I recently read a tweet on my Twitter feed stating that certain drugs cannot be used wisely for recreational purposes.
This is the kind of pushback that I sometimes get after citing positive uses for demonized drugs. It's like people want to believe me, but they have their own list of substances that they believe are completely without merit. It's almost like they would not mind the Drug War if it would only concentrate on the correct list of presumably "useless" drugs, at least from the point of view of a recreational user.
This is why the Drug War stays around so long. You can get people to believe that outlawing marijuana was wrong, and you might even persuade them that we should not be outlawing psychedelics. But they will still say: "Yes, but you've got to admit that drugs like opium and cocaine are still pure evil!" This was essentially Terence McKenna 1 's condescending take on non-psychedelic drugs2. It was also how Andrew Weil saw matters3. And I'm talking here about people that are presumably friendly toward the idea of decriminalization, if not legalization 4 .
The problem is, none of them really "get it." The whole problem with the Drug War is that it tells us we can reliably make these kind of emotional snap judgments about individual psychoactive drugs, like in this case, that there are drugs that cannot be used wisely on a recreational basis and that we could perhaps even name them if we had to.
I personally can think of no drugs that cannot be used wisely, at least in theory. Carl Hart tells us how he himself has used Fentanyl and crack cocaine wisely, and not in theory but in practice5. Of course, I'm not a pharmacist and I'm talking here about the drugs that are generally available on the streets. But it's hard to see how any drug can be classed as irredeemably bad, at least when we consider the variable of dosage. A killer at one dose might be a lifesaver at a lesser dose.
As a thought experiment, one can imagine a drug that makes one biophysically dependent after the very first use, but that drug could still be used at a lower dose or in combination with other drugs or in sociocultural situations in which expectations vary, as do the biophysical and genetic makeup of the user. When we consider the sheer number of such variables, we see that it is presumptuous to say that any particular drug has no good uses, even for recreational purposes. How would we know? Have we considered every possible usage in every possible culture at every possible dose and in every possible combination? All we dare say is that we do not know of anyone who has found a safe use yet for a given drug, but that's quite a different statement from the proposition with which I commenced this essay. Perhaps the drug of which we are personally skeptical will someday be combined with another substance to make a new improved ayahuasca.
I used to have this flawed viewpoint myself. I used to look at tobacco and say, "Well, at least we can all agree that tobacco is horrible." But it turns out that it's not so simple. The ancient cultures of Central and South America have used tobacco shamanically for ages6. When we Americans say that tobacco is bad, we are really saying something like this: "This particular strain of tobacco is bad when consumed in this fashion at this dosage for American people living an American lifestyle and eating an American diet and harboring merely materialist expectations with respect to their drug use." Nor is opium a drug that cannot be used wisely. To the contrary, all the great doctors (Paracelsus, Galen, Avicenna) have considered it to be a panacea. Nor has it killed millions of Chinese, despite the Big Lie of American missionaries in the 19th century7.
But I get it. The scheduling system has geared us to think in terms of the relative danger of given drugs8. But the scheduling system should not exist for a variety of reasons.
First, it should not be up to bureaucrats to decide what is dangerous in this life - especially when their jobs depend on there being as many "dangerous" substances in the world as possible.
Second: the scheduling system does not take into account the danger of having a drug outlawed: the mass arrests, the overcrowded prisons, the pain patients who go without adequate medication, the inner cities that are devastated by gang violence, and the civil wars that are generated overseas. In reality, cocaine 910 is probably the most dangerous drug in the world right now, but that is not because of any of its inherent qualities: it is the most dangerous drug for the simple reason that it is outlawed.
Of course, many people will scoff at the DEA's scheduling system, but instead of hoping to abolish it altogether, they just want to change the ranking of the drugs. They think they could do a much better job of it than the DEA. But they do not understand. The problem is this desire to rank these perceived dangers in the first place. Such rankings will always be misleading, and not just for the reasons already stated above but because the DEA is committed to the absurd proposition that the use of these substances provides no benefits whatsoever, which is simply another Big Lie. How can the DEA do a cost/benefit analysis about drugs while refusing to acknowledge any of their benefits?
