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How the Archive.org Website Censors Free Speech About Drugs

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





February 26, 2025



This was going to be an essay about my new plan to protest the Drug War by reviewing government-supplied propaganda on Archive.org. I was going to engage in a frenzy of reviewing because most of the site's drug-related content had yet to receive reviews, and so my own reviews would have pride of place as being first in line. But then something happened that changed my priorities completely. I had just finished my critique of a NIDA1 article entitled QQ1006. I had pointed out how NIDA was a propaganda arm of the U.S. government, and that it would always be so until it began to recognize both the glaringly obvious benefits of drug use and the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition. This was going to be the opening salvo in my campaign of posting reviews against the hateful War on Drugs. The form was filled out and ready to go...

And then I clicked "submit."

Instead of receiving a confirmation message or a thank-you, I received instead the following chilling announcement:

"It looks like your review triggered our spam detector."


Yes, and it looked like their site had triggered my BS detector.

Suddenly, the big story of the day was not my decision to review articles on Archive.org: the big story was the fact that minority opinions about drugs are not welcome in the age of the Drug War and so are censored at will. They are subject to Kafkaesque veto thanks to code written by anonymous techies who have been brainwashed in grade-school about the evil of godsend medicines. Suddenly, the big story was censorship, the fact that the Drug War mindset had effectively outlawed free speech2. I had encountered such censorship before, back in 2020, when I had posted a drug-related question for Professor Patrick Grim and it was automatically deleted by algorithms used by the Wondrium company during a virtual discussion forum. (See my essay entitled &253& for more on that 2020 censorship.) I knew, moreover, that self-censorship was rampant in the age of the Drug War (see my essay entitled &156&, also written in 2020). But I had not been so suddenly censored in five years, and I was not prepared for it. It was like a smart slap in the face.

The censorship had at least one positive outcome, however. It reminded me how there are life-and-death issues at stake when it comes to the War on Drugs and that the topic represents more than just an opportunity for the philosophically minded to expose the puerile assumptions on which such a policy is based. The Drug War is having hateful anti-democratic consequences right here and now in the real world. I had a similar feeling last night in watching an old episode of Night Gallery set in a state penitentiary. As the camera panned by the barbed wire and tall cement walls, it reminded me that there are real victims of Drug War policy, hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caged as we speak for having used and/or dealt with substances that the government had no right to outlaw in the first place, least of all in a country founded on natural law, a doctrine which tells us, according to John Locke himself, that "the earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being3."


Review of


QQ1006, an article by NIDA


Archive.org refused to publish this review thanks to algorithms written by anonymous coders who value drug-war orthodoxy over free speech.


The government study of drugs is HUGELY biased. Their researchers ignore all the benefits of drugs as well as all the downsides of prohibition. Their only job is to demonize drug use by holding it to a safety standard that we apply to no other activity on planet Earth: not to free climbing, not to drag-racing, and certainly not to gun shooting or drinking alcohol. Speaking of alcohol, it kills 178,000 a year according to the CDC, and yet the government invites us to fear drugs like Ecstasy, which have killed no one. The only deaths related to Ecstasy are those caused by the Drug War, which refuses to educate about safe use and to regulate product.

Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace, love and understanding to the dance floors of Britain in the 1990s, but Drug Warriors do not like peace, love and understanding. And so Drug Warriors cracked down on the use of Ecstasy, after which violence SKYROCKETED at rave concerts as dancers switched to the anger-facilitating drug called alcohol, and concert organizers had to bring in special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces!

NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition, thanks to which America's inner cities have been turned into shooting galleries and the rule of law is now a joke in much of Latin America. 60,000 Mexicans have been "disappeared" thanks to the Drug War over the last 20 years4, and yet NIDA 5 wants to outlaw a drug whose only crime is that it brought about unprecedented peace, love and understanding.

We don't need a National Institute on Drug Abuse. We need a National Institute on Drug USE -- an agency that recognizes the benefits of drugs and the downsides of prohibition.




Notes:

1: NIDA is the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Its bias is clear in its name. If it were an objective organization, it would be called the National Institute on Drug USE. (up)
2: Speak now or forever hold your peace about drug prohibition (up)
3: Second Treatise of Government (up)
4: Mexico's war on drugs: More than 60,000 people 'disappeared' (up)
5: How The NIDA Blocks Marijuana Research Over and Over (up)


Internet Archive Censorship




The Internet Archive runs censorship algorithms on autopilot. They flagged my criticism of a NIDA article as 'spam.' They could not even tell me why the algorithm called it spam, but they refused to overrule the algorithm. They apparently fail to realize that algorithms are written by real people based on real assumptions -- and that an algorithm is clearly wrong when it trashes legitimate opinion as 'spam.' Here is the letter that I wrote to the staff to complain of their censorship. I sent this letter to at least 20 separate staffers, to give it at least some chance of being attended to -- for experience shows that the vast majority of people at such organizations will ghost you should you bring up a drug-related topic.

