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How Ralph Metzner was bamboozled by the Drug War ideology of substance demonization

a review of essay number 15 in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Charles Grob

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





June 29, 2025



The following remarks are part of a series of responses to the essays contained in the 2001 book "Hallucinogens: A Reader," edited by Charles Grob1. The comments below are in response to essay number 15: "Ritual Approaches to Working with Sacred Medicine Plants: an interview with Ralph Metzner, PhD"


This is perhaps the most irritating essay of all in the entire "Hallucinogen" reader2. Ralph Metzner demonstrates clearly that he is completely bamboozled by Drug War propaganda. He agrees with the Drug Warrior notion that drugs can be judged up or down, outside of all context, especially by westerners who have never used them before and who have been blocked from reading positive usage reports for their entire lifetime! And so he tells us that the time-honored panacea called opium3 can have no legitimate uses for anybody, anywhere, ever - except when administered for physical pain by a board-certified doctor. WHAT?! Ralph is thereby signing off on drug prohibition which brought incredible gunfire to inner cities and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America.

Meanwhile, he is ignoring common psychological sense - in a way that people can only do when they have no skin in the game. If Ralph was like myself and lived - totally unnecessarily - with depression on a day-by-day and hour-by-hour basis, he would not categorically rule out the use of a drug whose nightly smoking is far less dangerous than alcohol use and can give me pleasant and creativity-prodding dreams and a blessed respite from futile and masochistic introspection. But then Ralph would never think of asking a would-be opium user what they thought of its use, occasional or otherwise. No, Ralph knows best. He would prefer that I commit suicide4 or have brain-damaging shock therapy5 than to use an evil drug like opium, which he implies should be outlawed.

He fails to notice that by depriving me of almost all psychoactive drugs that truly work, he is thereby helping to shunt me off on Big Pharma pills that have turned me into a ward of the healthcare state6. Ralph's view amounts to this: It is better for me to feel like crap and be on a regular antidepressant than for me to enjoy life with the help of opium. What outrageous presumption on Ralph's part! How can he "know" such things? Has he been inside my head and come away omniscient about what I "really" need?!

This is strange, because both Ralph and his interviewer, Timothy White, seem to agree that drug prohibition is politically motivated madness - and yet they implicitly "sign off" on prohibition by agreeing with its fundamental fallacy: namely, that we can and should judge a drug up or down, as good or bad, based on how we personally feel about that drug in our western world - a world in which all positive drug use is almost totally censored from media.

And so America operates according to this superstitious and imperialist algorithm when it comes to drugs:

A substance that might be misused by a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reasons.


It is impossible to imagine a mindset more likely to bring about unnecessary suffering. My life is just one small example of that fact, the fact that I am rendered "ill at ease" in my own skin because folks like Metzner have decided to judge drugs outside of all context. Thanks, Ralph. The Drug War algorithm thus outlaws the individual's power to take care of their own unique health, which, as Chesterton7 knew, is produced by a vast variety of inputs and their interactions, not by one single input such as a "drug."

As someone who has been "protected" by this fallacious and prejudiced mindset for an entire lifetime now - not simply from "drugs" but from all talk of their positive uses - I resent the way that the Metzners of the world cavalierly tell me in effect to "keep taking your meds," after they outlaw drugs like opium and cocaine that so clearly could lift me from my gloom and make me want to live - yes, even without addicting me - or at least by causing FAR FAR LESS DEPENDENCY than that caused by the Effexor that I am on, which is almost impossible to "kick," especially in a world in which we have outlawed all drugs that could help make that possible.

Were we to treat SSRIs and SNRIs like we do any other drugs, their dependence-causing nature would be pilloried high and low in the media. Instead, we are told to "keep taking our meds."

Metzner reveals all that is wrong with his point of view about drugs in the following sentence:

"One of the problems in the United States is that psychedelics have been mistakenly lumped together with the addictive drugs -- heroin, cocaine, and crack."


No, Ralph, the problem is that we assume that there are drugs that are "beyond the pale" in the first place! The problem is that we believe we should judge drugs based on their worst imaginable use in a world in which we refuse to educate about drugs. What antiscientific hypocrisy! Even cyanide and Botox have positive uses in medicine. As Carl Hart reminds us, most people use drugs wisely8, this despite the government's best efforts to see that drug use ends in disaster, by failing to educate, failing to regulate product and failure to provide drug choice. When we put politicians in charge of deciding in advance what medicines can and cannot work for specific unique individuals, we run roughshod over the right to heal.

