by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

The following was written six years ago, when I was first beginning to study the warped philosophical assumptions behind the War on Drugs and the substance demonization for which it stands. Since then, I have learned much more about the motivations behind opium prohibition, to the point that I fear that my former musings are now inadequate and that they might therefore inadvertently serve, as it were, to praise prohibition with faint condemnation. I have learned over the years that it is almost impossible to exaggerate the counterproductive and inhumane idiocy of the prohibitionist mindset. Nevertheless I will let my former musings stand as a sort of historical marker of my Pilgrim's Progress through the maze of disinformation and misdirection that constitutes America's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicines.

Meanwhile, I encourage all seekers of the massively hushed-up truth on this topic to read William Brereton's The Truth About Opium: Refutation of the Fallacies of the Anti-Opium Society and a Defence of the Indo-China Opium Trade.¹ Sure, Brereton had his own prejudices, of course, though he addresses these in the lectures of which this book consists, and, I think, does so in a reassuring and convincing manner. This is beside the point, however; for my goal on this website is not to advance an inductive argument about the upsides and downsides of any given drugs: my goal is to demonstrate that the whole mindset of drug prohibition is wrong and counterproductive: that it is wrong to judge drugs as good or bad "per se," that all drugs, even Botox and cyanide, have positive uses, and that to criminalize drugs because they can be misused by one demographic is anti-scientific and an inhumane policy. It is racist and xenophobic as well, basically telling the world: If a drug can be misused by a white American young person at one dose when used for one reason, then it must not be used by anyone in the world at any dose for any reason. This is the issue.

Also, I know that some doctors make a big distinction between dependence and addiction. I have a psychiatrist who thinks Effexor ² is great because it does not cause addiction, only dependence. I do not understand that point of view. When I tried to get off Effexor too quickly, I literally wished that I were dead. Literally. Why is that outcome so much better than being addicted? Answer? Because it leaves the doctor UNBOTHERED! I was not going to bother my doctor by phone -- I was just going to sit quietly at home and contemplate suicide. Why is that so much better than experiencing a craving, doc?

The irony is that anyone can end physical opiate addiction in a week -- whereas it is unclear if one can ever end their biochemical dependence on SNRIs like Effexor, at least in a world wherein all other psychoactive alternatives have been ruthlessly outlawed. Indeed, my previous psychiatrist told me that Effexor has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users after three years, far worse than that for heroin ³. So for these -- and many, many other reasons to be found throughout my hundreds of drug-related essays -- I insist that we all should have the right to smoke opium nightly as opposed to using Big Pharma drugs daily, or indeed to use any other drug, dependence-causing or not. Dependence in itself is not evil, after all: we are all dependent on chemicals of all kinds. Unwanted dependency is the evil, and such dependency will be the norm until we claw back our right to self-medicate⁴ from the self-interested medical establishment, meanwhile loudly denying the lie that they are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine and that they, not we, are experts on how we think and feel in life -- and even, indeed, on how we should be allowed to think and feel in life. Finally, when all drugs are re-legalized and we actually learn from best practices, then we can fight drugs with drugs. Dependent on Effexor? Surely, not for long when one can exchange the drug for laughing gas ⁵ on Friday, phenethylamines on Saturday, and opium on Sunday. (I'd better stop this talk about common-sense freedom lest I give a brainwashed reader a coronary. You've got to realize that they have been shielded their whole lifetime from such honest talk about drugs, the fact that they actually have benefits!)

Let's end this unprecedented power grab by the medical industry. Let's reclaim our right to take care of our own emotional and mental states.

I preface thus much lest my six-year-old essay should fall short, written as it was before I had recognized the disempowering, racist and xenophobic tyranny of the status quo with respect to opium and other so-called "hard" drugs. That very category, "hard drugs," is political, of course. Drugs are only dangerous when we refuse to teach safe use, refuse to ensure drug quality and refuse to provide choices. They are not dangerous in and of themselves. We should no more say "Drugs bad!" than we used to say "Fire bad!" Yet racist and xenophobic politicians use the term "hard" in an attempt to render the use of certain drugs "beyond the pale," unthinkable, as it were, to the average digitally hypnotized citizen. What are hard drugs then, in plain English? Hard drugs are just those drugs which, if used intelligently, could make most drug stores irrelevant -- and which might even inspire entire new religions! That's what Drug Warriors really fear about the substances that they demonize as "hard," failing to realize that the addictive potential of some such drugs could be easily dealt with by fighting drugs with drugs, in a world wherein we sought to learn about drugs rather than to demonize them.

Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal in the United States. It took drug laws to accomplish that. By outlawing opium and refusing to teach safe use, the drug warrior has subjected users to contaminated product of uncertain dosage, thereby causing thousands of unnecessary overdoses.

Currently, I myself am chemically dependent on a Big Pharma drug for depression, that I have to take every day of my life. There is no rational reason why I should not be able to smoke opium daily instead. It is only drug-war fearmongering that has demonized that choice -- for obvious racist, economic and political reasons.

You have been lied to your entire life about opium. In fact, the drug war has done its best to excise the very word "opium" from the English vocabulary. That's why the Thomas Jefferson Foundation refuses to talk about the 1987 raid on Monticello in which Reagan's DEA confiscated Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. It's just plain impolite to bring up that subject these days.

It's hard to learn the truth about opium because the few books on the subject demonize it rather than discuss it dispassionately. Take the book by John Halpern: "Opium: How an ancient flower shaped and poisoned our world." It's a typical Drug Warrior title. A flower did not poison our world, John: our world was poisoned by bad laws: laws that were inspired first and foremost by racism, followed closely by commercial interests, politics, misinformation and lies.

To learn something approaching to "the truth about Opium," read the book of that name by William Brereton, written to defend the time-honored panacea from the uninformed and libelous attacks of Christian missionaries.

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

The Drug War Cure for Covid

The Drug-Hating Bias of Modern Science

The Kangaroo Courts of Modern Science

The REAL Lesson of the Opium Wars

The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton