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Why I Am Pro Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

October 28, 2022



I just read a tweet in which a certain MLLanzillotta1 claims that he is not pro-drug, he's simply "pro-pragmatism."

This is the usual line of the bamboozled libertarian. They believe with the conservatives that there are, indeed, these horrible things out there called "drugs" that should not be used, but they acknowledge that people are going to use them so (sigh!) we should do our best to help them as needed.

Update: May 01, 2025

I couldn't agree less with this approach to opposing the Drug War.

Here is the reply I posted on Twitter:

I am pro-drugs, because right now we fry the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them chew the coca leaf. Sobriety is no goal in itself. Most suicides could pass a drug test. The idea that drugs are "bad" is Christian Science.


Folks like MLLanzillotta1 fail to grasp the fact that "drugs" is a political term, not a scientific one, and that medicines like coca and shrooms have inspired entire religions. Nor do they realize that the meds that we classify as "drugs" can do extraordinary things, like cure stuttering overnight (as in the case of Paul Stamets and shrooms), help us envision the DNA helix (Francis Crick and LSD) and inspire great stories (HG Wells and Coca Wine). "Drugs," as MLLanzillotta1 calls them (or rather slanders them) inspired Plato's view of the afterlife. For "drugs" is just modern slang for "substances of which botanically clueless politicians disapprove."

But MLLanzillotta1 has plenty of company. Whenever I talk about such things, I try not to get too excited from the favorable reactions I receive, because I know that most folks hate prohibition for the wrong reason. They think it was a good idea that does not work, or that prohibition is cruel as currently implemented. But they are usually completely ignorant of the fact that the very term "drugs" as used today is a modern invention which proposes a sort of pharmacological dualism, in which we have the evil "drugs" on one side of the extant pharmacopoeia and the sainted "meds" on the other, what Julian Buchanan refers to as drug apartheid.

ML and company are victims of Drug War propaganda. They've been indoctrinated to "hate drugs." They may well have received a teddy bear from DARE as a child for saying no to Mother Nature's godsend medicines. The media then shielded them from stories about POSITIVE uses of "drugs," by featuring "users" as scumbags. We don't see Jules Verne drinking coca wine on TV and in movies : instead we see a scroungy looking "bad guy" in denim "snorting blow" under a dangling light bulb in a cellar with a prostitute on his lap. Then we check the urine of ML and company, not to see if they're impaired, but merely to see if they are Christian Science heretics, using substances of which religion founder Mary Baker Eddy would disapprove.

No wonder ML says to himself: "Yeah, drugs are really bad, indeed!"

But with uninformed friends like these in the anti-prohibition movement, who needs enemies?

I am DEFINITELY pro-drugs -- because it is Big Pharma 's "meds," not "drugs," that have addicted me for life, ML.

Meanwhile it's DRUGS like MDMA and psilocybin that could help bring about world peace and end school shootings.

Who is not in favor of that?

Or would we prefer nuclear annihilation to legalizing MDMA , in the same way that we currently prefer frying the brains of the depressed to legalizing the coca leaf?



Author's Follow-up:

May 01, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




Some of my best friends are Libertarians, but...

I rarely find a Libertarian who understands the full injustice of the War on Drugs. In my experience, they tend to think of the Drug War as an okay idea that simply does not work. They may even think that the government has no business outlawing drugs. But they never seem to understand the enormity of the evil that drug prohibition causes. Meanwhile, they fail to see all the enormous potential upsides to drug use. The Hindu religion owes its very existence to the use of a drug that inspired and elated -- a drug about which the Rishi sages could not seem to say enough in the Rig Veda. The frequently referenced Soma juice inspired, it elated, it energized, both mentally and physically.

From this alone we see that drug prohibition is the outlawing of religion. Why? Because Drug Warriors outlaw PRECISELY those drugs that inspire and elate. The psychoactive drugs we have outlawed are hugely diverse in nature -- and yet the one thing they all have in common is that they have the potential to inspire and elate. This is what the government is seeking to prevent with the help of drug laws: new thought patterns that could shake the existing social system. Conservatives do not want new religions of any kind.

And yet Milton Friedman himself once infamously maintained that people of good will can be on either side of the drug legalization debate -- or rather what we should call the drug RE-legalization debate.

NONSENSE!

Are they good guys who outlaw new religions? No, no, no! (Think, Milton, think!)

Moreover, Libertarians have mostly never heard of the outcome of the use of phenethylamines as documented by chemist Alexander Shulgin in the 1991 book "Pihkal."

"I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world."

"An energetic feeling began to take over me. It continued to grow. The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people."

"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."


Wake up, Milton Friedmans of the world: It is a crime against humanity to outlaw such substances -- for the depressed, or for anybody else, for that matter!

It is strange that so many Libertarians do not grasp this fact. As GK Chesterton pointed out in "Eugenics and Other Evils," there is no tyranny so sinister as to let government control one's digestive system. It is the bizarre micromanaging of one's personal health -- something that the government should never have been put in charge of in the first place. And why not? Because health is not a thing: it is a balance of many factors. It follows that any attempt by government to control a particular individual's "health" is going to be ham-fisted in the extreme and occur in total ignorance of the all-important details of the case. A drug that can be deadly for one person at one dose when used for one reason in one circumstance may be a godsend at another dose when used for another reason in another circumstance. The Drug War is an outrage to common sense because it seeks to judge "drugs" outside of all context. It judges drugs only with regard to how their ill-advised use may affect the white American young people whom we refuse to educate about safe use in fealty to our absurd prohibitionist principle that ignorance is the best defense against drug misuse.

Libertarians insist that the government keep their hands off our guns. They do not realize the following, however: that any government that claims to have a right to control how and how much we can think and feel in life recognizes no limits whatsoever. If we submit to that injustice, we are tacitly telling government that we are willing to roll over and play dead for absolutely any steam-rolling that they might deem it expedient to apply to our civil liberties in future.

This is why the Drug War is wrong root and branch. It is moreover a crazy philosophy of life. Why? Because it leads to absurd results -- and as Whitehead reminds us:

"The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us."


To what absurd results are we reduced by the drug-demonizing philosophy of drug prohibition?

1) Drug warriors show by their actions and laws that they would rather that the suicidal commit suicide 1 than to be given drugs that inspire and elate.

2) Drug warriors show by their actions and laws that they would rather that the severely depressed receive brain-damaging shock therapy than to use the kinds of medicines that have inspired entire religions.

3) Drug warriors advance a prohibitionist policy that they know full well led to the creation of the American Mafia and drug cartels out of whole cloth.

4) The FDA will not approve an ultra-safe empathogen like MDMA 2 and similar phenethylamines that bring about peace, love and understanding, but they approve of shock therapy and they approve of Big Pharma 3 4 drugs whose side effects as advertised on national television include death itself 5 !

5) Our government claims that there are no valid uses whatsoever for drugs that have been considered panaceas by ancient doctors like Paracelsus and Avicenna. Talk about gaslighting 6 !

6) We try to "save" white young people from drugs by outsourcing the dangers of prohibition to minorities in inner cities and to foreigners south of the border.

7) We sit by while prohibition censors science. Just look at magazines like Psychology Today and Scientific American. Look for the many articles on mind and mood that fail to even mention that we have outlawed all the drugs whose use could actually tell us something about mind and mood. William James urged philosophers to use nitrous oxide to learn about the nature of reality, and yet the FDA recently announced its plans to treat laughing gas like a "drug" -- that is, to make it harder to use than ever. (In a sane world, we would give laughing gas 7 kits to the suicidal just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.)

8) Media companies never report positive uses for hated drugs like opium and coca. It is the abject and total censorship of all wise and beneficial uses for drugs.

And this is just the beginning of the list of real-world absurdities that obtain when we childishly demonize and outlaw the inanimate objects that we call "drugs." This is why it is so frustrating for me when I see a Libertarian telling me that he is not pro-drug.

How can he even KNOW that? Almost all research to prove common-sense drug benefits has been outlawed. How can you know that there is nothing out there that could benefit you? The wise use of opium 8 brings an intense appreciation of Mother Nature to the educated mind. Do you not believe in having an intense appreciation of Mother Nature? The wise use of phenethylamines helps you care about your fellow human being. Do you not believe that this is a GOOD THING? The wise use of drugs can give us a mental intensity wherewith we can accomplish great things. Is mental intensity not a GOOD THING?

To imply that "drugs" are not for you is insane. Is coffee for you? How about sugar and chocolate? Or nicotine? Or alcohol? Or do you just draw the line at drugs that inspire and elate -- like the Soma 9 of the Vedic religion?

