Why Kevin Sabet's approach to drugs is racist, anti-scientific and counterproductive
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
November 2, 2022
Kevin Sabet is the typical Drug Warrior. He wants to blame all our ills on drugs rather than on the social policies that make them dangerous. But Kevin and co. never had the right to outlaw Mother Nature in the first place. Ask Thomas Jefferson, whose ghost spun in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 1 in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants. Yes, Kevin, we need honesty about all drugs, but that's never going to happen in a capitalist society where we sell Big Pharma meds on prime-time TV as if they were bubble gum. Moreover, Obama's idea of "following the science" will not work because science is political in the age of a Drug War. That's why you will find almost no academic articles discussing the potential benefits of outlawed medicines (like the fact that the Vedic religion was inspired by Soma, or that the chewing of the coca leaf gave the Peruvian Indians endurance and social harmony for millennia). Because the Drug War is not about honesty and education, it is about the fearmongering that Kevin promotes with books like Reefer Sanity.
Even if Kevin were 100% right scientifically speaking (and drugs expert DJ Nutt of England would say he is not) , he never takes into account the harm that comes from the prohibition that he champions: civil wars overseas, the corruption of law enforcement, the deaths of blacks in inner cities, the withholding of godsend pain medicine from kids in hospice, the censoring of scientists, ad nauseam. Even if marijuana caused occasional deaths (which it does not), it would be infinitely better to have it re-legalized than to continue the status quo of prohibition. But Drug Warriors never weigh costs and benefits rationally. They judge outlawed substances by the following absurd standard: If it can cause any harm at all, it must be outlawed -- and to hell with the civil wars and police state that might result from such a policy!
What's more, this standard is racist, because in practice it means that we want to protect our white Christian sons and daughters from "evil" Mother Nature at the expense of putting minorities and indigenous peoples in harm's way around the world. We don't want to protect THEM from militarized police forces; we don't want to protect THEM from contaminated product; we don't want to protect THEM from the civil wars spawned by our Drug War. We just want to protect little Johnny and little Sally from Mother Nature's dangerous plant medicines -- as if Mother Nature's bounty was obliged to meet FDA safety standards!
Kevin is an old-school Drug Warrior. That's why he's supported by Jimmy Carter, and we know how successful he was in ending the Drug War.
It's the prohibition, stupid!
To repeat: Mother Nature is under no obligation to meet FDA safety standards.
The bounty of Mother Nature is ours by right, and NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO WITHHOLD IT FROM US, even in the name of safety.
It's called Natural Law, Kevin, and it grants us what John Locke called the use of the land "and all that lies therein."
Stop demonizing and outlawing, start teaching!
Kevin Sabet reminds me of the police officer in "Wrongfully Accused" who pushes bystanders back from a crime scene in order to protect them, not realizing that in so doing he is pushing them off the edge of a cliff.
When is Kevin going to speak up about the 1 in 4 American women who are chemically dependent on Big Pharma for life? Oh, but they are not "drugs," right, Kevin? They are "meds." That way of thinking is what Julian Buchanan calls "drug apartheid." Substances are substances are substances -- it is only politics that makes us say otherwise, politics and the commercial interests of Big Pharma , Big Liquor, law enforcement and the military.
Prohibition and ignorance are the problems, Kevin. By thinking otherwise, we give bad social policy a great big mulligan and never learn from our sociopolitical mistakes. And if Kevin really thinks that prohibition works, let's remember that his policy has given elections to conservatives by locking up millions of blacks and has turned inner-city areas (like Southeast Washington DC) into no-go zones for the last 40 years thanks to the guns that are piled up in the community as a direct result of the prohibition that Kevin continues to champion, even though blacks are killed every day in America because of his anti-American policy.
America first cracked down on cannabis (in violation of natural law) because the government needed something to do after Prohibition stopped them from cracking heads over liquor. So they renamed cannabis "marijuana" to associate it with Hispanics and went back in the field, cracking heads once again, this time for marijuana use and possession.