THIS is the problem. It is not our failure to separate evil from good drugs - it is our decision that there are things called evil drugs in the first place. And what is the sinister and cynical way that prohibitionists go about doing this: by teaching Americans to fear for the safety of their poor little white kids in the suburbs - never realizing that by thus "protecting" them from themselves, we are outlawing the ability of millions to treat their own mental health - and thereby forcing them to seek help from materialist science and their dependence-causing medicines.

If the opium-loving Benjamin Franklin were living today, Metzner and company would insist that he belonged in a 12-step group!

As Paracelsus knew half a century ago, all drugs can be poisons at some dose: the details matter, and we can never, even in theory, decide about the utility of psychoactive drugs on an objective basis: this is because psychoactive drug use depends on the psychology of unique individuals. This is why prohibition of all kinds is folly. Because, as GK Chesterton reminded us, once you put the government in charge of public health, "there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea.9" In such a world, drug laws are justified by well-heeled branding operations, political PR campaigns to make us "feel" a certain way about certain drugs -- whereas our individual feelings about drugs should never be given veto power over the contents of our pharmacopoeia based on some one-size-fits-all demonization campaign about the drug in question.

Prohibition is the problem, not drugs.

This chapter of Grob's book reminds me of why it is so hard to make progress in ending substance prohibition. In their heart of hearts, most drug law reformers still believe in prohibition, despite the fact that the policy has destroyed inner cities and ended the rule of law in Latin America -- and destroyed democracy in America by arresting minority voters, thereby ensuring the election of fascists. These bamboozled proponents of Drug War Lite believe that there are, indeed, such things as good and bad drugs and that we can distinguish between the two without reference to the needs of unique individuals, whom we would rather treat as interchangeable widgets with the use of one-size-fits-all antidepressants.

Hallucinogens: a Reader, edited by Charles Grob




Essays about the opinions expressed in Hallucinogens by Charles Grob.

  • Cocaine and Ecstasy are not evil
  • Drug Prohibition and the Metaphysical Search for 'Real' Religious Inspiration
  • How Ralph Metzner was bamboozled by the Drug War ideology of substance demonization
  • Sartre and Speed
  • The Drug War is One Big Branding Operation to Demonize Mind and Mood Medicine
  • The metaphysics of drug use and how the Drug War outlaws religious liberty
  • The thin line between honesty and fearmongering in the age of the War on Drugs
  • Want to end freedom in America? Just terrify philosophically clueless parents about the boogieman called drugs
  • Why America cracked down on LSD


    • Notes:

    1: Hallucinogens: a reader (up)
    2: Hallucinogens: a reader (up)
    3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
    4: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use (up)
    5: Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War (up)
    6: How materialists turned me into a patient for life (up)
    7: Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument against the Scientifically Organized State (up)
    8: Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (up)
    9: Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument against the Scientifically Organized State (up)







    Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.

    This is the problem with trusting science to tell us about drugs. Science means reductive materialism, whereas psychoactive drug use is all about mind and the human being as a whole. We need pharmacologically savvy shaman to guide us, not scientists.

    The UN of today is in an odd position regarding drugs: they want to praise indigenous societies while yet outlawing the drugs that helped create them.

    Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?

    It's really an insurance concern, however, disguised as a concern for public health. Because of America's distrust of "drugs," a company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.

    Most enemies of inner-city gun violence refuse to protest against the drug prohibition which caused the violence in the first place.

    This is why I call the drug war 'fanatical Christian Science.' People would rather have grandpa die than to let him use laughing gas or coca or opium or MDMA, etc. etc.

    First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws. 3:51 PM ยท Jul 15, 2024

    Psychedelics and entheogens should be freely available to all dementia patients. These medicines can increase neuronal plasticity and even grow new neurons. Besides, they can inspire and elate -- or do we puritans feel that our loved ones have no right to peace of mind?

    How would we even KNOW that outlawed drugs have no positive uses? We first have to incorporate them in a sane, empathic and creative way to find that out, and the drug war makes such a sensible approach absolutely impossible.


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






    Two things that Aldous Huxley got wrong about drugs
    The thin line between honesty and fearmongering in the age of the War on Drugs


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