I don't want to pick on Snoop, but I cannot resist because her confusion about so-called "drugs" is so typical of the muddle-headed thinking of Americans in general on this subject. So hopefully in clarifying her confusion, I'll be of assistance to others who may be similarly bamboozled.
First, let's be honest about what we Americans mean by drugs, Snoopie: We do not mean liquor. We do not mean tobacco. And we certainly do not mean Big Pharma 's massively prescribed antidepressants 1 to which 1 in 4 American women are currently addicted.
No, by "drugs" we merely mean natural substances that our government has decided are bad for us. In other words, our hatred of drugs is simply Christian Science with respect to psychological well-being, it is the metaphysical idea that we have some moral duty to forego the mind-improving pharmacopeia of Mother Nature.
Why? It's hard to say*. But our mistrust of Mother Nature is "all of a piece" with our historic fear of witches in the west and the way that they freely availed themselves of psychoactive plants. This fear in turn no doubt dates to societal PTSD from the Garden of Eden debacle. More recently, the psychoactive bounty of Mother Nature has become a threat to traditional medical practitioners, and they're right to be concerned.
If the government allowed humanity to access its natural birthright of Mother Nature's pharmacy, then who in their right mind would use the handful of addictive and inadequately effective synthesized drugs that Big Pharma has created to take Mother Nature's place? No one, at least if the cure and/or benefit that we seek is psychological.
That's why, to keep that bounty off-limits, Hollywood has to keep cranking out films to support the Drug War, to remind Americans how incapable they are of handling freedom, how incapable they are of wisely using the bounty of Mother Nature that grows at their very feet. And so those seeking increased mental acumen and expanded consciousness are forced to seek out white-coated professionals who tell us what we "really" need - and you can be sure that it's not the plants of Mother Nature, but rather the addictive nostrums of Big Pharma , in particular the brand name drugs that a Big Pharma huckster brought to their door that very morning with a promise to reward the doctor for prescribing.
Thus humankind gets a one-two whammy by the unconstitutional Drug War: we're deprived of our natural birthright of Mother Nature's plants and then we're treated as children by the medical industry, to which we have to sue for psychological help, only because government has told us that the medicines that grow at our feet are somehow now illegal.
What's more, if we dare to act in defiance of the Drug War, we are removed from the job market by the extrajudicial punishment of drug testing 2 . Sharia is enforced by businesses, who check urine to ensure that only Christian Scientists can earn a living in "free" America.
Turning to our friend Snoop's crazed Drug War mentality, let's consider her statements on this subject during her appearance on Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations." In that show, she brags to the host about her scorn for cocaine , insisting that "I would never put nothin' in my nose." She says her mother taught her better than that.
This from an actress who killed two people as a youngster and who allegedly peddled "drugs" herself in her pre-television incarnation. Apparently obeying the government's ban on natural substances is so important that even murderers will stop short of transgressing our government-sponsored holy war on these matters.
Does Snoop know that Sigmund Freud was a prolific user of cocaine 34? Does she realize that he did not use the substance to party hearty, but rather to achieve self-fulfillment in life, insofar as the drug made possible the prolific output without which the famous Austrian would never have achieved self-actualization? Does she realize that Amazon tribes use the substance to this day in life-affirming ritual?
Snoop, like the rest of America, doesn't think in this way, because Hollywood shows us nothing but hedonistic substance misuse - thereby constantly encouraging Americans to think that they can't handle the freedom of actually having access to Mother Nature. And so the government and Hollywood 5 slander psychoactive drugs, essentially turning the US Government into a theocracy based on the principles of Christian Science.
*Then again, it's not so hard to say. If you're a millionaire Senator with a portfolio that's loaded with pharmaceutical stocks, the last thing you want is for non-addictive plants to become available that would render Big Pharma 67 's addictive nostrums obsolete.
Author's Follow-up:
July 13, 2025
This essay was naive, and so my apologies to Snoop. She was herself a victim of the drug prohibition which first brought violence to inner-city streets. As Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014:
"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 8 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist." --Heather Ann Thompson, from Inner-City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration9
In the age of the Drug War, we can never trust what ANYBODY says about drugs. That is one of the main reasons why the Drug War is wrong: it turns lying and duplicity into a way of life in America. Why? Because as a practical matter, most Americans have to toe the party line in public about drugs -- for their very livelihoods depend on it!
I should also add that the Drug War is anti-minority in the extreme. Consider this quote from Charles Winick in Artificial Paradises, the drugs reader by Mike Jay:
"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.10"
The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.
Talking about being in denial: drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
For those who want to understand what's going on with the drug war from a philosophical point of view, I recommend chapter six of "Eugenics and Other Evils" by GK Chesterton.
The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they connote.
Many in the psychedelic renaissance fail to recognize that prohibition is the problem. They praise psychedelics but want to demonize others substances. That's ignorant however. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason.
Americans are starting to think that psychedelics may be an exception to the rule that drugs are evil -- but drugs have never been evil. The evil resides in how we think, talk and legislate about drugs.
The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.
The 2024 Colorado bill was withdrawn -- but only when pols realized that they had been caught in the act of outlawing free speech. They did not let opponents speak, however, because they knew the speeches would make the pols look like the anti-democratic jerks that they were.
Healthline posted an article in 2021 about the benefits of getting off of antidepressants. They did not even mention the biggest benefit: NO LONGER BEING AN ETERNAL PATIENT -- no longer being a child in the eyes of an all-knowing healthcare system.
The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.
