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Whiteout

A Philosophical Review

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 9, 2023



Here's the take-home message from the new book "Whiteout": we crack down on drugs when the victims of prohibition are minorities and we "medicalize" drugs when the victims of prohibition are white.

Here's where I'd usually tell you all the ways that the book I'm reviewing has "missed the point." But "Whiteout1" is a very rare book when it comes to drugs: one in which the authors truly have something to teach ME. I believe this all the more after listening to their discussion on YouTube (April 12, 2023). They truly "get it" about prohibition.


(abolishthedea.com)

The deadpan Robin Kelley is not necessarily being entirely facetious when he calls "Whiteout" the best book of all time. Let's all read it -- multiple times, if possible.

Whiteout: How Racial capitalism 2 Changed the Color of Opioids in America

Author's Follow-up: January 13, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




My mother was a Caucasian. She became dependent on oxy after her local practitioner prescribed the drug for her anxiety. When you're white, these substances are called "medicines" you see.

Already, there's a problem here. My mom's anxiety could have been excellently treated with a wide variety of substances with no addiction potential, starting with MDMA 3 and a wide variety of other phenethylamines created by chemists like Alexander Shulgin. Then there are psychedelics and plant medicines which intoxiphobic westerners have not even dared investigate because these drugs are both illegal and highly stigmatized in superstitious America.

So the Drug War ideology of substance demonization tied the hands of her GP. If white patients like my mom complain constantly about anxiety, they have nothing effective to offer her except drugs like oxy with addiction potential.

The odd thing, however, is how such drug use is viewed by society. I personally never in the world thought of my mother as a "drug" user in the evil sense of that word. Nor did any family members. I never even thought about the specific drug that she was using. To me, it was just some medicine with which she was having issues, not a "drug" in the negative sense of that word.


A classified advertisement torn out of the newspaper. It reads as follows: DEA AGENTS WANTED. Must have demonstrated ability to harass minorities in an urbans setting.
Do you have what it takes to support a social policy that has destroyed inner cities and forced pain patients and the depressed to go without godsend medicine? Help us enforce Drug War sharia in the United States!




Only after her decade-long bout with her anxiety "medicine" was coming to an end did I realize that the drug involved was oxy, a substance whose name was slowly becoming a term of reproach in modern parlance. She, after all, was not the kind of person who used "drugs." She was using medicine!

Of course, the problem with this viewpoint is that minorities and the poor who, for financial and systemic reasons, use drugs without state sanction are considered "druggies," even though they are basically just guilty of self-medication4. They are punished by drug law for leaving the doctor out of the loop when it comes to psychological relief.

There is something obviously racist here. Drug abuse among minorities and the poor is an excuse to lock them up in America -- whereas drug abuse among elderly middle-class white American females is a medical matter worthy of our concern and empathy. Had Congress gotten wind of opiate use in a subsidized housing complex, they would have introduced new bills about drug-testing residents and removing them from their homes if they tested positive. This is blatant racism, of course. Imagine if Congress were to pass laws requiring elderly white middle-class women to undergo drug testing 5 for oxy and denying them Social Security payments should they fail the test. That is unimaginable, for the simple reason that the Drug Warrior's motive is to punish the poor and minorities, not to punish respectable white women.


Cartoon depicting cocaine users before and after Drug War propaganda. The before picture shows suave and debonair Sigmund Freud, the after picture shows a loser madly snorting the drug.
Freud knew that cocaine was a godsend for the depressed. But doctors saw it as a threat to their bottom line and so they studied only the rare misuse of the drug.




Don't get me wrong, I would not have wanted my mother locked up or disparaged for her substance-related issues; however, the compassionate "spin" that society gave to her use clearly demonstrates the racist nature of the Drug War. This double standard of empathy (for whites) versus anger (for minorities) when it comes to their drug use shows that the Drug War is racist in the extreme.

That's why there was a sudden outpouring of concern about the so-called opiate problem in America: the public now saw that the laws they had designed to punish minorities were beginning to cause problems for respectable white people as well. This was not what Drug Warriors had in mind, so they focused the public narrative on helping folks with oxy issues, while, of course, blaming "drugs" for all the downsides that were ultimately being caused by prohibition itself, the laws that they had passed which had outlawed all safe means of anxiety relief and virtually forced GP's to prescribe oxy, or else to lose their many anxious white patients.

But the problem is not oxy. It is not Fentanyl. It is not heroin 6. It is not morphine 7 . The problem is drug prohibition.

There was no opiate problem when opium 8 was legal in America. Thousands of young people were not dying in the streets. People used regulated product in the safety of their homes and carried on normal lives. It took drug prohibition to render drug use deadly by outlawing safe mind and mood medicine, discouraging drug education, and failing to regulate drug supply.

There are endless reasons why the Drug War is inhumane insanity; just check out my hundreds of essays on this topic. But the book "Whiteout" reminds us that the Drug War is ultimately nothing but a "respectable" way of practicing racism. The makeup of the U.S. prison population is proof of that claim. Blacks make up 13% of the American population but they account for 37% of America's record-breaking prison population9. This is, in fact, how racists and fascists win close presidential elections in America today, because they have crafted drug laws to throw their enemies in jail. Unfortunately, most Americans refuse to see this connection. The penny will not drop, even though this Drug War racism has now resulted in the election of a Russia-loving fascist and replaced democracy with insurrectionism and dictatorship.

Note: As Carl Hart reminds us, most people use drugs wisely10. Even "addictive" drugs can be used safely to fight anxiety, even though drug law policy is designed to encourage ignorance and to make safe use as difficult as possible. There are endless common-sense drug-use protocols that come to mind to fight anxiety the moment that we start learning about drugs rather than demonizing them. See my essay on Fighting Drugs with Drugs for more on this topic.













Notes for essay entitled Whiteout: A Philosophical Review:

1: Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America Hansen, Helena, 2023 (up)
2: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)
3: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
4: 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)
5: Drug Testing and the Christian Science Inquisition DWP (up)
6: 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)
7: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
8: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
9: Race and ethnicity Racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal legal system Prison Policy Initiative (up)
10: Drug Use for Grownups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear Hart, Carl (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.

One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise come from user reports.

Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.

Outlawing opium was the ultimate government power grab. It put the government in charge of pain relief.

There are hundreds of things that we should outlaw before drugs (like horseback riding) if, as claimed, we are targeting dangerous activities. Besides, drugs are only dangerous BECAUSE of prohibition, which compromises product purity and refuses to teach safe use.

If there was free speech in America, we would see billboards demanding freedom to use psychoactive substances for religious purposes, or to heal, or to follow-up on the research of William James regarding the nature of human consciousness.

In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.

The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.

It is a violation of religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate. The Hindu religion was inspired by just such a drug.

It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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Book Cover

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