What Malcolm X got right about drugs

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What Malcolm X got right about drugs

how the Black leader refused to view substance misuse as a medical problem

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 1, 2025

One of Thomas Szasz's most striking insights is revealed in his explanation of how Malcolm X fought heroin ¹ addiction, both his own and that of his followers. He did so without relying on the medicalization model championed by modern (white) science. As Szasz writes:

"Here, then, is the basic conflict and contradiction between the Muslim and methadone; the former eliminates the problem, and thus the need for the white man and the doctor, by making the Negro self-responsible and self-reliant; the latter makes the white man and the doctor indispensable by making the Negro a permanent medical cripple and a lifelong patient, on the model laid down long ago by Benjamin Rush.²"

This points in turn to the larger problem of drug prohibition and the medicalization of mind and mood matters, the fact that these two impulses for societal control are all about disempowering and infantilizing Americans when it comes to their most basic right to take care of their own health as they see fit ³. I am attempting to kick the SNRI known as Effexor ⁴ for the same reason that Malcolm was attempting to kick heroin: because he believed that he had been shunted off onto the drug thanks to the incentives supplied by a corrupt society. In my case, I believe I was shunted off onto Effexor thanks to incentives supplied by a materialist society, one that is dogmatically blind to common sense, anecdote and history when it comes to the glaringly obvious benefits of drug use. I was thus transformed into a permanent medical cripple and a lifelong patient.

I was trying to promote these ideas on X this morning, but it is quite depressing to encounter so much knee-jerk resistance to common sense. One runs into constant gaslighting ⁵ . We are told that we are being paranoid merely because we dislike being forced to rely on a mind-numbing Big Pharma ⁶ ⁷ med in a world wherein we do not have the right to use medicine that grows at our very feet.

Note here that I am not saying that antidepressants ⁸ are evil in themselves: merely that drug prohibition makes them so by turning them into "the only game in town" for the depressed. This in turn makes these dependence-causing meds almost impossible to quit -- since drug prohibition denies us the common-sense ability to fight drugs with drugs.

Malcolm X at least vaguely sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. He would not have phrased his insight in this way, but this view is implicit in his determination to keep his flock out of the doctor's office. Drug use is all about the hopes, dreams and desires of a human being, after all -- things about which the doctor qua doctor has no expertise whatsoever. Indeed, medical doctors are antithetical to such topics insofar as they view patients through a behaviorist lens, as lacking free will and as subject to biochemical forces beyond their control and therefore requiring a lifetime worth of government-sanctioned medical interventions.

The real monkey on our backs today, however, is neither heroin nor antidepressants: the monkey on our back is the medical industry which has been illegitimately placed in charge of mind and mood medicine. That was the mother of all category errors, and until America recognizes that fact, we will continue infantilizing patients and turning them into wards of the healthcare state by using pills specifically designed for that purpose.

This is an uphill battle, to put it mildly, since we need to change more than our laws: we need to change the simplistic and inherently racist way that America thinks about the world. Only imagine: our view of drugs is based on the following inhumane and antiscientific algorithm: namely, that if a drug can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person, then it must not be used by anyone for any reason ever.

Just look how that algorithm renders every single stakeholder invisible when it comes to drugs except for Western young people -- the very young people whom we Westerners refuse on principle to teach about wise drug use! On what principle, you ask? Answer: On the Christian Science principle that drug use is somehow wrong in and of itself without regard for context of use!

It would be so easy to despair in light of the wholesale bamboozlement of a gullible and self-interested humanity on this subject, especially considering the vast financial incentives that are in place for ensuring that so-called "mental health" patients remain subservient and disempowered. Let me end, therefore, with an inspirational quote from Jeffrey Singer's 2025 book entitled Your Body, Your Health Care. I hope the following snippet will encourage the countless disempowered "patients" like myself to keep the faith.

"Restoring patient autonomy and the right to self-medicate ⁹ will be a challenging task. Like most precious things, it requires perseverance and commitment. Like all precious things, it is worth the effort." - --p. 63 ¹⁰

NOTES: The sad fact is that many (if not most) of our drug-law reform advocates believe in the medical model of drug abuse. Szasz himself saw how far America was "behind the curve" on this topic when he wrote the following in "Our Right to Drugs":

"When even so staunch a defender of the free market as Milton Friedman regards treatment as the proper response to the drug problem, how can we expect ordinary people to resist this deadly illusion?" --p. 147 ¹¹

Antidepressants

Notes:

1: 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)
2: “Ceremonial Chemistry – Syracuse University Press.” 2026. Syr.edu. 2026. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1114/ceremonial-chemistry/. (up)
3: How Drug Prohibition has turned academics into children DWP (up)
4: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
5: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs 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: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
9: Restoring our Right to Self-Medication: how drug warriors work together with the medical establishment to prevent us from taking care of our own health DWP (up)
10: https://www.cato.org/people/jeffrey-singer. 2025. “Your Body, Your Health Care.” Cato Institute. April 8, 2025. https://www.cato.org/books/body-health-care. (up)
11: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Just think how much money bar owners in the Old West would have saved on restoration expenses if they had served MDMA instead of whiskey.

The December Scientific American features a story called "The New Nuclear Age," about a trillion-dollar plan to add 100s of ICBM's to 5 states, which an SA editorial calls "kick me" signs. This Neanderthal plan comes from pols who think that compassion-boosting drugs are evil!

Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.

Even prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. We should not drugs "up or down" any more than we should judge penicillin or aspirin in that way.

The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war.

It wasn't until western prudery and racism came along that we started to judge people by the substances that they chose to ingest, rather than by their actual behavior in the world.

All drugs have positive uses. It's absurd to prohibit them because one demographic might misuse them.

Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.

Whether we judge people only by the words that they say or only by the substances of which they partake, we are ignoring the most important things: what they really mean and how they really behave.

The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.

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