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When Kava Comes, Can Prohibition Be Far Behind?

The national drink of Fiji meets the drug prejudices of the west

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 18, 2026



NOTE: Kava juice is a plant-based psychoactive substance that has been consumed for over 3,000 years in Polynesia, Melanesia, and parts of Micronesia, for ritual, recreational and religious purposes. According to both critics and fans of the drink, its moderate consumption is associated with feelings of well-being and increased empathy for one's fellow human beings.1

I recently happened across a news blurb informing me that there are several hundred kava bars in the United States.2 After thus learning about the existence of these stateside bars, I addressed myself as follows:

Sounds almost too good to be true, Brian. But I'd better start visiting these kava bars soon before they disappear. Surely, America's white suburban parents will discover ways in which free access to kava can be considered to be a threat to our vulnerable young people. After all, these chicken little Drug Warriors have tacitly discovered such a threat to exist for almost every other psychoactive substance in the world: why should the kava plant prove to be an exception to the rule? To paraphrase Percy Bysshe Shelley: 'When kava comes, can prohibition be far behind?'


Of course, I have no doubt that financially interested parties in Oceania are standing up for the health benefits of kava, including countries like Fiji and Vanuatu, where the kava plant accounts for a large part of the GDP.3 But I am also sure that even MORE financially interested parties like the liquor industry will be pushing back against the legality of kava bars here in the States, touting the downsides of use, no matter how rare or geographically isolated those downsides may be. Of course, these established conglomerates will not publicly raise a fuss. That would be beneath them. They will push back via proxies with the help of non-profit "front" organizations that are ostensibly acting out of a selfless interest in public health. It's just a question of comparative mathematics: such well-established parties will push back precisely to the extent that this new would-be industry appears to be prospering in the States. If deemed necessary to save liquor from potentially meaningful competition, these nonprofits will release a raft of slick television ads, not against kava per se, perhaps, but rather in favor of the passing of bills "in the name of public health" that will indirectly make it difficult for kava bars to prosper. The alcohol industry is not going to stand by idly as their inebriated clientele swap their fluted glasses at Chili's for a coconut bowl at the Mystic Water Kava Bar in Ventura, California; or at the Kava Kove in Fargo, North Dakota, or at the Kava Culture Kava Bar in Key West, Florida.

In fact, there are already signs that the stateside kava industry is hitting road blocks that are being deliberately strewn in their way by disapproving parties. Although the three establishments listed above are pegged as kava bars on the latest Google Maps, research reveals that at least one of them is already out of business.4 To be precise, it has changed its business without changing its name. I'm sure you can guess which business I am talking about insofar as substance regulation these days is determined by politics, not by objective standards. (Hint: the affected business is neither in California nor in Florida.) As the owners of Kava Kove explained to their customers in "Our Story," published in late 2024 on the Nextdoor website:

Hello Fargo! We started out with the intent of selling delicious Kava drinks and ended up bringing you nutritious and delicious caffeine teas and protein shakes!!!5


How's that for ambiguity? Logically parsed, this statement would seem to hold out hope that the Kava Kove not only offers kava, but that they now offer both kava AND teas and shakes as well, insofar as the sentence lacks the clarifying adverb "instead." Unfortunately, a little research on my part soon disabused me of that optimistic supposition. The Kava Kove is, indeed, Kava free, albeit inexplicably so. The owners themselves provide no explanation for their change in menu. They breezily ignore the subject altogether in their social media posts. I think I can guess what's going on, however. They no doubt changed their menu in 2024 for the same reason that the only kava bar in the state of Virginia went out of business in 2025: because the respective states relied on a technicality to force them to do so.6 It seems that the FDA considers kava to be a food additive when it is "mixed" with water, and since these states have not approved kava as a food additive, this supposedly gives them an excuse to outlaw the serving of kava juice at bars. It sounds to me like the bureaucrats in these states are maliciously targeting such businesses based on metaphysical scruples about the propriety of chemically-inspired relaxation, but then start-ups are in no position to launch expensive legal campaigns to secure their rights to make a living in America. Fred Bryant, the owner of the KavaClub in Richmond, Virginia, complained as follows after receiving a "cease-and-desist" order from the state:

They should be ashamed of themselves. They’ve done a major disservice to the Commonwealth. They’ve done a major disservice to a lot of the citizens, as well, who are seeking non-alcohol-centric third places to socialize and gather.7


This is one of those stories that appears increasingly outrageous the further one looks into it. As Cheyenne Pagan reports in a 2024 article on the website for WRIC, the ABC News affiliate in Richmond, Virginia:

One of the VDH’s regulations was that KavaClub had to ensure an 'honest presentation of kava,' meaning they are not allowed to advertise it as an alternative to alcohol or as an option for people trying to stay sober.8


How dare the Virginia Department of Health say such things in a country full of drug laws that are supposedly all about keeping people sober! What does the VDH consider to be an honest presentation of kava, anyway? Is an honest presentation of kava one that completely ignores kava's most promising feature: its ability to serve as a replacement for alcohol? The VDH seems to think that this is a medical claim. That is just plain silly. Is it a medical claim for a fish restaurant to claim that they are the answer for people who are tired of hamburgers? Should we be worried that such claims might cause diners to rashly give up red meat, only to find out that clams on the half-shell were not the real answer to their culinary wanderlust after all?

ABUSE

I hate to give stateside prohibitionists any ideas, but if I were interested in demonizing kava, I would point to the reported misuse of the drink by the Aboriginal and Islander peoples of Northern Australia.9 The kava plant was introduced to these peoples as a goodwill gesture from Fiji Islanders in 1982 in the hopes that this gift would cut down on the abuse of alcohol in the region. The choice of such a "gift" only demonstrates the psychological naivete of the Fijians, however. Alcohol was never the problem in the region to begin with: the problem was the inability of the locals to use such substances wisely. It is crucial to remember, however, that this inability to use psychoactive substances wisely was not the fault of the locals themselves; it was rather the fault of the drug-pushing west which first destroyed the local people's pride in themselves and their culture and then introduced them to the brain-scrambling drug known as alcohol, a substance that was unknown in the Pacific until the arrival of westerners. The Aboriginal people of Northern Australia were thus left culturally rudderless. In presenting them with kava, then, the Fijians were merely giving the locals another substance that they could use to excess, for want of the many productive channels for the locals' time and energy that would naturally exist in a culturally healthy community.

I make this point because the failure of kava to bring peace, love and understanding to the region is portrayed by state-supported researchers in Australia as proof that kava is not what it is "cracked up to be" by the Pacific Islanders to their north.10 And yet that is not the correct moral to draw from the story. The real moral is that drugs are not the problem; it is the mindset of the users that renders drugs dangerous, and this mindset is brought about by bad social policies -- such as colonialism and its potentially disastrous psychological effects on its victims. If the state really wanted to help the locals, it would "spring" for the local equivalent of Head Start programs to educate children, not just about drugs, but about the world around them (and not least about how that world came to be), while opening their minds to the opportunities that exist for them today, both locally, in Australia, and around the world. Instead, the state identifies a drug as the "real problem" of the region and then proceeds to find ways to arrest the locals for using that drug, never mind the fact that this "drug" had been used safely for thousands of years before the arrival of the west.

However well-intentioned such government drug policies may be, they are ultimately just an exercise in scapegoating. They serve to justify a status quo that creates job opportunities for well-to-do white people out of indigenous suffering. The hypocrisy of these white pundits in targeting kava, however, is clear. The westerners who are suddenly evincing this Johnny-come-lately concern about the health of native peoples would never consider outlawing alcohol in response to studies that demonstrated a correlation between alcohol and social pathologies. They would insist that that particular problem must be solved by anything BUT substance prohibition. Yet these same outsiders feel free to adjust the drug laws at will, experimentally, and on the fly, when the drug that is supposed to be causing problems is non-western in origin.

