America's Anti-scientific Standards for Psychotherapeutic Medicine
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
December 6, 2020
Alcohol can kill tens of thousands of Americans a year and we consider it a bargain price to pay for a little harmless fun. But if a demonized psychoactive plant from Mother Nature is merely REPORTED as being somehow related to one single solitary death -- one single solitary death -- the Drug Warrior considers it to be a knock-down argument that the plant medicine in question should be made unavailable, not just to Americans but to everyone around the world, including drug researchers studying Alzheimer's, and that we should even send our army overseas to burn those plants, no matter how many millennia they may have been used responsibly by other cultures.
That's why enemies of the Drug War should think twice before turning the regulation of plant medicine over to the healthcare state. The system is hypocritically rigged to pillory therapeutic plant medicine for statistical trifles while it gladly lets non-therapeutic drugs like alcohol and cigarettes ravage the population at will. That's why Americans are depressed in record numbers. Because we're determined to ban the effective drugs over trifles while ignoring the enormities perpetrated by our go-to drugs of alcohol and tobacco.
Author's Follow-up: September 20, 2022
There's another reason why science and the healthcare state should only play a peripheral role when it comes to psychoactive medicine. That's because, when it comes to such nostrums, the user is often looking for self-transcendence and an ability to maximize one's potential, as the coca leaf provides the endurance and opium, the creativity, to allow one to succeed in life. In other words, use of such substances is often an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to achieve self-actualization in life. For many of us, that is the prime directive. If we were stereotypical robots, we would be walking around saying: "Must have a meaningful life," whereas the robots of the medical tribe would be saying something quite different, namely: "Must maximize safety."
Wrong. That makes enough sense in the realm of physical medicine, but it is a purblind maxim when it comes to psychoactive substances. Yes, safety is a consideration when it comes to using psychoactive medicine, so give me all the facts about actual use -- including the subjective reports of actual users -- but at the end of the day, as the Brits would have it, I would rather live a potentially shorter life in which I am achieving my goals than become a centenarian purely for the satisfaction of chart-wielding doctors.
Of course, historians like Paul Johnson ("The Birth of the Modern1") cherry-pick a few cases of opium misuse (as in the case of the drug-friendly but hypocritical Samuel Taylor Coleridge) to conclude that drugs like opium probably do not help creativity -- but Johnson makes the usual mistake of expecting such drugs to act like aspirin. Just as we take an aspirin to ease a headache, we should, he feels, be able to take opium to improve creativity. Otherwise, the drug does not "work." But the efficacy of psychoactive drugs involves a great host of contextual and psychological factors that Johnson ignores. They are not one-size-fits all drugs. The question is not whether opium, say, increases creativity in general, but whether it improves creativity in the case of a given person of a given history with a given desire for a given outcome using a given dose at a given frequency in a given situation. It seems to have worked in these ways for Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin, not to mention Poe and Lovecraft, the latter's work in particular being full of unapologetic opiate imagery.
Johnson goes on to spitefully GUESS that Franklin "probably" became an addict in his old age, but it's not quite clear why even this should be problematic, unless we want to subject opium use to a moral scrutiny that we never apply to Big Pharma meds, let alone to the coffee that Johnson no doubt drank every day of his adult life, or the alcohol that he imbibed, etc. One wonders what uncharitable future historian will look back on Johnson's life and self-righteously conclude that "he was probably addicted to alcohol."
Those of us who have friends and family who smoke are used to said individuals suddenly disappearing from parties and such. We're like, "Where is so-and-so?" until the penny finally drops, and we realize that said person has gone outside for a smoke. If we're going to get on high horses about potentially useful drugs like opium, then by rights we should be indignant about smokers. But again, the Drug War is political, and so we only invoke moral disdain when it suits us for non-health-related reasons.
Author's Follow-up:
June 15, 2025
Drug warriors like Paul Johnson operate from the following warped assumption:
that drug prohibition has no downsides and that drug use has no upsides.
Both statements are demonstrably false and can be maintained without laughter only because America censors all examples of positive drug use. If you made the same claim in an indigenous society, they would have referred you to the local shaman so that you could be treated for insanity -- with the help of some of those medicines whose efficacy you deny based on your western prejudices: prejudices like materialism, behaviorism and brew-loving puritanism.
Just imagine the sort of 'history' we'd read if a misnamed 'conservative' like Paul Johnson were to treat liquor and cigarettes the same way that he treats opium and coca. We would hear nothing but talk about how alcohol and cigarettes lead to broken homes and misspent savings and cancer and liver damage. Paul would even resurrect talk of the DT's, which modern authors have long since spared us in fealty to the pro-liquor sensibility of modern times. Above all, we would learn of the 178,000 deaths each year from alcohol2 and the half a million linked to cigarette smoking3, devastating facts about which Johnson et al. are completely silent, of course. Yes, half a million deaths per year are linked to cigarette smoking. Check out the link to this CDC factoid -- before Drug Warriors 'take it down.'
SIDE NOTE: When confronted with such stats, Drug Warriors generally fall back on a lame rejoinder such as: "Well, we do not want to approve any drugs that would make this death toll even HIGHER!" What they fail to realize, however, is that the use of many of the less-dangerous drugs that we outlaw today would lead to far less use of tobacco and alcohol -- which, of course, one cannot help but feel is the real reason for the Drug Warrior's enmity toward such options in the first place. END SIDE NOTE.
I call Paul a misnamed conservative, because there is nothing conservative about promoting the totally unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive substances. To do so is to willfully embrace dogmatic ignorance, and surely that is not what conservativism is meant to be about. One can only assume therefore that seemingly educated people like Johnson have an unspoken goal in championing drug prohibition, something that they are deliberately not telling us. And what could that be? Well, let's see. Such fearmongers have no problem with rowdy beer-drinking rednecks and they are blind to all the damage that they cause for themselves and others. It looks, then, as if the Drug Warriors are afraid that other kinds of drug use would empower other kinds of people and thus make the conservative feel uncomfortable and no longer in control. That's my guess, anyway, that drug policy is all about controlling the hypochondriacal racial fears of neurotic conservatives. How? By ensuring that all races conform to the redneck pro-brew mentality, while eschewing all other substances whose use might facilitate god-knows-what conceptual breakthroughs -- because if there is one thing that conservatives do not like by definition it is conceptual breakthroughs.
Of course, it is so much gravy for such "conservatives" that drug policy ends up arresting minorities and removing them from the voting rolls, on either a de facto or de jure basis. God knows how those damn minorities might want to change the beloved lily-white status quo.
CONCLUSION
In a sane world, we would recognize the Drug War mindset as a hate-filled pathology and put all those who harbor such views on a course of drugs like phenethylamines45 in order to open their minds to the largely untapped potential for peace, love and understanding in this world. This will take some tough-love intervention, because there is nothing that the pathological Drug Warrior hates so much as peace, love and understanding. That's why they cracked down on the Summers of Love on both sides of the Atlantic in the 20th century, the one inspired by LSD in the 1960s and the one inspired by Ecstasy in the 1990s6. The Drug Warriors do not even think of peace, love and understanding as a benefit, even though our species is living under a nuclear sword of Damocles thanks to our fear and hatred of 'the other.' The U.S. was almost nuked multiple times over the last 70-plus years, including at least twice in the early 1960s alone7.
Sadly, one does not have to be a latent racist to be bamboozled by the War on Drugs. In "A People's History of the United States of America8," progressive Howard Zinn9 never even mentions the War on Drugs. Out of sight, out of mind when it comes to the unprecedented outlawing of psychoactive medicines: unprecedented in human history! The Drug War is thus the perfect crime, destroying our freedoms while never being called to account for doing so. And so we cast about for second-best answers to all the problems that the Drug War has caused -- all the gun violence and unnecessary suffering thanks to the outlawing of godsend medicines. Of course, the latter downside is easy for us to ignore because the folks who go without godsend medicines suffer in silence behind closed doors and are never considered stakeholders in the drug approval process.
When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses and is known to cause death and destruction.
Why don't those politicians understand what hateful colonialism they are practicing? Psychedelics have been used for millennia by the tribes that the west has conquered -- now we won't even let folks talk honestly about such indigenous medicines.
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.
Before anyone receives shock therapy, they should have the option to start using opium daily instead and/or any other natural drug that makes them feel good and keeps them calm. Any natural drug is better than knowingly damaging the brain!!!
The benefits of outlawed drugs read like the ultimate wish-list for psychiatrists. It's a shame that so many of them are still mounting a rear guard action to defend their psychiatric pill mill -- which demoralizes clients by turning them into lifetime patients.
It is a truism to say that we cannot change the world and that therefore we have to change ourselves -- but the drug war outlaws even this latter option.
Drug prohibition is the perfect racist crime. It brought gunfire to inner cities, yet those who seek to end the gunfire pretend that drug prohibition has nothing to do with it.
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.