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Re-Legalize Opium Now

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 21, 2022



The title of this essay is so controversial in the age of the Drug War that I despair of defending it in the traditional way, by reasoned argument. The metaphorical hooting and jeering of the average reader would drown me out long before I came to my otherwise ineluctable conclusion, namely that outlawing Mother Nature's medicines creates infinitely more problems than treating them for what they are: to wit, a botanical fact of life with which we are naturally surrounded as denizens of planet Earth.

So instead of even trying to advance my own arguments for the re-legalization of what after all is mere plant medicine, let us consider what the Drug War has "accomplished" by outlawing opium in 1914 -- and subsequently outlawing coca, marijuana, and finally virtually every potentially helpful psychoactive substance in the world (to the astonished approbation of the burgeoning health-care industry in the early 1900s, which suddenly had a monopoly, not simply on treating physical ills, but on treating psychological ills as well).

Drug War "Accomplishments"


  1. It has created a psychiatric pill mill upon which 1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent for life, the largest chemical dependency in human history.


  2. It has denied godsend pain medicine to dying children under the theory that drugs like morphine are somehow evil without regard to why they are used.


  3. It has forced us to allow our elderly parents to die miserably, by "withholding life support" rather than allowing them to drift off painlessly to sleep with the help of an opium derivative such as morphine.


  4. It has REQUIRED the use of brain-damaging electroshock therapy in severe cases of depression that might otherwise have been treated with no-brainer godsends like MDMA, psilocybin and laughing gas.


  5. It has turned inner cities into shooting galleries, thanks to Drug War prohibition which created armed gangs out of whole cloth.


  6. It has imprisoned millions of minorities, thereby removing them (either officially or effectively) from the voting rolls, thereby facilitating the election of drug-warrior demagogues.


  7. It has created civil wars overseas, which the US can leverage as an excuse to intervene in foreign countries.


  8. It has forced US soldiers to go for four decades now without the use of MDMA to fight PTSD, thanks to the self-serving DEA which ignored the advice of its own council in 1985 in order to maintain its workload when it comes to cracking down on "Ecstasy."


  9. It has outlawed plant medicines that have inspired entire religions in the past, thereby outlawing the very fountainhead of the religious impulse in humankind
    10. .

  10. It has censored scientists by barring them from effectively investigating criminalized plant medicines, censorship made all the more insidious by the fact that most scientists do not even recognize that it exists.




But in perhaps the greatest irony of all, the criminalization of opium in particular has led to... wait for it, folks... an opioid epidemic!

When will the Drug Warriors learn: you can outlaw substances but you cannot outlaw the human desire for self-transcendence?

The answer is obvious. We must make it as safe as possible for folks to pursue self-transcendence, through education and a safe drug supply.

The Drug Warrior, on the other hand, reminds us of the governess in 'The Turn of the Screw' by Henry James. Mrs. Grose is so myopically determined to protect Miles and Flora from the perceived dangers of an illusory phantom (the ghostly former valet known as Peter Quint) that she ends up causing Miles' death and estranging herself from Flora forever: just the sort of Pyrrhic victory that the Drug War has achieved by myopically outlawing naturally occurring medicines like opium.

Opium




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.


  • In Defense of Opium
  • Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion
  • Open Letter to Margo Margaritoff
  • Opium for the Masses by Jim Hogshire
  • Re-Legalize Opium Now
  • Smart Uses for Opium and Coca
  • 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
  • Why doctors should prescribe opium for depression





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    We should start taking names. All politicians and government officials who work to keep godsends like psilocybin from the public should be held to account for crimes against humanity when the drug war finally ends.

    The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.

    Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.

    The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses and is known to cause death and destruction.

    I wonder if Nixon knew what a favor he was doing medical capitalism when he outlawed psychedelics. Those drugs can actually cure things, and there's no money in that.

    I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.

    The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.

    But that's the whole problem with Robert Whitaker's otherwise wonderful critique of Big Pharma. Like almost all non-fiction authors today, he reckons without the drug war, which gave Big Pharma a monopoly in the first place.

    We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.

    Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.


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






    Open Letter to Diane O'Leary
    Open letter to Wolfgang Smith


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