I have often said, in the spirit of GK Chesterton, that one would need to be God in order to say what is healthy for a given person, given all the factors that are involved in making such a decision.11 Human beings are complicated systems, after all, and so the effects of Chaos Theory will render all conclusions problematic, at least in so far as they are drawn by studies that ruthlessly eliminate all but a few variables. But in reading the exhaustive report by the government-funded Australian Indigenous Health Bulletin on the supposed problem of kava use in the Northern Territory12, it is clear that the Australian state is, indeed, stepping up to the plate: they are more than willing to play God, at least for the 16,000 people living in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. As the report of psychologist Julia Butt makes clear, these bureaucrats have placed themselves in charge of deciding how much kava should be used in the region, by whom, at what time, in what context, and at what price, etc.

But apparently being God is not an easy job, especially when God is a committee rather than a single saintly entity. The laws that this Australian God created about kava use in the Northern Territory were all over the map in the last two decades of the 20th century. The use of the drink was alternately outlawed, legalized, sold only by licensed tribal organizations, officially encouraged as a way to cut down on alcohol consumption, and officially discouraged out of fear that its mainly male enthusiasts were spending too much money on the drink, money that the God of the state deemed should have been going toward things like their food budget and home repairs.13 And consider that kava is just one psychoactive substance and the Northern Territory is just one region of Australia. What about all of the other psychoactive threats to all of the other regions in the Land Down Under? God must be busy, indeed! I wonder how the Australian government finds enough office space to house all of the "scientists" and clerks that it must take to advisedly second-guess the psychoactive choices of a country of 28 million.

In fact, the above-mentioned report about kava demonstrates all that is wrong with drug prohibition and the attitudes that promote the prohibitionist mindset. And yet this extensive report by Julia is the "poster child" for the sort of "evidence-based data" that psychologists like Dr. McFillin tell us are the gold standard for deciding whether the use of a given drug should be allowed in a given society.14 I will list just a few of the problems with this mindset below.

EVIDENCE-BASED DATA

1) Any substance in the world can be shown to be problematic when overused. Any substance.

2) This report15 frequently uses the words "kava use" in a pejorative context. The author will tell us that "kava use" causes THIS problem, and "kava use" causes THAT problem, when she should be writing that "the excessive use of kava" causes THIS problem and "the excessive use of kava" causes THAT problem. She herself admits, after all, that reasonable use of kava is not problematic.

3) Such reports are full of assumptions. They make arguments in the following form: "Kava use began, and then money was no longer spent on houses, it was spent on kava instead; therefore, kava use causes housing problems." This conclusion is drawn from an enormous simplification of the facts on the ground, and no wonder, because God is a busy entity and, as heretical as it may sound, cannot be everywhere at once. God cannot assign bureaucrats to study the behavior of the butterfly in Iowa which, according to Chaos Theory, may be relevant to an outcome on the other side of the globe. And yet the human being is a complex system after all and the rules of Chaos Theory apply to all complex systems, even human beings -- and I would say especially human beings.16 Scientists must ignore all such considerations lest their claims about giving us definitive and objective answers be revealed as the bravado that they are.

Such reports17 can indeed show us that there is a correlation between kava use and problems in the Northern Territories of Australia, but that is all that they show us. And yet reports like Julia's are used as prestigious academic ammunition by prohibitionist politicians to justify the outlawing of drugs, as who should say, "Our scientists have told us that drugs are the problem, and so we must outlaw drugs." Researchers like Julia make this misuse of reports especially easy by her failure to clearly and consistently distinguish between "kava use" and "the excessive use of kava." It is as if a researcher were to begin a research paper talking about the dangers of drinking too much water and then, through laziness perhaps, begin ascribing the downsides of overconsumption to water itself, as if to say, "A substance that causes such problems at high doses must be unsafe at ANY dose!"

