How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 6, 2025
I stopped by a convenience store yesterday and noticed a huge sign behind the counter: "Nicotine is an addictive drug. This is because it changes the brain."
This warning, as the fine print makes clear, is displayed thanks to a court ruling. (I say "fine print," but the sign is so large that even this introductory blurb reads like a banner headline.)
This made me stop and think, why do we never see a sign like the following at psychiatrist's offices:
"SSRIs are dependence-causing drugs. This is because they change the brain."
That latter claim has been clearly demonstrated in the work of Richard Whitaker, who reveals how antidepressants 1 cause the very chemical imbalances that they are purported to fix2.
The Jekyll and Hyde nature of America's attitude toward drugs is made clear by such over-the-top warnings about tobacco: on the one hand, we're screaming "Danger!" On the other, we're screaming, "Just let me buy what the hell I want to buy!" And the former court-supported warnings get louder every year. It seems it won't be long before stores are required to hire someone to personally lecture a would-be purchaser about the dangers of nicotine before allowing them to buy a pack of cigarettes.
This got me thinking about the relationship between nicotine and drug prohibition.
In my childhood in the '60s and '70s, I was subject to a barrage of television commercials 3 teaching me that cigarette smoking causes addiction and cancer. I now see in hindsight that this public health campaign helped to normalize the idea of drug prohibition in my mind by getting me used to the idea that the government and the courts had a role in protecting me from making bad decisions.
What I had yet to realize was that drug prohibition itself is what made tobacco the go-to drug for most Americans in the first place! It did this by outlawing all alternatives. Opium smoking drastically decreases the desire for tobacco smoking (and alcohol, for that matter), as does the use of certain phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, as is clear from the user reports that the chemist cites in "Pihkal.4" And yet we legalize tobacco while outlawing all less inherently risky drug use, in the same way that we legalize alcohol while outlawing all less inherently risky drug use.
This is what America cannot get through its thick puritanical skull: that drug prohibition causes the very problems that we assume that it will solve. Drug prohibition has always been based on the assumption that less drug use is always better -- but that is demonstrably false, not least because drug use has inspired entire religions5! In a sane world, we would use the least harmful drugs in the wisest possible way, and this is made impossible by drug prohibition.
What are the prohibitionists thinking? They seem to be expecting that someday people will be happy to do without any mood-enhancing substances of any kind, but that is a bizarre, anti-scientific, ahistorical and inhumane goal. It can only be maintained seriously by a Christian Scientist as a matter of religious faith. To enforce such laws is, in fact, the enforcement of the Christian Science religion as the law of the land. Such tyranny makes no more sense than outlawing drugs for physical conditions, under the theory that no one "really" needs those either, provided only that they were "right with God."
Drug prohibition has not ended drug use in America. To the contrary, it has ensured that only the most dangerous possible drug use is practiced. Why? Because we have outlawed everything else!
As with any essay on the idiocy of drug prohibition, there is so much more that could and should be said on this topic. But I will spare the reader any more obvious truths in this particular post. Let me end, however, by citing a quote from William H. Brereton in the Truth About Opium, published in 1822 to counter the absurd lies of the Anti-Opium Society.
"Nicotine, the alkaloid of tobacco, is simply a deadly and rapid poison, useful only to the assassin. Morphia, the alkaloid of opium, is only poisonous when taken in an excessive quantity; whether used internally or injected under the skin, it is the most wonderful anodyne and sedative known. I fully believe that, when medical men come to study opium and opium smoking more fully, it will become the established opinion of the faculty that opium smoking is not only perfectly harmless, but that it is most beneficial, so that it may ultimately not only put down spirit drinking, but perhaps supersede, to a great extent, tobacco.6"
Of course, this quote will be hard for Americans to believe, since they have been protected from their birth from learning anything about the benefits of drug use -- just as they have been shielded from learning anything about the endless downsides of drug prohibition.
AFTERWORD
Even Psychology Today now acknowledges that SSRIs do not fix chemical imbalances. In fact, in a 2022 PT article7 by Noam Shpancer Ph.D., the author tells us that "We don't know how antidepressants work." I would agree, except to add that "We don't know that they work at all," except perhaps to make the user satisfied with a lack of self-realization in life. Some might even claim that they keep some folk from committing suicide, but they only do so by limiting their possibilities in life. If we really wanted to help the depressed, we would let them thrive on the wise use of phenethylamines and opium and coca, all of which are inherently less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco, at least in a world in which we teach safe use and regulate product -- a world in which we replace the hateful Drug Enforcement Agency with a Drug Education Agency, staffed by what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths8.
Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.
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.
Did the Vedic People have a substance disorder because they wanted to drink enough soma to see religious realities?
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
Freud's real discovery was that drugs like cocaine could make psychiatry UNNECESSARY for the vast majority of people. The medical establishment hated the idea -- so they judged the drug based on its worst possible use!
The Drug Warriors say: "Don't tread on me! (That said, please continue to tell me what plants I can use, how much pain relief I can get, and whether my religion is true or not.)"
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
Using the billions now spent on caging users, we could end the whole phenomena of both physical and psychological addiction by using "drugs to fight drugs." But drug warriors do not want to end addiction, they want to keep using it as an excuse to ban drugs.
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