Why America cracked down on LSD

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Why America cracked down on LSD

a review of essay number 1 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 25, 2025

The following remarks are part of a series of responses to the essays contained in the 2001 book "Hallucinogens: A Reader," edited by Charles Grob ¹. The comments below are in response to essay number 1: "A Conversation with Albert Hofmann."

We outlawed marijuana because its use was associated with Hispanics, we outlawed cocaine ² ³ because its use was associated with Blacks, we outlawed opium ⁴ because its use was associated with the Chinese - and just as surely we outlawed psychedelics because its use was associated with anti-establishment young people. Concern about health did not figure into the crackdown on LSD except as window dressing, as part of a media show trial, as part of a controlled political narrative, as a way to justify a preconceived crackdown on dissent. Yet Hofmann naively accepts the pretext that we outlawed psychedelics for health reasons. He fails to realize that, even if this were true, it is anti-scientific and inhumane to outlaw a drug for use by all peoples and in all contexts merely because we believe that it is being "misused" by one group of people in one context, especially when society has no interest in educating users about drugs. It is absurd to outlaw all research on a drug simply because the drug can be misused by white American young people. It is absurd for us to say that a drug has no positive uses and then to outlaw the research and experimentation that could identify positive uses.

Conclusion: Drug prohibition is the problem ⁵ , not the answer. Drug prohibition is inherently anti-scientific, imperialistic, and racist, for it tells us to judge drugs based on how we feel about the people that we currently see using them. We need to combat this anti-progress mindset. Unless we do so, then every drug will always be subject to criminalization and re-criminalization. As GK Chesterton noted about prohibition in general:

"It is said that the Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens....⁶"

No matter how safe the use of any drug may become in general, any substance can be successfully criminalized by a demagogue with the help of a lurid news story reported by conglomerate media. This is why we have to expose the current biased standards for drug approval, rather than pretend that they are disinterested and objective and established for reasons of public health. Aspirin kills 3,000 people a year in the UK alone ⁷. If politicians and the media were so minded, they could work Americans up into a frenzy over this death toll and outlaw aspirin. But there is no political will to do so among the moneyed classes.

Again, the prohibitionist mindset is the problem, not drugs, the mindset that tells us that we are free at will to outlaw any drug, provided that we put time and effort into demonizing that drug outside of all context and focus on its cherry-picked links to "misuse" by undesirables.

No drug would ever be outlawed, however, even on the basis of a cost/benefit analysis, were we to actually consider all the costs of prohibition and all the benefits of drugs - and all the costs of NOT re-legalizing them. In that case, we would educate rather than demonize. But we never perform an unbiased analysis of a psychoactive drug. In failing to approve the sorts of drugs that inspire and elate (the kinds of drugs that inspired the Hindu religion), the FDA never considers the dangers of keeping the drugs illegal and thereby subjecting ignorant users to potentially contaminated product at unknown doses. The FDA never considers the suicides that will necessarily result when we outlaw every substance that can provide psychological relief. The FDA never considers that drug prohibition makes shock therapy necessary by outlawing everything that might have made life bearable for the severely depressed. The FDA never considers the thousands of deaths that occur yearly that can be directly linked to drug prohibition: the gun-related violence in inner cities, the sudden "disappearances" in Mexico -- nor do they consider the downsides of eroding time-honored democratic freedoms in the name of drug prohibition. The FDA never considers the downsides of outlawing the religious impulse. In short, we do not perform a risk/benefit analysis of drugs: we simply focus on the risks and legislate accordingly. Finally, the FDA ignores the obvious need for peace, love and understanding in the nuclear age - as if we can easily afford to do without the kinds of drugs that could help bring the world together. In a world with saner values, we would welcome MDMA ⁸ as the first in a line of phenethylamines that could help humanity survive... and yet this is clearly why the drug is being pilloried, to make sure that this whole movement toward godsend medicines is nipped in the bud.

Yet Hofmann seems to believe that we can reach a level of safety when it comes to LSD use that would justify the drug's relegalization ⁹ . That is naïve nonsense, of course. It's a big world after all. If conservative politicians do not want drugs like LSD legalized - and they clearly do not - then they will find a way to link the drug to perfidy on the part of undesirables. There is always some news story that they can torture into a morality play on behalf of drug prohibition. With the help of the conglomerate status-quo media, they will keep the public fearing LSD - the same public that watches with hypocritical complacency as Jim Beam bourbon targets prime-time television ads at young people - this despite the fact that liquor kills 178,000 a year in America alone ¹⁰.

No, no, Albert, the issue has never been about drug safety - it is all about politics, and until drug pundits recognize this fact, we will be dancing to the anti-scientific tune of the racist prohibitionists.

Hallucinogens: a Reader, edited by Charles Grob

Notes:

1: Hallucinogens: a reader Grob, M.D., editor, Charles, Penguin Putnam, 2002 (up)
2: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
3: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
4: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
5: Drug Prohibition is the Problem, not Drugs: what the movers and shakers get wrong in the drug re-legalization debate DWP (up)
6: Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument against the Scientifically Organized State Chesterton, GK (up)
7: Daily Aspirin Linked To More Than 3,000 Deaths Per Year, Scientists Warn Huffington Post (up)
8: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
9: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
10: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)

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The book "Plants of the Gods" is full of plants and fungi that could help addicts and alcoholics, sometimes in the plant's existing form, sometimes in combinations, sometimes via extracting alkaloids, etc. But drug warriors need addiction to sell their prohibition ideology.

We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.

The war on drugs has destroyed America's faith in the power of education. In fact, it has made us think of education as WRONG in and of itself. It has made us prefer censorship and fear-filled ignorance to education!

Two of the biggest promoters of the psychedelic renaissance shuffle their feet when you ask them about substance prohibition. Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman just don't get it: prohibition kills.

It's amazing. Drug law is outlawing science -- and yet so few complain. Drug law tells us what mushrooms we can collect, for God's sake. Is that not straight-up insane? Or are Americans so used to being treated as children that they accept this corrupt status quo?

The prohibitionist motto: "Billions for arrest, not one cent for education."

The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.

The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.

Today's doctors are "quacks" because they fail to see any of the many obvious uses for psychoactive substances.

Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Why America cracked down on LSD

a review of essay number 1 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob

Hallucinogens: a Reader, edited by Charles Grob

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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

Drama lovers: collect full-cast recordings of classic plays