The Christian Presuppositions of the Drug War and Why They're Important
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 18, 2024
There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than afterwards to offer them their prescriptions for making life easier -- their Christianity, for example. -- Nietzsche1
I keep getting Tweets along the lines of: "Well, that's all well and good, but the Drug War is REALLY about A, B, or C..."
I'm told by one that it's all about militarization, by another that it's all about money, by still another that it's all about racism. If you ask me, it is all about materialism 2 as well (a connection that I appear to be the only one to have noticed so far, however, which has turned me into the Ignaz Semmelweis of the Drug War3).
Of course, they're all correct. The Drug War is "about" a lot of things. But the real question, philosophically speaking, is how a program that is dramatically failing even on its own supposed terms, that of saving lives, can be not only tolerated by Americans of all political stripes, but actually promoted by them. (The Washington Post recently reported that the shipment of opioid pills dropped 45% between 2011 and 2019 thanks to law enforcement crackdowns. During the same time, the deaths by overdose skyrocketed!4)
This stubborn illogical embrace of drug-war ideology cannot be explained by militarization, greed or racism. It has something to do with the very psyche of westerners, which, as Nietzsche warned us, has maintained the puritan notions of Christianity while discarding the religion5. It has something to do with our historical disdain for the tribal people that we have conquered and their belief in drug cures. It has something to do with our puritanical distrust of laughter and unfettered self-expression. It has something to do with America's ongoing need for sin, redemption, and the existence of a devil. It has something to do with America's concoction of a faux morality whereby we can resurrect a world where there is a clear good and bad: drug dealers bad, prohibitionists good. The sinner is the "user" who comes home to a 12-step group and recognizes a thinly disguised Christian god known as a "higher power." These 12-step groups, of course, teach the "addicts" that they are powerless6. (Of course, the reason they are powerless is because the drug law has made them so, just as a flu victim might be powerless to overcome the flu were we to outlaw all antibiotics.)
Otherwise the Drug War would be inexplicable. For it is not common sense to hate drugs. That is something one must learn. And even in order to learn that, you must be predisposed to that belief by the history of your people. Certainly such anti-drug attitudes never occurred to tribal peoples, all of whom used drugs for various psychosocial purposes, as ethnobotanist Richard Schultes reports7. The Drug War, in fact, can be seen as the west's final step in destroying these aboriginal peoples: we first destroyed them physically, and now we are bent on destroying their nature-friendly view of life, their metaphysic about what life is all about, and replacing their shamans with our materialist doctors, doctors who are so obsessed with looking down their microscopes that they cannot acknowledge that drugs like laughing gas 8 and MDMA 9 could help the depressed.
Those who ignore this background story cut the ground out from under the legalization movement (or rather the RE-legalization 10 movement). For the strongest argument that can (and should) be made against the Drug War is the fact that it is the unconstitutional enforcement of a religion: namely, the religion of Christian Science, which tells us that using drugs is morally wrong, that the moral state of mind is the "drug free" state of mind11.
With this argument, we can (and should) make a strong and undeniable case that the Drug War must end NOW, declaring that it is SELF-EVIDENTLY wrong to tell people how and how much they are allowed to think and feel in life, and that is exactly what we do when we outlaw psychoactive medicines. This is government overreach of unprecedented proportions, and it is supported by hypocrisy of equally unprecedented proportions, insofar as the most rabid Drug Warriors fiercely defend their right to guns, which kill 50,000 a year in America alone12.
They'll say, of course, that guns do not kill people - but then turn around and tell us that drugs do indeed kill people. It's such enormous hypocrisy that such gun worshipers should be photographed and placed in the Webster's Illustrated Dictionary under the term "hypocrite."
Author's Follow-up: January 18, 2024
As you philosopher types should already know, nothing that I've written above need be construed as Christianity bashing, or even Christian Science bashing. If you believe that drugs are bad, then more power to you. All I ask is that you keep that belief to yourself and do not insist that the rest of the world live by your theology. For I personally believe that life is all about becoming all you can be and that psychoactive medicine has been provided to human beings for a reason. Again, if you're a materialist, you will disagree. But again, all I ask is that you keep that belief to yourself and not insist that the rest of the world live by your faith in reductive materialism as the sole method whereby truth may be known.
America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
Peyote advocates should be drug legalization advocates. Otherwise, they're involved in special pleading which is bound to result in absurd laws, such as "Plant A can be used in a religion but not plant B," or "Person A can belong to such a religion but person B cannot."
Drug prohibition has resulted in hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths thanks to totally preventable drug overdoses!
"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.
"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann
"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.
Alexander Shulgin is a typical westerner when he speaks about cocaine. He moralizes about the drug, telling us that it does not give him "real" power. But so what? Does coffee give him "real" power? Coke helps some, others not. Stop holding it to this weird metaphysical standard.
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
Here's one problem that supporters of the psychiatric pill mill never address: the fact that Big Pharma antidepressants demoralize users by turning them into patients for life.
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