4) Consider this conclusion that Julia reaches at the end of her lengthy report:

There is no evidence that Kava has a beneficial impact on the health of aboriginal people in Arnhem Land.18"


None? Really? So much the worse for "evidence" as scientists conceive of that term.

Now, I have no experience with kava use, but my general life experience and my drug-related reading assure me that there exist substances that can improve my mood in the way that kava is purported to do and thereby help me to focus on what's important in my life. This would be a benefit for me, an obvious benefit. Such use could inspire me to transcend my customary state of gloom, that feeling of "why bother?", and to get up from my sofa at long last and to WRITE. I would therefore feel better about myself and this feeling would conduce to good health. Even materialist curmudgeons will grudgingly admit that attitudes matter when it comes to health. Yet these kinds of benefits could never show up on Julia's radar, first because Julia is looking at the aboriginal people "as a whole" and ignoring their individuality, and second because she has no way to get inside my brain and to discover the benefits that kava use provides me on an indirect basis, so to speak. How will she figure out that the occasional use of kava juice has contributed to, say, the spring that she observes in my step or the fact that I have the energy to hold a door for others in cases where most people would fail to do so? And yet, knowing nothing of my inner state whatsoever, Julia feels free to pronounce judgement on the supposed uselessness of kava for the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory. In so doing, she is giving a death sentence for kava legalization in Northern Australia (and doubtless beyond), at least after such "scientific" verdicts like hers are placed in the hands of a prohibitionist demagogue who has a political axe to grind.

5) The latter point brings me to a suggestion for Drug Warriors: instead of outlawing substances for everybody, why do we not outlaw substances for those who misuse them? When a statesider abuses their rights to gun ownership, we deprive them of their gun; we do not consider their misuse to constitute a reason for depriving EVERYONE of their guns.

6) But I should be careful what I ask for. The definition of "misuse" is a very fraught term in the age of drug prohibition. "Misuse" is often in the eye of the beholder. Which brings me to another concern about Julia's report. She talks about "misuse" and "abuse," as if these are objective terms in the age of drug prohibition, but that is not the case with psychoactive substances. When I see a group of noisy drinkers in a bar, I think to myself that they are abusing alcohol -- especially when they have a "chug-a-log" contest using shot glasses19 -- and yet the drinkers and the bartenders will tell me otherwise: "They're just having fun, after all, Brian, for gosh sake. What are you, a spoilsport?" I personally also believe that med-dependent patients are misusing drugs, since the way that I see it, it is disempowering for them to be stuck on a "med" for their entire life, especially one that, in my view, is expensive and underperforming and has side effects that the drug creators have no interest in telling them about, or even in studying, for that matter. In this latter case, of course, the drug abuse that I'm alleging is essentially mandated by the healthcare industry, which abused its monopoly on mind and mood medicine (courtesy of drug prohibition) by turning 1 in 4 American women into patients for life with dependence-causing meds, which they continue to flog today, by the way, on prestigious websites like that of the Mayo Clinic, without even mentioning the extreme dependence-causing nature of this so-called "med."20 But the psychiatric establishment will tell me otherwise. "Nonsense!" they'll cry. "These people aren't drug abusers! They are 'good patients' taking care of their mental health with scientific medicines!"

I am not claiming that there was no misuse of kava in Northern Australia; I am merely insisting that any allegations of misuse should be accompanied by specifics. This is because any context-free claim of drug "abuse" in the age of substance prohibition always begs the following question: "What exactly does the speaker consider to be 'abuse'?" This is a particularly important question in the case of researchers like Julia, an outsider who is studying human behavior in a culture other than her own. When Julia tells us of the abuse of the kava plant in the Northern Territory, we have to ask ourselves: "What does Julia, as a white Australian bureaucrat, consider to be the 'abuse' of kava juice among Aboriginal people?" The state of meditative calm obtained by members of a kava circle may be interpreted by an outsider as the expression of a pathological lack of ambition in the participants, but such usage might also be characterized as the participants' attempts to obtain spiritual states whose indirect influence will help them to cope more skillfully with life in 21st-century Australia. Westerners have to get over their bad habit of talking about "drug misuse" without providing specifics. The term "drug abuse" is too often used as label behind which we hide our own biases about how other people should be leading their lives.