I paste the letter below now without further comment....



Amir Esfahani et al. 3-30-25
c/o The Internet Archive
300 Funston Ave
San Francisco, CA 94118

Dear Mr. Esfahani:

I am writing to protest the Internet Archive's use of algorithms to censor free speech about drugs.

I recently wrote a review of a NIDA article on Internet Archive entitled "Research Report Series 2017 MDMA (Ecstasy) Abuse." In my review, I pointed out the biases of NIDA and how they ignore all glaringly obvious benefits of psychoactive substances. The review was blocked by your algorithms as "spam."
Spam? I am used to being banned and blocked for speaking the truth about drug policy, but how exactly do my comments (see below) qualify as spam? Perhaps you could ask the programmer who wrote the algorithms and get back to me?

When I protested to IA, I received no response until I threatened a lawsuit -- even though I had received same-day service when my questions concerned donating to your site. An anonymous member of your "Internet Archive Team" finally got back to me by email and told me that they themselves were uncertain why my review was blocked. This alone should have been grounds for permitting my review to be published! Instead, they seemed to think that the algorithm that blocked me was infallible and should not be second guessed. In fact, they said that IA made a point of not intervening personally in censorship decisions and relied totally on their algorithms.

WHAT? Do you not realize that algorithms are written by actual people based on actual assumptions? Your censorship algorithms should not be on autopilot. You should be tracking down the algorithm maker and asking them why they are flagging free speech about drugs as "spam."

The team member speculated that my review might have lacked specifics about the article in question, but that is a sham excuse for censoring me. There are plenty of reviews on IA that do not mention specifics but rather praise the authors. Why then am I blocked for suggesting that the authors of an IA article are biased on the subject about which they write?

It is "chilling" to have one's review blocked in real-time by a faceless algorithm. When you take such a drastic step, you have a responsibility to make the reason as clear as possible to the would-be posters and not to simply flag their comments with a mendacious catch-all term such as "spam." If you want some pointers for how to use censorship algorithms fairly, consistently, and in a user-friendly way, just ask and I will provide you with some common-sense suggestions.

Meanwhile, I ask you to please publish my review and to stop suppressing it for algorithmic reasons that you yourselves admit you do not understand.

Yours Truly...................

The following is my Banned Review of the NIDA article on the Internet Archive entitled "Research Report Series 2017 MDMA (Ecstasy) Abuse."

The government study of drugs is HUGELY biased. Their researchers ignore all the benefits of drugs as well as all the downsides of prohibition. Their only job is to demonize drug use by holding it to a safety standard that we apply to no other activity on planet Earth: not to free climbing, not to drag-racing, and certainly not to gun shooting or drinking alcohol. Speaking of alcohol, it kills 178,000 a year according to the CDC, and yet the government invites us to fear drugs like Ecstasy, which have killed no one. The only deaths related to Ecstasy are those caused by the Drug War, which refuses to educate about safe use and to regulate product.

Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace, love and understanding to the dance floors of Britain in the 1990s, but Drug Warriors do not like peace, love and understanding. And so Drug Warriors cracked down on the use of Ecstasy, after which violence SKYROCKETED at rave concerts as dancers switched to the anger-facilitating drug called alcohol, and concert organizers had to bring in special forces troops to keep the peace. Special forces!

NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition, thanks to which America's inner cities have been turned into shooting galleries and the rule of law is now a joke in much of Latin America. 60,000 Mexicans have been "disappeared" thanks to the Drug War over the last 20 years, and yet NIDA wants to outlaw a drug whose only crime is that it brought about unprecedented peace, love and understanding.

We don't need a National Institute on Drug Abuse. We need a National Institute on Drug USE -- an agency that recognizes the benefits of drugs and the downsides of prohibition.


  • Demonizing Human Transcendence
  • Even Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug War
  • How the Archive.org Website Censors Free Speech About Drugs
  • How the Internet Archive Censors Free Speech about Drugs
  • Self-Censorship in the Age of the Drug War
  • When Drug Warriors cry 'Censorship!'
  • How the Archive.org Website Censors Free Speech About Drugs
  • How the Internet Archive Censors Free Speech about Drugs
  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan says psychedelic legalization would endanger young people. What? Prohibition forces users to decide for themselves which mushrooms are toxic, or to risk buying contaminated product. And that's safe, Michael?

    Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).

    People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.

    The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.

    This is why it's wrong to dismiss drugs as "good" or "bad." There are endless potential positive uses to psychoactive drugs. That's all that we should ask of them.

    "The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.

    Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use the many drugs that improve and speed up mental processes.

    I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.

    The Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. It is therefore a crime against religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate.

    Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.


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






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