Finally, I am suspicious of the term "recreational use." I sometimes think that "recreational use" just means: "drug use by the kind of people that we despise."11
Imagine a guy that you consider to be a slacker who takes some MDMA in order to have a good time with his mates at a rave. Recreational drug use, right? But then we have a goody-two-shoes of the same age who has been prescribed MDMA 12 for anxiety by his expensive psychiatrist. Medicinal use, right? Well, actually, both uses are for the same purpose: so that the users can go places in the world and interact more freely with the people around them. But the slacker embarrasses the Puritan in us by saying things like, "We are gonna party tonight!" We want to justify our prudishness by slandering the guy's drug use as "recreational." We are much more comfortable with the pedantic nerd who merely tells us in an apologetic voice that, "I am going to interact more maturely with my fellow human beings tonight." "Good man," we respond. "And as always, thank you for taking your meds!"
Remember, I am talking about an ideal world here. Certain drugs may indeed be difficult to use wisely, but that is because of the Drug War itself, which refuses to educate, meanwhile limiting the user's supply to a handful of drugs of which the quality is always suspect. The problem here is not with the drugs, it is with the Drug War which keeps us ignorant and surrounded by a niggardly and contaminated pharmacopoeia. We must recognize this latter distinction; otherwise the Drug War will live forever as the Drug Warrior continues to blame drugs for all the problems that are actually caused by prohibition.
Author's Follow-up: June 23, 2024
Okay, you say, "It's common sense that opium is a hard drug and very dangerous." I say, "What's even more dangerous, though, is outlawing a healer like that and giving government the power to dole out pain relief."
So you see, there are philosophical assumptions behind your judgment of opium. You do not see all the dangers relevant to a discussion of opium's legality, only the ones that you are focusing on: the upfront dangers to white young people. I, on the other hand, think that personal liberty and access to Mother Nature are more valuable than saving the world from dangerous activities like using drugs -- just as it's better to let people occasionally die from horseback riding than to outlaw the sport. You, on the other hand, say that it's better to outlaw personal freedom viz. the plant world and pain relief.
You see then, this matter of judging drugs is not an objective game: it is subjective and depends on what one ultimately values in life and what one believes would behoove the purportedly free nation in which one lives.
Author's Follow-up: February 4, 2025
GK Chesterton understood all this. He reminded us, in the age of liquor prohibition, that health consists of a balance of factors, it is not a thing in itself. Once government is put in charge of our personal health, it then becomes a subjective matter as to what is considered dangerous. Chesterton pointed out that tea itself could be outlawed just as easily as liquor, once we start evaluating substances subjectively like this.
That subjectivity has since given a field day to Drug Warriors, who realized that they could destroy American freedoms by doing a little subjective fearmongering of their own on the subject of drugs. And so they demonize substances and get away with it, because we have forgotten that health is a balance -- and that no one element of that balance is decisive.
The sad fact is that America regularly arrests people whose only crime is that they are keeping performance anxiety at bay... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
Antidepressants might be fine in a world where drugs were legal. Then it would actually be possible to get off them by using drugs that have inspired entire religions. In the age of prohibition, however, an antidepressant prescription is usually a life sentence.
We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.
Today's Washington Post reports that "opioid pills shipped" DROPPED 45% between 2011 and 2019..... while fatal overdoses ROSE TO RECORD LEVELS! Prohibition is PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.
The existence of a handful of bad outcomes of drug use does not justify substance prohibition... any more than the existence of drunkards justifies a call for liquor prohibition. Instead, we need to teach safe use and offer a wide choice of uncontaminated psychoactive drugs.
Malcolm X sensed an important truth about drugs: the fact that it was always a self-interested category error for Americans to place medical doctors in charge of mind and mood medicine.
If I beat my depression by smoking opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag subject to immediate arrest. But if I do NOT "take my meds" every day of my life, I am a bad patient.
Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.
The drug war tells us that certain drugs have no potential uses and then turns that into a self-fulfilling prophecy by outlawing these drugs. This is insanely anti-scientific and anti-progress. We should never give up on looking for positive uses for ANY substance.
Many prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. Drugs cannot be judged up or down. Prohibition is the problem. Say otherwise and you open the door to endless substance demonization by politicians.
The sad fact is that America regularly arrests people whose only crime is that they are keeping performance anxiety at bay... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