FOLLOW THE SCIENCE?

There is a belief among the mainstream that we can develop objective policies about drugs with the help of "scientific" reports of the kind created by Julia Butt on behalf of the government-funded Australian Indigenous Health Bulletin.21 This belief is expressed in the slogan "Follow the science." But this belief is simply not true. As I've already mentioned above, Julia's report on kava use in the Northern Territory is the "poster child" for the types of scientific reports that are supposed to bring us certainty when it comes to drug policy, and yet what does her well-annotated report ultimately tell us with its pages and pages of evidence? The answer is nothing. Or rather anything. That report could be plausibly invoked to support absolutely any drugs policy, including kava legalization, kava decriminalization, and the complete ban of kava in Australia. Each of these policies could be justified by focusing on different aspects of the report. Nor is this surprising considering the fact that drug-use problems are never created by drugs themselves but rather by the mindset with which a user approaches a given drug. If the consumption of kava juice simply killed every individual outright after they partook, then Julia could indeed create a scientific research paper whose results would give us entirely objective evidence -- but in that case, human beings would soon learn to avoid the drug without any help from the government. Human beings weren't born yesterday, after all. As Mistress Quickly assures Doctor Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor: "I'll ne'er put my finger in the fire, and need not."

CONCLUSION

One final word on the existence of kava bars or lack thereof in the United States, especially in politically conservative regions of the country. This is a very fluid situation, indeed, no pun intended. New kava bars seem to be going up every day, as entrepreneurs attempt to cater to the needs of a new and apparently expanding market. And yet drug-hating America is fighting back. Stealth Christian Scientists inside the state health departments in the Bible Belt are wracking their brains for plausible ways to keep kava bars from competing with "real" bars: you know, the dives, joints and taprooms where good-old-boys have always gone to get drunk, treat women inappropriately, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. As the Virginia case reveals, these bureaucrats will not stint at using implausible ways to shut down kava bars should the plausible options fail to produce the desired results. As such Drug Warriors have always known, drug laws are something that you make up and enforce as needed as you go along, secure in the knowledge that our increasingly conservative courts will let you get away with murder provided only that your stated goal is to "fight drug use." Stateside kava use will surely be singled out for special demonization by such officials, and one can see why. A whole way of life is at stake here, the way of life that privileges brain-clouding inebriation over the kind of inebriation that produces socially beneficial outcomes, like compassion and mental clarity. The normalization of kava bars in the United States would bring into question the whole idea of today's drug prohibition ideology, according to which the consumption of alcohol is fine, whereas the consumption of all less-lethal alternatives is to be punished by felony convictions and imprisonment.









Notes for essay entitled When Kava Comes, Can Prohibition Be Far Behind?: The national drink of Fiji meets the drug prejudices of the west:

1: Singh, Yadhu N. 1992. “Kava: An Overview.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology. Elsevier Scientific Publishers Ireland, Ltd. 1992. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ 64a844ee6e7f244358d775ff/t/650a3749dc6bb3293bf015c0/1717013365705/Kava-an-overview_Singh+ 1 (up)
2: Kava, Ultimate. 2024. “Deviant Kava.” Deviant Kava. https://www.deviantkava.com/blog/the-definitive-list-of-kava-bars-in-the-usa. (up)
3: Kava Coalition: Enhancing Wellness Together. 2025. “Kava CoalitionTM.” Kava CoalitionTM. 2025. https://www.kavacoalition.org/. (up)
4: Kava, Ultimate. 2024. “Deviant Kava.” Deviant Kava. https://www.deviantkava.com/blog/the-definitive-list-of-kava-bars-in-the-usa. (up)
5: Nextdoor, and Nextdoor. 2026. “Kava Kove.” Nextdoor.Com. 2026. https://nextdoor.com/pages/kava-kove-fargo-nd/. (up)
6: Gehlich, Clare. 2025. “Richmond Kava Bar Closing Its Doors in June.” WRIC ABC 8News. June 7, 2025. https://www.wric.com/news/local-news/richmond/richmond-kava-bar-closing-its-doors-in-june/. (up)
7: Gehlich, Clare. 2025. “Richmond Kava Bar Closing Its Doors in June.” WRIC ABC 8News. June 7, 2025. https://www.wric.com/news/local-news/richmond/richmond-kava-bar-closing-its-doors-in-june/. (up)
8: Gehlich, Clare. 2025. “Richmond Kava Bar Closing Its Doors in June.” WRIC ABC 8News. June 7, 2025. https://www.wric.com/news/local-news/richmond/richmond-kava-bar-closing-its-doors-in-june/. (up)
9: “Australian Indigenous HealthBulletin : Review of Kava Use among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People.” n.d. Healthbulletin.Org.Au. Accessed August 17, 2026. https://healthbulletin.org.au/articles/review-of-kava-use-among-aboriginal-and-torres-str (up)
10: “Australian Indigenous HealthBulletin : Review of Kava Use among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People.” n.d. Healthbulletin.Org.Au. Accessed August 17, 2026. https://healthbulletin.org.au/articles/review-of-kava-use-among-aboriginal-and-torres-str (up)
11: “The Project Gutenberg eBook of Eugenics and Other Evils, by G.K. Chesterton..” 2019. Gutenberg.Org. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25308/25308-h/25308-h.htm. (up)
12: “Australian Indigenous HealthBulletin : Review of Kava Use among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People.” n.d. Healthbulletin.Org.Au. Accessed August 17, 2026. https://healthbulletin.org.au/articles/review-of-kava-use-among-aboriginal-and-torres-str (up)
13: “Australian Indigenous HealthBulletin : Review of Kava Use among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People.” n.d. Healthbulletin.Org.Au. Accessed August 17, 2026. https://healthbulletin.org.au/articles/review-of-kava-use-among-aboriginal-and-torres-str (up)
14: The Drug War Philosopher. 2026. “Evidence-Based Antidepressants.” Substack.Com. The Drug War Philosopher. August 17, 2026. https://drugwarphilosopher.substack.com/p/thoughts-o-the-day. (up)
15: “Australian Indigenous HealthBulletin : Review of Kava Use among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People.” n.d. Healthbulletin.Org.Au. Accessed August 17, 2026. https://healthbulletin.org.au/articles/review-of-kava-use-among-aboriginal-and-torres-str (up)
16: How You Are Who You Are--in Chaos Theory (up)
17: “Australian Indigenous HealthBulletin : Review of Kava Use among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People.” n.d. Healthbulletin.Org.Au. Accessed August 17, 2026. https://healthbulletin.org.au/articles/review-of-kava-use-among-aboriginal-and-torres-str (up)
18: “Australian Indigenous HealthBulletin : Review of Kava Use among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People.” n.d. Healthbulletin.Org.Au. Accessed August 17, 2026. https://healthbulletin.org.au/articles/review-of-kava-use-among-aboriginal-and-torres-str (up)
19: Blast-off for Planet Hypocrisy! DWP (up)
20: Mayo Clinic. 2024. “Venlafaxine (Oral Route) Description and Brand Names - Mayo Clinic.” Www.Mayoclinic.Org. https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/venlafaxine-oral-route/description/drg-20067379. (up)
21: “Australian Indigenous HealthBulletin : Review of Kava Use among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People.” n.d. Healthbulletin.Org.Au. Accessed August 17, 2026. https://healthbulletin.org.au/articles/review-of-kava-use-among-aboriginal-and-torres-str (up)




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