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How Prohibition Causes Addiction

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 20, 2023



To say that addiction is a brain disorder is bad science, but even worse philosophy. It's just a little convenient that addiction should be diagnosed in precisely those cases where people show a marked predilection for substances of which politicians disapprove. This label of addiction, moreover, represents a judgment about what constitutes the good life. When we say that addiction is wrong, we are saying basically that the search for self-transcendence is pathological, that one should be happy with the world as it is without drugs that give insight into higher realms, that the mind should not be improved. This, of course, is a sociopolitical/aesthetic/religious judgment, not a scientific one, the more so in that society holds muddled views about self-transcendence. Society believes that some kids need a form of speed called Ritalin in order to concentrate in class while simultaneously believing that no adult human beings ever require a similar boost in their powers of mentation. That's a logically incoherent position. And even if the search for self-transcendence has negative consequences in one's life, we cannot fairly evaluate any given case without first acknowledging the role that prohibition itself played in rendering use problematic. How? By strictly limiting the quality and quantity of available drugs while insisting that it's defeatist treason in the War on Drugs to teach safe use.

Addiction, in fact, is a natural result of prohibition. The outlawing of mind-enhancing drugs leads to a severe limit in the substances to which an illicit user has access. No wonder users get stuck on one specific drug: they had to leap huge dangerous hurdles just to have access to that one specific choice; they do not have a smorgasbord of obvious alternatives from which to choose. Nor should this come as a surprise. After all, a trillion-dollar effort is underway to ensure that users have no illicit options whatsoever.

We believe that addiction is an almost insurmountable disorder because we are blind to the ways that this phenomenon could be treated or even nipped in the bud. Why? Because to combat addiction, we need to be willing and able to use drugs to fight drugs, and that's something that today's indoctrinated doctors cannot imagine, having been programmed by their government since grade-school in the drug-hating ideology of Mary Baker Eddy. Doctors have this anti-scientific belief that drugs as chemically different as MDMA and coca are basically all the same thing: i.e., "drugs," in the pejorative sense of that word. And so they are blind to a vast array of therapies that would be common sense for anyone who was not a member of the Cult of the American Drug War.

Our therapeutic imaginations have been stunted by Drug War prejudices. Here is a list of a few of the many drug-enabled treatments that our "addicts" might undergo - or rather CHOOSE to undergo - in a world in which politicians no longer control how (and how much) we are allowed to think and feel in this life:

  1. The use of MDMA 1 to inspire faith in humanity and compassion for others

  2. The use of morphine 2 to inspire a surreal appreciation of Mother Nature (See Poe's "Tale of the Ragged Mountains")

  3. The use of opium in order to gain perspective on one's life and jog one's creative faculties

  4. The use of salvia to encounter encouraging "spirits" from another world (thereby following up the work left us by William James himself in investigating the true nature of reality)

  5. A trip on DMT to divert the mind, encounter "spirits," etc., maybe even get hints about ultimate realities

  6. A trip on psilocybin to help clarify one's goals in life



I can feel Euro-Americans cringing at these suggestions. After all, did we not travel west over 500 years ago in order to bully the locals into renouncing their quest for drug-inspired transcendence? And where would the addiction industry be today if everyone had the right to use substances of which politicians disapprove?

What I'm writing about here is the process of obfuscation. Is the drug you're using causing problems (besides the many caused by prohibition itself)? Then let's distract your mind with the effects of a wide variety of other substances.

Right now, drug law basically gives the user one choice: use your poison of choice or use nothing at all. But in a free world, we would be able to crowd the field of use with so many diverse substances that there would no longer be the monomaniacal focus on one specific drug which is said to be the hallmark of addiction. And if the predilection is for opioids, fine. We would teach the user how that taste can be accommodated safely and sanely with the nightly smoking of opium .

Unfortunately, Drug Warriors prefer that we be ignorant about drugs instead and fear them. And now they are pointing to the very downsides of that inane policy as a reason to continue their War on Drugs.

The Drug War is a superstition: it tells us that substances that we call "drugs" have no positive uses for anyone, at any dose, for any reason, in any circumstance, ever. In reality, there are no substances of that kind on earth. Even cyanide has positive uses.

Until modern science rejects this superstition, society will remain blind to an awesome list of drug-enabled psychoactive therapies that is limited only by our imagination, an imagination, alas, which has been atrophied thus far by the western world's religious and cultural disdain for altered states.

This prejudice will be hard to shake, of course, since the philosophy of the West (with a few notable exceptions such as William James) has always ignored the power of psychoactive medicines to teach us anything at all. Post-Enlightenment philosophers like Kant, for instance, tell us ex-cathedra that there are severe limits to what we can know about ultimate reality, but they knew nothing about the hints and road signs that appear to users of drugs like salvia, peyote, ayahuasca, LSD and ibogaine. Hume seemed to share Kant's ignorance on this topic, but that did not stop him from quickly dismissing drugs as an impractical way to change culture. Marx at least indirectly recognized the power of drugs when he told us that religion was the opiate of the masses. Unfortunately, he never stopped to consider what the world might be like if opium itself were the opiate of the masses, as Jim Hogshire suggested. The 20th century might have been a lot less bloody had everyday folk been minding their own business and seeking liberation on the mental front rather than listening in rapture as demagogues agitated on behalf of a highly speculative interpretation of the philosophy of Friedrich Hegel.






Author's Follow-up: November 13, 2023



Jim Hogshire told us In 1999 that there were already sleep cures for opium 3 addiction, that reduced much of the time and suffering of physical dependency upon opiates. Imagine how such treatments could blossom in a world where they were studied full-time and in which the use of ANY substance was encouraged provided that it held out hope for the individuals concerned. Imagine a world in which we spent billions on research rather than incarceration 4 . As far as psychological dependency, there is no reason for such a phenomena in which all substances are legal and we encourage understanding. In that case, it takes merely a little creativity to develop any number of protocols to divert the attention of a would-be psychological "addict" with substances that elate and inspire and take the individual's mind completely off of the substance that might otherwise threaten to become a problem drug.

But Drug Warriors rely on addiction as their trump card to inspire a superstitious fear of drugs, so that they can continue to win elections by screaming about law and order, thereby incarcerating their political enemies by first tempting the poor with the massive profits of prohibition and then following up by arresting them and removing them from the voting rolls.



Notes:

1: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts (up)
2: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School (up)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
4: Inner-City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration (up)


Addiction




"The irreducible core of the disease theory of addiction is still as strong as ever -- the significant distinction between good and bad opiate use is whether it's medically supervised." --Emperors of Dreams by Mike Jay


Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the drug war censors honest talk about drug use.

In short, until we end the drug war, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.

Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both drug war ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.

  • Addicted to Addiction
  • Addicted to Ignorance
  • Addiction
  • America's Great Anti-Depressant Scam
  • America's Invisible Addiction Crisis
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How Drug Prohibition Causes Relapses
  • How Prohibition Causes Addiction
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Libertarians as Closet Christian Scientists
  • Modern Addiction Treatment as Puritan Indoctrination
  • Night of the Addicted Americans
  • Notes about the Madness of Drug Prohibition
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Prohibition Spectrum Disorder
  • Public Service Announcements for the Post-Drug War Era
  • Sherlock Holmes versus Gabor Maté
  • Tapering for Jesus
  • The aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependency
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.

    Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy. It is based on the following crazy idea: that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.

    "In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud

    They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."

    Freud found that cocaine CURED most people's depression and he "got off it" without trouble. I'm on a Big Pharma antidepressant that has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users. Drug prohibition is insane and a crime against humanity.

    Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.

    In the board game "Sky Team," you collect "coffees" to improve your flying skills. Funny how the use of any other brain-focusing "drug" in real life is considered to be an obvious sign of impairment.

    SSRIs are created based on the materialist notion that cures should be found under a microscope. That's why science is so slow in acknowledging the benefit of plant medicines. Anyone who chooses SSRIs over drugs like San Pedro cactus is simply uninformed.

    Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war: "clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."

    According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.


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






    The Drug War Imperialism of Richard Evans Schultes
    Prohibition Spectrum Disorder


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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