In re-reading the following essay from over three years ago, I sense that I was being too diplomatic by half back in 2022. Had I written this essay today, I would have gone straight for the jugular by pointing out, first and foremost, that Francis Fukuyama, just like Bill Clinton1, is in complete denial about the ENDLESS downsides of drug prohibition. Complete denial.
As Ann Heather Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014:
"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist." 2
Not only does Francis ignore this fact, but he actually blames inner-city residents for failing to accept still MORE policing as the answer to their problems. Still more policing. Francis ignores the fact that the police CREATED the problems in the first place by enforcing drug laws that incentivized HUGE violence in inner cities. Calling in the police to fight drug violence is like calling in an arsonist to help put out a fire that he himself started.
It was liquor prohibition that first brought machine-gun-fire to America's erstwhile tranquil streets, and it was liquor and then drug prohibition that armed inner-city neighborhoods to the teeth in the first place. It is so obvious: prohibition is the problem. And yet Francis, like almost every other author today, reckons without the Drug War. He never mentions the hateful policy in his book, and he only mentions drugs in a pejorative fashion, as if inanimate objects called "drugs" were the cause of problems instead of disastrous social policies that refuse to teach safe use, refuse to regulate product as to quantity and quality, refuse to offer drug choice, and which incentivize gunfire.
This is inexcusable. We all know that liquor prohibition brought folks like Al Capone out of the woodwork and created the Mafia as we know it today. And yet Americans like Francis Fukuyama and Bill Clinton (and, needless to add, Donald Trump) pretend to see no problems with drug prohibition. This blindness has hateful racist overtones since the communities that pay the price for our kneejerk penchant for criminalizing substances are minority and impoverished communities.
Sure, the police could be helpful... but only after we end substance prohibition which has created inner-city violence out of whole cloth. Until then, the Drug War simply gives racist cops a license to hassle minorities. And this is blatant racism. As jazzman Dizzy Gillespie pointed out, police never searched Isaac Stern for drugs prior to a concert in which he was taking part, and yet police routinely seek to search minorities like Dizzy before their concerts. This is not a bug when it comes to drug law, this is how drug law is meant to operate: it is meant to put police in charge of hassling minorities in a way in which they would never dare to hassle upper-class white people.
"The contempt with which the jazzman is regarded can be seen in a story which famed trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie tells about being searched for drugs by police in Philadelphia. He refused to be searched and asked the police if they searched violinist Isaac Stern when he played in Philadelphia. Obviously, the police applied different standards to Stern than to Gillespie, although both men are great musicians." --Charles Winick, as quoted by Mike Jay in Artificial Paradises : a drugs reader, p. 159-160 3
And yet Drug Warriors are afflicted by a highly convenient two-fold blindness: First, they recognize none of the glaringly obvious downsides of drug prohibition and second, they recognize none of the glaringly obvious upsides of drug use -- the kinds of upsides that have inspired entire religions. Drugs like Soma, cannabis, opium and coca have all had religious uses in the past, as has the use of a host of naturally occurring psychoactive substances about whose very existence the intoxiphobic west has been dogmatically ignorant until recently, until the ethnobotanical work of folks like Richard Schultes4, Gordon Wasson5 and Terence McKenna6. Meanwhile, white Americans are blind to the way that drug prohibition is decimating inner cities even as we speak. 67,000 minorities were killed in America's inner cities over the last ten years thanks to gunfire that was incentivized by drug prohibition7. 60,000 Mexicans were "disappeared" over the last two decades thanks to the Drug War down south8. Meanwhile, drug prohibition led to the election of Donald Trump by throwing over a million minorities in jail and so removing them from the voting rolls9.
Meanwhile, liquor kills 178,000 a year in America alone10. And yet Francis is not calling for the police to raid white neighborhoods to keep them from misusing alcohol.
Let's be honest: Fukuyama is hypocritically championing a racist prohibitionist policy about drugs, and this in a world in which Jim Beam Bourbon targets ads at young people on prime-time television11!
This is not just racism but hugely hypocritical racism.
And yet Fukuyama rewrites history to make it appear that inner-city violence is caused by evil drug-dealing minorities and not by the white Drug Warriors who incentivized drug dealing as an excuse to crack down on minority communities. We are told that Drug Warriors are interested in public health -- and yet these same Drug Warriors insist on being able to sell guns to these very communities that we have primed for violence by outlawing desired substances. Thus authors like Fukuyama drive a narrative that has nothing to do with reality but which serves to legitimize and normalize the hateful minority-crushing status quo.
Sadly, Fukuyama is in good company. Most other modern non-fiction authors reckon without the Drug War as well, both on the left and on the right. In "A People's history of the United States," progressive historian Howard Zinn12 never mentions the Drug War once. Not once. Neither does conservative historian Paul Johnson in "Birth of the Modern13." The latter author mentions drugs several times, but, of course, only in connection with misuse, abuse and addiction -- in sections that Paul probably wrote while "throwing back" the white man's drug called liquor. Thus we see that the Drug War is the perfect racist crime. It turns inner-city neighborhoods into no-go zones and subjects minority young people to death by drive-by shootings -- and yet the downsides of drug prohibition remain off the radar of all of our white pundits.
And so we see that drug laws allow hypocritical white Americans to be as racist as they want to be -- taking advantage of the fact that even minority leaders are bamboozled by the enormous twin lies of the Drug War: namely, that drug use has no upsides and that drug prohibition has no downsides.
But let's personalize this criticism. The drug prohibition that Francis tacitly champions in his book resulted in the death of kids like 15-year-old Niomi Russell, who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2024 in Washington, D.C, thanks to violence that Francis knows perfectly well results from outlawing desired substances14. We know this. We lived and learned this in the 1920s during liquor prohibition. But we ignore this obvious truth in the present because we see that those drug-war downsides can be leveraged to decimate minority populations and so hand elections to white racist Drug Warriors.
I am sure that Francis is not consciously aware of these inconvenient truths: but then that is the problem. Over 100 years of drug prohibition propaganda has bamboozled authors like Fukuyama into believing that drug prohibition is some kind of natural baseline, that it has no negative effects in the real world, and nothing could be further from the truth. The Drug War has destroyed inner cities and placed a racist would-be fascist in the White House. The Drug War has eroded American freedoms and rendered entire constitutional amendments null and void when it comes to drugs. The Drug War has placed the Trump regime in power. How much more proof does Francis need to waken him from his dogmatic slumbers?
How can one write about the modern world without mentioning drug prohibition, let alone the fact that this superstitious social policy has militarized our world, censored academia, destroyed minority communities, and denied human beings their once-inalienable right to access Mother Nature and to have sovereignty over their own mental and emotional states?
Francis' book is based on make-believe history, a history which takes drug prohibition as a natural baseline. But then science writers do the exact same thing. They reckon without the Drug War and so write make-believe science. And so they tell us that depression is a tough nut to crack, that we need many more expensive reductionist lab studies to find answers; whereas, in reality, I could end my depression in a trice with the wise use of the endless inspiring medicines that America has outlawed precisely because they have the potential for inspiring users. Just look at the drugs that the DEA has placed on so-called Schedule I: they have nothing in common except the fact that they all have the potential for inspiring and elating. In other words, these are the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions -- and this is what the Drug Warrior is afraid of. Drug laws are designed to keep us all in line, ideologically speaking, to give us all a common scapegoat and so unite multiethnic America in a common hatred, thereby dividing and conquering and keeping our minds off of enormous income inequality and the humiliating practice of urine testing -- not to find impairment, but rather to identify Christian Science heretics and so remove them from the workforce, without so much as putting them on trial before doing so.
And so the Drug War is inherently anti-religion. It is worse than the outlawing of a specific religion, it is the outlawing of the religious impulse itself.
But, of course, Francis never comes close to such a realization, since he is blind to the most basic of facts. To repeat and re-emphasize: Francis has fallen for the enormous two-fold lie of the Drug War: that drugs have no upsides and that the prohibition has no downsides.
Question: How do folks like Francis and Bill get away with this?
Answer: The downsides of prohibition are just too large for them to see. There are "no-go" zones in every major U.S. city thanks to drug prohibition -- and no-go zones in minor cities as well -- and yet Francis and company pretend not to notice that fact. If they only had a little self-knowledge, they would be down on their knees, begging forgiveness from minority communities for killing their young people and destroying their infrastructure with drug laws designed for that very purpose. But we should not hold our breath waiting for these stealth racists to apologize, because they are pathologically blind to the hell that they create. Like the rest of the mainstream white community, they just program their GPS to avoid such no-go zones -- never stopping to take credit for the fact that these no-go zones are the result of the blatant racism of modern drug prohibition.
MAY 2022 ESSAY
Dear Professor Fukuyama:
I am greatly enjoying your book entitled "Liberalism and its Discontents.15"
I just would like to share one insight on the subject of drugs, however.
You mention the right to use "drugs" in connection with Libertarians, as if to at least partially disparage (or at least question) the supposed importance of that right. But I would ask you to consider that the very category of "drugs" (meaning "psychoactive substances of which politicians disapprove") is a 20th-century invention and that this "right to drugs" takes on a very different light for those of us who define "drugs" as "godsend plant medicine," as many people do who are familiar with the promise of the many psychoactive plant medicines that Drug Warriors have decided to demonize a priori by focusing myopically on their potential to harm.
For the word "drugs," as most people use it today, is just a pejorative Christian Science epithet for "psychoactive botanicals." As such, the topic of "drugs" provides a very fraught example to use in attempting to illustrate the extremes of political thought that hover around the core ideas of liberalism. You suggest the right to use drugs may be an illiberal demand, but is it really such a non-liberal thing to consider that human beings have a right to the plant medicine that grows at their very feet, a right that everyone took for granted until 1914 and the Harrison Narcotics Act took the unprecedented step of criminalizing a plant?
One need not be a Libertarian to decry the fact that the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants, thereby showing their disdain for the natural law upon which Jefferson founded America. For as John Locke wrote in his Second Treatise on Government, human beings have a natural right to the use of the land "and all that lies therein."
While you may think of irresponsible hedonism when the politicized word "drugs" is mentioned, I personally think of the Vedic religion which was inspired by the use of psychoactive Soma. I think of Marcus Aurelius stoically meditating with the help of opium and of Plato getting his views of the afterlife from the psychedelic Eleusinian mysteries16. I think of HG Wells and Jules Verne enjoying how coca wine helped them focus and write great stories. But most of all, I think of the ghost of Thomas Jefferson, rolling in his grave as the DEA stomped onto his estate in 1987 to confiscate his poppy plants.
In sum, I think that it's very illiberal indeed for a government to tell its people that they no longer have a right to the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet. That's why I would respectfully take exception to your use of the topic of "drugs" to allude to potentially dubious rights viz. what liberalism could justifiably call for.
Otherwise greatly enjoying your book. I had to speak up on this one subject, however, since I've spent 40+ years of life addicted to Big Pharma meds for want of the far less addictive godsends that my government continues to withhold from me to this very day in the name of the war on the hypocritically defined category called "drugs," which includes neither alcohol nor tobacco, which respectively kill half a million Americans a year, nor the Big Pharma antidepressants upon which 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent for life. That's a medical dystopia so large that it is invisible to the American Drug Warrior. Indeed, far from demonizing THOSE expensive drugs, most Americans believe it is a moral duty to take them.
Thanks for your time!
Sincerely,
Brian Quass
Abolishthedea.com
May 21, 2022
Sorry, I couldn't stop myself. I had to send Francis a second email after reading still further in his book.
A couple further notes, please, Francis.
Like almost all non-fictional authors today, you write as though the Drug War does not exist, implying that it has no effect on the subjects you cover. Yet the Drug War has denied human beings the right to the plant medicine that grows around us. And that amounts to a war on religion -- indeed a war on the very FOUNTAINHEAD of religion -- because it criminalizes the kinds of psychoactive medicines that inspired the VEDIC-HINDU religion, the kind of psychoactive medicines which, at Eleusis, gave Plato insights about the afterlife17, the kind of psychoactive medicines that have been used by South American and Mesoamerican religions time out of mind.
Moreover, what could be more important to the subject of your book than the fact that the US government controls (via the unprecedented criminalization of plants) how and how much a person can think and feel???
This is how ingrained the Drug War has become, giving teddy bears to kids for renouncing godsend medicines: it has brainwashed us into thinking that it is normal to criminalize Mother Nature -- that it is a natural baseline from which we can provide analyses of behavior and customs without flagging said criminalization as the distorting factor that it is. And so America's best magazines publish naive stories about the search for a cure for depression, always dutifully ignoring the fact that we have outlawed a priori hundreds of medicines that could be responsibly used for that purpose.
Re: black oppression: It is the Drug War that is causing deaths in the black community. Over 800 blacks died last year in Chicago alone from gunfire, which as Ann Heather Thompson wrote (in 2014 in The Atlantic) would not be happening without substance prohibition, which incentivizes the poor and uneducated to deal "drugs."
Perhaps this is the result of scholars ignoring the natural law upon which Jefferson founded the country. As long as we hold that certain rights are inalienable, we can always have a right to the plant medicine that grows at our feet -- but once we consider that doctrine "old hat," we hand a blank check to Congress to control how we think and feel, by denying us the medicines that could change our minds for the better, end school shootings and help us avoid nuclear armageddon.
If these claims seem astounding to you, I recommend the documentary "One Nation," showing how the use of the drug Ecstasy brought together all races and ethnicities and religions in complete harmony during the British rave scene -- until Drug Warriors criminalized the drug, at which point the dance floor exploded into alcohol-stoked violence.
AFTERTHOUGHT: I'm not going to send Francis any more emails, since it's probable that I've already plucked his last nerve with the two that I've copied for you above. I'm still recovering from the scolding that I received from Rick Strassman (author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule) a few years ago after he took me to task for writing him an unsolicited email of what turned out to be an inappropriate length, according to some unspoken length standard of which I had been blissfully ignorant until then. That said, I do have one more observation for Francis should he turn out to be one of those rare remarkable authors who are not threatened by well-intended criticism and who (more remarkably still) is curious about what further I might have to say in defense of my contrarian thesis.
Speaking of which, my additional beef is this: In "Liberalism and its Discontents," Francis writes that America has forsaken religion as a guide for our policies in political life -- and yet once again he reckons without the Drug War. What is the Drug War after all but the establishment of the drug-hating Christian Science religion with respect to psychoactive medicine? I would further argue that America has a kind of negative religion, in which one is holy to the extent that they renounce their right to the psychoactive plant medicine of Mother Nature. Despite modern liberalism's "Rawlsian" aversion to judging people for their own ways of being in the world, modern society is very judgmental indeed about the kinds of plant medicines of which one avails oneself. The intolerance in this quarter is so huge -- involving the expulsion from the American work force for Christian Science heretics who are found to have availed themselves of Mother Nature -- that this craze for a hypocritical "drug-free" state has all the emotional and psychological hallmarks of a religion, and a very intolerant one at that.
In this sense, the Drug War is like the last bastion of intolerance, the last crusade wherein "good" Americans can still demonize "the other" with a good conscience and impugn that other in the immoderate language of their choice -- even calling that other a "scumbag" if they wish -- thus finally getting relief from the constant requirement to be PC toward every other lifestyle group in the entire world. Drug "users" can now bear the brunt of all our pent-up self-righteous fury that we've diverted from all other targets in the name of modern tolerance. Just as the zombie craze gives Americans the moral license to maim and kill again like in the good old days, the Drug War craze gives Americans the moral cover they need to be old-school absolutists and intolerant despots toward their fellows as in the days of yore. It's as if the whole surviving sense of morality in modern America has been reduced to the one litmus test of drug use. Are they good people? Answer: Yes, providing that they have renounced their right to the plant medicine that grows at their very feet.
May 29, 2022
I love Francis' sharp analysis about the excesses of the right and the left viz classic liberalism, but every time he mentions drugs, I feel like some sadistic schoolmarm has just dragged her long fingernails over a nearby chalkboard. Why? Because he always approaches the subject from the point-of-view of a dyed-in-the-wool Drug Warrior. I feared as much given that he's written a whole book about modern culture without one mention of America's disgraceful Drug War, and that he is therefore reckoning without his host.
Case in point: Francis cites the "Defund the Police" movement as an example of where the left has gone too far. And why does he think this? Because, he says, the very neighborhoods that are calling for this defunding are rife with drug crime and violence and therefore need the police to fix things.
Hello? Francis, it was the police who created the armed and violent inner-city gangs in the first place by enforcing substance prohibition, just as surely as the enforcement of liquor prohibition created the American Mafia out of whole cloth. To say that the police are needed to help control this situation is like saying that an arsonist needs to come back to the scene of his crime to put out the fire that he himself has started.
This is so typical of neo-liberals, I'm afraid -- and indeed Francis' position here seems to match that of the clueless Bill Clinton on this topic: they completely underestimate the role that the police-prosecuted Drug War plays in creating the violence that we see in inner cities. Clinton is a Rhodes Scholar and yet he has failed to learn anything from the history of American liquor prohibition. Once we recognize the obvious, that the inner-city violence was caused by the Drug War itself, we can understand the reluctance of city denizens to solve the problem of violence by relying on the very police who caused the violence in the first place, namely by enforcing an unscientific drugs policy that incentivized the super-profitable sale of banned substances and the purchase of the requisite massive armory to protect that huge and risky investment against competition and the cops.
It never occurs to liberals like Francis and Bill that the problem here is created by prohibition itself and that what's required is education, not criminalization. The fact is, we can stop the violence overnight if we take the necessary steps to remove the enormous financial incentives that the Drug War has placed before the poor and poorly educated, kind of like a lure that was custom-made for racist politicians so that they can reel their political opposition (mainly minorities) into the nation's overcrowded prisons. The full list of steps necessary to end these incentives is beyond the scope of my current argument, but it would start with the re-legalization of all psychoactive medicine, particularly the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet, which the government never had the right to outlaw in the first place, given the fact that America was founded on natural law. For as John Locke wrote in his Second Treatise on Government:
"The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being."
Given to men, not to governments.
Author's Follow-up: August 30, 2022
I'm always trying to imagine why folks like Francis keep reckoning without the Drug War: writing books, that is, whose conclusions would vary greatly were America not involved in an anti-scientific war on psychoactive medicine.
After all, there is a prima facie case for thinking that brain-growing empathogens like psylocibin and MDMA (aka ecstasy) could help conditions such as autism and Alzheimer's disease, but almost no one is investigating such therapies because drug law makes it criminal to do so, and even researchers who get waivers have to treat the psychoactive substances that they receive like they were plutonium. That's one way that the DEA tries to protect its job, by implying in every way they can that demonized substances are devil spawn rather than the naturally occurring godsends that some of us consider them to be. And who wants the hassle of supporting controversial research? Answer no one: yet no one in science will point out how science is censored these days, let alone annotate their research papers to explain that the Drug War is standing in the way of scientific progress and the good of humankind, both collectively and singly.
Surely, the first step in solving a problem is to identify it -- yet I have yet to find a scholar who was honest enough about this drug-war censorship to allow that the Drug War actually exists, much less that this war stands in the way of learning and science by teaching us to fear and hate psychoactive substances rather than to understand them.
Historians and scientists of the world unite, to slam the anti-scientific Drug War. Stop ceding to politicians the right to tell the world which plant medicines they are allowed to use. The kinds of meds we're discussing here have inspired entire religions, meaning that to deny them to humanity is to outlaw the very fountainhead of the religious impulse itself.
So, goodbye to freedom of religion in America: that's only for materialists. But my moral duty is to follow the Platonic imperative of "Know Yourself." I personally believe that the self and consciousness is deeply "rooted" in the physical world (word tellingly suggested by sprouting shrooms) and that naturally occurring medicines help me explore that world and learn more about the big picture of life in the universe. When the materialist tells me that I cannot undertake such studies, he is claiming that my religion is false and demanding that I live my life by HIS belief system: namely, atheism and a desire for ever-increasing efficiency rather than self-actualization.
September 14, 2022
Just one more thing before this page devolves into a full-blown blog. What is the definition of "drugs" as that word is used today?
Drugs: substances for which there is no reasonable use, in any dose, at any time, for any one, anywhere, ever.
But there are no such substances of that kind, Francis! Even the deadly Botox has positive uses, and not just cosmetically but in fighting conditions like spastic dysphonia. That's why the Drug War is anti-scientific, for it forces scientists to ignore a host of medicines whose potential uses are legion! To their shame, most scientists comply because I have yet to see an article in esteemed journals like Science News or Scientific American in which the author is truthful and points out that their conclusions and even their lines of research were limited and dictated by the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
You can see this problem everywhere, in books and articles. Just look for a title like, "The real causes of depression," or "Examining the causes of addiction." I can guarantee you that the authors will dogmatically ignore the role that psychoactive medicines could have played in leading them to very different conclusions than the ones that they end up with.
Author's Follow-up: January 20, 2023
William James was a Liberal, yet his view of human potential and of life in general was deeply influenced by his use of nitrous oxide. The outlawing of such substances is therefore a direct assault on liberalism and the search for truth itself.
Book Reviews
Most authors today reckon without the Drug War -- unless they are writing specifically about "drugs" -- and even then they tend to approach the subject in a way that clearly demonstrates that they have been brainwashed by Drug War orthodoxy, even if they do not realize it themselves. That's why I write my philosophical book reviews, to point out this hypocrisy which no other philosopher in the world is pointing out.
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."
Science knows nothing of the human spirit and of the hopes and dreams of humankind. Science cannot tell us whether a given drug risk is worthwhile given the human need for creativity and passion in their life. Science has no expertise in making such philosophical judgements.
America is insane: it makes liquor officially legal and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.
Guess who's in charge of protecting us from AI? Chuck Schumer! The same guy who protected us from drugs -- by turning America into a prison camp full of minorities and so handing two presidential elections to Donald Trump.
Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.
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.
The Drug War is a crime against humanity.
The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Performers can lose their livelihood if they become too self-conscious. We only call such use "recreational" because we are oblivious to the common-sense psychology.
"Judging" psychoactive drugs is hard. Dosage counts. Expectations count. Setting counts. In Harvey Rosenfeld's book about the Spanish-American War, a volunteer wrote of his visit to an "opium den": "I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week."