Nor are the benefits just psychological. The reports of drug use in Pihkal show that specific phenethylamines can lower blood pressure and decrease our cravings for drugs like nicotine. Moreover the strict demarcation between psychological and physical conditions disappears when we accept the holistic philosophy that materialists have been at such pains to suppress with their one-size-fits-all "cures" for mind and mood conditions -- a realm in which they actually have no expertise in the first place, as is clear from their absurd dogmatic blindness to the glaringly obvious common-sense benefits of outlawed substances.

No one has ever set out with the money, the freedom, the interest, and the pharmacological savvy to study every psychoactive substance in the world, in combination and alone, with regard to its ability to improve mind and mood and so make the world a better place -- one in which people are happy in their own skin and comfortable around others.

Until such studies are made, it is insane to rule out drug use a priori. It is like renouncing in advance the food products at a new grocery store that you refuse to even visit. And it is insanity with a vengeance when you seek to outlaw drug use for everyone, based on your own metaphysical biases about drugs.

Of course, even our terminology is used against us here: Every time I use the word "drugs," Drug Warriors think of evil substances. In reality, all medicines are drugs and all drugs are medicines. They are not two different things. That is just one of the many common-sense facts that Americans have to take onboard before they can become actual grown-ups when it comes to psychoactive medicines.

Meanwhile, Drug Warriors say things like "Fentanyl 10 kills" and "Oxy kills" and "ICE kills" and "Crack kills" -- all of which sayings are philosophically identical to saying "Fire bad!" Such phrases are just an attempt to demonize a substance instead of using it as wisely and safely as possible for the benefit of suffering humanity.

In writing the above, I am reminded of the feeble arguments that conservatives like William Buckley adduced against the Drug War in a debate in the 1970s. None of the points made above were included. Buckley's debate team argued on the back foot about statistics and probable outcomes, never once cutting to the heart of the matter. Of course, this was before the research into phenethylamines and psychedelics made it clear that so-called drugs can inspire and elate. But Buckley had no excuse. He should have mentioned the fact that the Hindu religion owes its existence to the use of a drug that inspired and elated, from which it clearly follows that the Drug War is the outlawing of religion.

Amazingly, I have yet to hear any drug legalization 11 proponent argue in this fashion in a public forum. It is as if the cradle-to-grave brainwashing of drug propaganda has dispirited the friends of liberty and placed them forever "on the back foot" when it comes to arguing for the return of common sense with respect to the politically created boogieman called "drugs." They make use of plenty of statistics, of course, but statistics can always be gainsaid, however disingenuously. If they want to break through the drug-war double-talk, they need to start adducing objections to drug prohibition that cannot be answered except with a blush. They need to start citing the kinds of principled home truths that I have mentioned above.

Their failure to do so is not surprising, however, considering that many of them received teddy bears as children for saying "no" to the kinds of drugs that inspired the Hindu religion. How can they think objectively on a topic about which they have been brainwashed since grade school? How can they even imagine positive uses for drugs in a world in which a government-suborned media has ruthlessly expunged any hint of such things from print, television and movies 12 13 ?

Propaganda works, after all. Just ask Madison Avenue.









Notes for essay entitled Why I Am Pro Drugs:

1: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
2: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
3: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
4: 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)
5: RINVOQ RX List (up)
6: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
7: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
8: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
9: Blue Tide: The Search for Soma: a philosophical review of the book by Mike Jay DWP (up)
10: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)
11: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
12: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
13: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

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Psychedelics and entheogens should be freely available to all dementia patients. These medicines can increase neuronal plasticity and even grow new neurons. Besides, they can inspire and elate -- or do we puritans feel that our loved ones have no right to peace of mind?

We throw people out of jobs for using "drugs," we praise them for using "meds." The categories are imaginary, made up by politicians who want to demonize certain substances, but not cigs or beer.

I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."

This pretend concern for the safety of young drug users is bizarre in a country that does not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.

"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."

Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.

News flash: certain mushrooms can help you improve your life! It's the biggest story in the history of mycology! And yet you wouldn't know it from visiting the websites of most mushroom clubs.

The drug war normalizes the disdainful and self-righteous attitude that Columbus and Pizarro had about drug use in the New World.

An Englishman's home is his castle. An American's home is a bouncy castle for the DEA.


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






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