijuana is not ideal, perhaps, but let us remember why marijuana is being resorted to in the first place: it is not because of the irresponsibility of a user but rather because tyrannical drug prohibition has outlawed every drug that could work for them so much more directly and powerfully to end the suffering that the user is attempting to end.

This is why the ideology of drug prohibition is wrong: because it encourages us to make snap moral judgments about the drug use of others, judgments that only an omniscient deity is qualified to make: one who understands the downsides of "sobriety" for specific poorly raised individuals just as well as the downsides of purposeful intoxication, one who understands that we all experience the world differently and that health is not created by any one thing -- not even by the consumption of a demonized psychoactive substance -- but is rather the result of a balance of a wide array of factors of a biochemical, psychosocial and genetic nature. In the meantime, if we must judge, then we should judge drug users like we do everyone else -- based on how they actually behave in life, and not by what drugs that these people seem to be consuming. If their drug use results in dangerous and obnoxious behavior, then by all means let us complain -- but let us complain about the behavior, not about the individual drugs that have been misemployed in such a way as to help to bring that misbehavior about.

This is, indeed, how we used to judge people in the past, based on how they behaved, not on what psychoactive substances might have played a role in promoting or facilitating said behavior.

I recently read "The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present" by Ronald Hutton ¹³ ¹⁴. Although the witches of medieval Europe made use of a wide variety of drugs (which the author disingenuously and misleadingly refers to as "herbs"), the specific drugs that they used were never singled out for blame and demonized by the enemies of witches. The evil of witches was thought to reside in the fact that they would dare use such substances for malicious purposes -- whereas in the age of the Drug War, the evil is thought to reside in the substances themselves. This is the paleolithic and superstitious mindset of the Drug War: that it causes us to judge drug use in the abstract, without regard for context. We should be cognizant of this pernicious tendency whenever we feel tempted to judge the propriety of the drug use of our fellows. We should remember that even problematic drug use may actually make sense were we to know all the factors involved in the decision to use. Until we can get in the heads of our fellows and see how they experience the world, we should be leery of judging their use of drugs based on abstract principles alone -- indeed, we should refrain from judging at all except in cases of clearly counterproductive usage outcomes, and even then we should criticize usage decisions, not drugs!

Book Reviews

Notes for essay entitled What Andrew Weil Got Wrong: a philosophical review of 'From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs':

1: Great Ghost Stories O'Brien, Fitz-James , Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., 1918 (up)
2: "He took life as young poets take opium: in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses." --'The Last Adventure' by Richard Middleton (up)
3: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
4: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
5: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
6: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
7: 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)
8: Drug Prohibition is the Problem, not Drugs: what the movers and shakers get wrong in the drug re-legalization debate DWP (up)
9: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
10: How Drug Prohibition has turned academics into children DWP (up)
11: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
12: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
13: The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present Hutton, Ronald, Yale Press, 2017 (up)
14: Drug Dealers as Modern Witches DWP (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Your drug war has caused the disappearance of over 60,000 Mexicans over the last 20 years. It has turned inner cities into shooting galleries. It has turned America into a penal colony. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and put bureaucrats in charge of deciding if our religions are "sincere."

Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.

Almost all of today's magazine articles about human psychology should come with the following disclaimer: "This article was written from the standpoint of Drug War ideology, which holds that outlawed substances can have no beneficial uses whatsoever."

The drug war is a slow-motion coup against democracy.

In an article about Mazatec mushroom use, the author says: "Mushrooms should not be considered a drug." True. But then NOTHING should be considered a drug: every substance has potential good uses.

We give kids drugs to improve their concentration -- but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.

The Drug War is the most important evil to protest, precisely because almost everybody is afraid to do so. That's a clear sign that it is a cancer on the body politic.

We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for those who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.

ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."

Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.

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(up)

What Andrew Weil Got Wrong

a philosophical review of 'From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs'

Author's Follow-up: August 26, 2023

Author's Follow-up: September 7, 2023

Author's Follow-up: January 31, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

July 15, 2025

Book Reviews

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend