How colleges censor courses to conform with the substance-demonizing ideology of drug prohibition
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 10, 2025
Your indoctrination in Drug War ideology may have begun in grade school, but it did not end there. Your university professors continued that indoctrination by refusing to teach you any inconvenient truths about the substances that we have been taught to hate. Take your knowledge of Sigmund Freud12. You have been taught by your professors to think only of "psychoanalysis" when it comes to Freud, but in a free world, we would be thinking instead about the power of cocaine to end depression. This was Freud's real breakthrough, his acknowledgment that a drug that inspires and elates can be used as an antidepressant. We do not hear about this breakthrough because the powers-that-be have decided FOR us long ago that this belief was a mistake on Freud's part and so future generations need not even know about it.
And so anyone today can claim to be an expert on Freud without even knowing about his advocacy of cocaine for the depressed. Those who catch wind of such advocacy are merely informed by their politically correct professors that Freud's interest in cocaine was a mistake. No proof of this fact need be adduced. Such slander will be readily believed by students who have been brainwashed since childhood in the substance demonizing ideology of the War on Drugs. We see then that Freud is considered a hero in academia, not because he found a practical cure for depression, but rather because his theoretical musings about psychoanalysis have provided fodder for endless remunerative academic projects. The depressed may be as gloomy as ever, but the academics have been promoted to the role of experts when it comes to the parsing and mythologizing of the real-world manifestations of our distress.
And who were the authorities who originally decided FOR us that cocaine use for depression was a non-starter?
Hint: They were not the depressed themselves, whose opinions about cocaine were never even consulted -- not then, not now. (In the materialist west, doctors are the experts on how we feel about the world -- not ourselves.)
No, these "authorities" were the self-interested psychiatrists, psychologists and medical doctors who had a vested interest in demonizing a drug whose use could put them out of business3! If cocaine remained legal, anyone could treat their own depression symptomatically and the mental health field would be devastated -- just as the physical health field would be devastated were opium to be re-legalized for the intermittent treatment of physical pain and discomfort. And what would happen to all the academics who wrote so many impressive (if unreadable) papers on the subject of Oedipus complexes and latent fears of castration? They could no longer create the illusion of profundity through the employment of pedantic circumlocutions and the amassing of superfluous footnotes. And what about the doctors who counseled so many patients for depression? They could no longer entice the public into paying for a lifetime of talk therapy based merely on the possibility of an eventual "breakthrough" of some kind, the precise nature and value of which can never be guaranteed in advance.
This is why the original critics of cocaine use were doctors -- and why they never even bothered to acknowledge the glaringly obvious benefits of the drug for the large majority of users. Cocaine was an existential threat to these professionals. The drug had to be demonized at all costs. And so they wrote hatchet jobs for the press, in which neither they nor their publishers pointed out their obvious conflict of interest in so doing.
A good poster child for this lopsided reporting about drugs is Social Psychologist Henry Lennard, author of a 1972 New York Times article entitled Freud's Disaster With Cocaine4. The op-ed piece contains the kind of argumentation that could only impress a child -- or else an adult who has been brainwashed since grade school in the substance-demonizing ideology of the Drug War. For one searches the article in vain for proof that Freud's interest in cocaine was a mistake, let alone a disaster. Lennard merely cites the fact that a patient of Freud's (one who was already addicted to morphine 5 ) used the drug irresponsibly and became psychologically dependent upon it.
That's it, that's the proof that Freud's advocacy of cocaine was a "disaster."
Now, I ask the reader, have you ever offered a drink to someone who eventually became an alcoholic? If so, did you commit a big mistake -- a disaster, even -- or did you merely provide a potentially beneficial substance to someone who turned out to be incapable of using it wisely, like the vast majority of OTHER drinkers?
And yet the intoxiphobic Lennard perversely tortures this one incident in Freud's life into a supposedly "knock-down" argument, not just against the use of cocaine, but against drug use in general for the treatment of conditions like depression. Not only should we not use cocaine, but we should apparently not use psilocybin, nor opium , nor phenethylamines, nor beta-carbolines, nor even laughing gas -- no, not even if we're desperately depressed like some relatives of mine, on the verge of suicide, and visiting the ER at 3 in the morning in the naive hope of getting some unequivocal relief. As someone who is intimately acquainted with the downsides of neurotic sobriety, I find this drug-hating attitude of Lennard's to be condescending and naive in the extreme. Did Lennard not understand that in some people, the so-called "sober" state is counterproductive, that it works against our interests in life, and that it promotes personal failure through the subtle transmission of defeatist thoughts to the brain? It matters not whether such thoughts are a product of upbringing, genetics, or biochemistry, or -- which is much more likely -- a hopelessly entangled admixture of all three factors. The point is that there exist drugs like cocaine that can clearly help the afflicted to transcend such nefarious and ever-present influences, in light of which fact, Lennard is cruel to support drug prohibition. Cruel! Such a stance on his part amounts to his saying: "I can get along just fine without drugs, thank you very much. Everyone else should be able to do so as well."
But this is mere know-nothing solecism. There is, in fact, no logical reason for Lennard's belief. It is rather a conclusion based (consciously or otherwise) on the drug-hating ideology of Mary Baker Eddy. And it is an anti-indigenous viewpoint into the bargain. Had Lennard been conversant in the field of ethnobotany6, he would have known that all indigenous societies have used drugs for the benefit of humanity. Being surrounded by untrammeled nature, they were well aware of the psychoactive potential of their environment and were determined to exploit it for the use of their people. Only in the long-since bulldozed world of the west do we deem such interest in psychoactive medicines to be pathological and even criminal. And so we pass laws that help to normalize the imperial intolerance of the Francisco Pizarros of the world with respect to native medicine, thereby giving the lie to our politically correct protestations against the colonialist practice of interfering in the affairs of sovereign countries.
To grasp the cock-sure absurdity of Lennard's views, I like to imagine the psychologist standing in the Andean jungle, surrounded on every side by the psychoactive medicines of Mother Nature, chastising the Inca for their time-honored use of the coca leaf and Sapo frog venom and San Pedro cactus and ayahuasca, etc. "Now, I can set each of you up for a $200 visit to a psychotherapist," says Lennard. "He will help you understand why you have this pathological desire for drugs. I'm guessing here that it has something to do with your relationship with your mothers, but don't quote me on that. Let's see now, the first opening I see here is for next Friday at 10 a.m."
This would be funny, were it not for the fact that Lennard's naive views of human psychology (not to mention sociology) still reign in academia. Hence the postulate of this essay: namely, that censorship about drugs reigns supreme, not just in grade school but in university as well.
AFTERWORD
As part of my attempts to convincingly depict Lennard in the Andes as above, I researched the subject of Andean psychoactive medicines. The results of that search quickly reminded me of another problem with the Drug War mindset. For I found that all the pages that mention such medicines do so in a very apologetic manner, with the author cravenly reminding us that he or she does not recommend the use of these substances and that one should see their doctors and counselors (counselors like Dr. Lennard, perhaps?) before partaking of such. And so I asked myself: whence comes this apologetic disposition on the part of writers? When authors write about drag-racing, or free diving, or free falling, or knife throwing, they seldom feel called upon to warn the reader that these activities might be dangerous and that they should educate themselves appropriately before undertaking them. Why, then, do we assume that merely writing about drugs is equivalent to advocating their uninformed use for a specific person?
The answer is clearly that we have been infantilized since grade school when it comes to drugs7: we have been taught how to FEEL about them -- that is, to fear them -- rather than to understand them. And so when we write about drugs, we naturally assume that we are writing for immature and rash youngsters -- whereas when we write about knife throwing, we assume that our readership will have at least a grain of common sense. Even if someone were to be injured by knife throwing after reading our page on the subject, we would see no necessary connection between the two events. But somehow when it comes to drugs, free speech itself is deemed to be dangerous8 -- under the assumption that our readership is infantile. It is this perverse and hypocritical mindset that has the world on the brink of outlawing free speech altogether. (Indeed, the Oregon state legislature came close to outlawing free speech about drugs in 2024.) Such a ban (like so many other attacks on our time-honored freedoms) will be originally "justified" by our hysterical fears about "drugs," though you can be sure that such prohibitions will inevitably expand to encompass other inherently "dangerous" activities in the future, as fearmongering demagogues find financial and political reasons to render us hysterical about still other threats.
NOTES
This censorship has results in the real world. I just received a notice in my email box of a new article on Academia.edu entitled "Suicide and Covid-19." Now, any article on suicide prevention should point out -- and protest, loudly and clearly -- the fact that we have outlawed all drugs -- such as opium 9 , coca, and laughing gas 10 -- whose wise and intermittent use could prevent suicide, by giving the depressed a blessed vacation from defeatist thought patterns! Blessed relief! Yet I need not even LOOK at that article to know in advance that it will say NOTHING about drug prohibition and the War on Drugs. Such academic articles never do. This is because the writers -- like everyone else in the drug-hating west -- has been "protected" for their entire lifetime from stories about the positive uses for drugs -- protected not just in grade school but in university as well -- thanks to people like Henry Lennard and the medical doctors whose jobs would be lost were we to have the time-honored freedom to take care of our own health.
I really don't understand it. I am not a genius. Many people are smarter than myself in many ways. And yet I am alone among philosophers in seeing how thoroughly the Drug War ideology of substance demonization has destroyed our ability to think straight about psychoactive substances. It can only be because I have skin in this game: I have been directly impacted by drug prohibitions which have denied me obvious cures for my chronic depression for a lifetime now in favor of shunting me off onto dependence-causing medicines that literally cannot ever be kicked and which have thereby turned me into a ward of the healthcare state. And yet inspiring substances like cocaine have been so thoroughly demonized in our society that they are entirely off the radar, even of those academics who write about suicide 11 and depression! And so these ostensive experts on human psychology live in a well-funded world of make-believe, a world in which problems like depression are considered huge issues -- but issues which are to be solved while observing one non-negotiable caveat: namely, that psychoactive substances (with the exception of dependence-causing Big Pharma 1213 "meds") are never to be thought of as answers to the problems at hand. That is the price that academicians pay for admittance to the well-heeled conferences that are held around the country on the topic of mental health. Attendees must be willing to kowtow to drug-hating orthodoxy.
It's as if a tribe of paleolithic cave dwellers were shivering in the cold, racking their brains for ways to keep warm, yet never even thinking about building a fire for that purpose, so thoroughly have they come to believe that fire is bad!
Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.
Science knows nothing of the human spirit and of the hopes and dreams of humankind. Science cannot tell us whether a given drug risk is worthwhile given the human need for creativity and passion in their life. Science has no expertise in making such philosophical judgements.
Americans believe scientists when they say that drugs like MDMA are not proven effective. That's false. They are super effective and obviously so. It's just that science holds entheogenic medicines to the standards of reductive materialism. That's unfair and inappropriate.
The whole drug war is based on the anti-American idea that the way to avoid problems is to lie and prevaricate and persuade people not to ask questions.
We should start taking names. All politicians and government officials who work to keep godsends like psilocybin from the public should be held to account for crimes against humanity when the drug war finally ends.
Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"
Problem 2,643 of the war on drugs:
It puts the government in charge of deciding what counts as a true religion.
Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity. It is the outlawing of our right to take care of our own health.
And so anyone today can claim to be an expert on Freud without even knowing about his advocacy of cocaine for the depressed. Those who catch wind of such advocacy are merely informed by their politically correct professors that Freud's interest in cocaine was a mistake. No proof of this fact need be adduced. Such slander will be readily believed by students who have been brainwashed since childhood in the substance demonizing ideology of the War on Drugs. We see then that Freud is considered a hero in academia, not because he found a practical cure for depression, but rather because his theoretical musings about psychoanalysis have provided fodder for endless remunerative academic projects. The depressed may be as gloomy as ever, but the academics have been promoted to the role of experts when it comes to the parsing and mythologizing of the real-world manifestations of our distress.
It's as if a tribe of paleolithic cave dwellers were shivering in the cold, racking their brains for ways to keep warm, yet never even thinking about building a fire for that purpose, so thoroughly have they come to believe that fire is bad!
Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.