The Atlantic loves Kevin Sabet's viewpoint, but that's no surprise, since that magazine completely ignores the positive uses of psychoactive medicine when it writes about the latest treatments for depression and Alzheimer's (see ). To read such articles, one would think that Mother Nature's pharmacy does not exist -- but in reality, the Atlantic is happy to ignore the existence, let alone the potential, of that pharmacy, in lockstep with the superstitious Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
But unfortunately, Kevin's unscientific way of thinking about drugs has to be taken seriously because it represents the mainstream viewpoint of the average American -- the average American who received a teddy bear in grade school for saying no to Mother Nature's godsends; the average American who watched thousands of hours of TV shows 2 and movies 34 without ever seeing outlawed substances portrayed in a positive way; the average American who has to urinate in order to get work, not to check if he or she is impaired but rather to make sure that he is not using the kinds of plant medicines that have inspired entire religions in the past.
So, I urge the fans of freedom, common sense and natural law to study Kevin Sabet's ideas about drugs carefully, because they are the philosophically flawed ideas that keep America from taking the crucial step of outlawing substance prohibition, for now and for all time, in the name of natural law, in the name of scientific progress, and in the name of user safety, which will never be advanced by the Drug War's policy of keeping us in ignorance about the substances that we are told to hate.
If Sabet agrees with me that we should be completely honest about all drugs, then he should push for the abolition of the DEA. That's the agency that poisoned pot smokers with paraquat in the 1980s, a weed killer that causes Parkinson's Disease; that's the agency that voted to outlaw MDMA 5 in 1985 against the advice of its own counsel, thereby forcing American soldiers to go for decades without godsend medicine for PTSD. If honest education is really our goal as Kevin suggests, the DEA would be replaced by the Drug Education Agency, which would give us honest reports (subjective and objective, both pros AND cons) about all psychoactive medicines -- including those Big Pharma meds upon which 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent for life. The Drugs Education Agency would finally tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about psychoactive substances.
But Kevin knows as well as I do that politicians are like Lieutenant Kaffee in "A Few Good Men." They can't handle the truth when it comes to psychoactive medicine, because complete honesty would conflict with the vested interests of Wall Street.
Yet another reason why Kevin should abandon his dream of letting government decide which plant medicines we can use: for not only is that a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, but such government honesty is simply not possible in a nation where Big Pharma 67 lobbyists (not to mention liquor and law enforcement lobbyists) determine "which science" and "which facts" can even be considered.
Finally, I agree with Kevin that there is a disproportionate focus on marijuana right now, but why is that so, Kevin? It's precisely because your knee-jerk substance prohibition has outlawed all of marijuana's psychoactive competition. Like all Drug Warriors, you want to blame social problems like this on "drugs," but it is social policy that got us to this point, not "drugs." People want to experience self-transcendence, Kevin, no matter how much we may demonize their attempts to do so as "getting high." A social policy like prohibition which ignores this fact is sure to fail -- while doing great damage in the process.
Saying things like "Fentanyl kills!" makes just as much sense as saying "Fire bad!"
The drug war is the ultimate case of fearmongering. And yet academics and historians fail to recognize it as such. They will protest eloquently against the outrages of the witch hunts of yore, but they are blind to the witch hunts of the present. What is a drug dealer but a modern service magician, someone who sells psychoactive medicine designed to effect personal ends for the user? They are simply providing an alternative to materialistic medicine, which ignores common sense and so ignores the glaringly obvious value of such substances.
If opium were legal, then much of the nostrums peddled by drug stores today would be irrelevant. (No wonder the drug war has staying power!)
Problem 2,643 of the war on drugs:
It puts the government in charge of deciding what counts as a true religion.
We should be encouraging certain drug use by the elderly. Many Indigenous drugs have been shown to grow new neurons and increase neural connectivity -- to refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!
Some fat cat should treat the entire Supreme Court to a vacation at San Jose del Pacifico in Mexico, where they can partake of the magic mushroom in a ceremony led by a Zapotec guide.
As great as it is, "Synthetic Panics" by Philip Jenkins was only tolerated by academia because it did not mention drugs in the title and it contains no explicit opinions about drugs. As a result, many drug law reformers still don't know the book exists.
Almost every mainstream article about psychology and consciousness is nonsense these days because it ignores the way that drug prohibition has stymied our investigation of such subjects.
Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.
Malcolm X 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.
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
If opium were legal, then much of the nostrums peddled by drug stores today would be irrelevant. (No wonder the drug war has staying power!)