and how we respond to it -- an open letter to Professor Nathan Nobis
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 12, 2022
Good morning, Professor Nobis.
I am a 64-year-old philosopher and the founder of abolishthedea.com, where I post a wide variety of philosophical arguments against America's Drug War.
I just wanted to share with you a few ideas I have on the subject, if you have a moment. I'll try not to presume too much on your time, however, because if you have any real interest, you can always browse my writings on the topic at abolishthedea.com.
Here then are ten points that I believe receive "short shrift" by current opponents of the Drug War:
1. The Drug War is a violation of the natural law upon which Jefferson founded America, because it involves the government telling us which plants we can have access to -- whereas John Locke himself wrote in his second treatise on government that human beings have a right to the use of the land "and all that lies therein." (Surely Jefferson was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello 1 in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants.)
2. The Drug War represents a wrong way of looking at the world. To understand this, we merely need to replace the political term "drugs" with the term "godsend plant medicine." In short, the Drug War makes sense only if we take a jaundiced Christian Science view of the medical bounty of Mother Nature (which is really an anti-Christian outlook since the Christian God himself said that his creation was good).
3. Which brings me to point 3: the Drug War can be seen as the enforcement of the Christian Science religion with respect to psychoactive medicine. The government requires us to believe that drugs are morally bad in this latter case.
4. Drug testing is wrong because it punishes people, not for impairment, but for the mere use (however dated and fleeting) of a proscribed substance. In this sense, it is an extrajudicial "fishing expedition" by corporations acting on behalf of the federal government. Moreover, the punishment is cruel and unusual, insofar as it involves the removal of the "guilty" party from the American workforce without trial, a punishment not even inflicted on paroled murderers.
5. Many opponents of the Drug War (especially libertarians) start on "the back foot," since they effectively agree with the prohibitionist notion that there is no reasonable use for "drugs." This standpoint ignores the fact that the Vedic religion was inspired by the psychoactive impact of botanicals, that Plato's view of the afterlife was inspired by the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries2, that Benjamin Franklin, Marcus Aurelius and many poets and authors have profited from opium use, and that coca has been used for centuries by South American cultures and inspired the writings of such authors as HG Wells, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, and Henrik Ibsen.
6. In light of point 5 above, the Drug War may be seen not simply as the outlawing of a religion, but rather as the outlawing of the very fountainhead of the religious impulse.
7. The Drug War has government dictating what can be studied by scientists in the same way that the Church once dictated terms to Galileo, with the exception being that Galileo recognized that he was being censored, while modern scientists almost never acknowledge this censorship, so used have they become (through lifelong indoctrination) to considering Drug War prohibitions to be a natural baseline for modern research, thereby drastically limiting their conception of what drug-aided wonders might be possible with respect to improving human happiness, learning potential, ability to overcome addiction and depression, and even bringing about world peace (considering how Ecstasy brought peace, love and understanding to a multiethnic dance floor -- before being shut down by prohibitionists who couldn't get their minds around the fact that this utopia was brought about by a "drug"). Even the fight against Alzheimer's and autism is stymied by our outlawing of medications that show great prima facie potential for ameliorating if not curing these conditions (as, for instance, psychedelics can generate new neurons and new neuronal connections).
8. Almost no drug-war critic holds the Drug War responsible for the fact that 1 in 4 American women must take a Big Pharma 34 med every day of their life (far more than were ever "habitues" of opium prior to 1914), and that the meds in question can be harder to kick than heroin 5 thanks to the way that they change brain chemistry, without yet "fixing" the depression at which they were targeted (source: Julie Holland).
9. In light of point 8 above, we can see how the term "addict" is a political term in a Drug War society. Before prohibition, opium 6 users were "habitues." Only after 1914 were they demonized as "addicts." Likewise, a lifetime heroin user is deemed an "addict" (with all the judgmental baggage that implies) while the lifelong user of a modern antidepressant is not only NOT an addict, but is someone whom we actually tell to "keep taking their meds."
10. Drug war propaganda is spread in very subtle ways. Academic papers about "drugs" almost always focus on misuse, abuse and addiction, thereby giving the impression to those who merely browse such collections that outlawed substances do absolutely nothing other than pose a threat to human health. The articles may all be 100% accurate and yet the collective effect of these articles is misleading because it is ahistorical and ignores a world of therapeutic possibilities that we have dogmatically decided to ignore on an a priori basis.
As said, I do not want to presume on your time. Suffice it to say that my drug-war focus and belief is the following: that the Drug War is far more insidious and wrong than almost any Drug War critic has yet realized, and that the Drug War can be shown to cause all of the problems that it purports to fix, and then some.
My goal is to share ideas like these that I do not think have been adequately considered by drug-war opponents, and I hope you find these ideas interesting and useful in fighting the war on the War on Drugs.
Best Wishes!
Brian Quass
abolishthedea.com
PS I personally feel that the modern attempt to roll back the Drug War is unnecessarily defensive, often starting on the assumption that "drugs" really are bad and unnecessary. I would advocate an offensive approach, wherein we push for the legal prosecution of the DEA for crimes, such as lying about plant medicine for the last half century and poisoning Americans with a weed killer that causes Parkinson's Disease (and which was known to be deadly to human beings even at the time that it was first employed by Reagan's Jefferson-busting DEA).
November 10, 2022
Brian failed to point out, bless him, that Professor Nobis is a bioethics philosopher at Morehouse College. Nor has our author made it entirely clear why he contacted Nathan in the first place. This is a trifle puzzling, given his worship's usual rigor on such points. Fortunately, the admittedly interesting observations enumerated above can stand on their own. Still, one can't help speculating about the nature of the no-doubt fascinating article and/or opinion piece that prompted them.
Author's Follow-up: November 10, 2022
Professor Nobis has not yet quite seen his way clear to respond to me. But it's early days. Watch this space for developments.
Author's Follow-up:
May 04, 2025
It has been now over three years since I contacted Nathan, and I am beginning to worry. Still no word from my cuz. Someone might want to check in with him to make sure he is okay.
Oh, and I re-read my ten points and I am happy to say that I can still sign off on the same. However, in the intervening years, I have come to see that drug prohibition outlaws academic freedom and philosophical research in particular, a point that I failed to adequately address above. So if and when I hear back from the Herr Professor (my homeboy Nat, I mean), then I must remember to direct him to the following essay on how drug prohibition outlaws philosophy: &745&.
Finally, in answer to my sharp-eyed editor, Philomena, I am afraid that I myself lost track of the name of the article or blurb that must have inspired me to contact our friend Nat in the first place three years ago. But not to worry: the relevant heads will roll. What am I paying my website staff for, anyway? Jeepers.
Also, let me echo my former self by restating that the Drug War is wrong root and branch. It is not enough to change a few laws: as long as the prohibitionist mindset remains, America will never accept individual liberty and religious freedom with respect to drugs. The prohibitionist mindset has to be destroyed. We have to drive a stake through its heart. Otherwise, a bumper crop of Chicken Little prohibitionists will rise from the dead in each and every new generation, determined to make drugs a scapegoat for all that their hypochondriacal souls imagine to be wrong with the world.
This is why ending the Drug War is all about philosophy -- because it is our philosophy of life in America that is wrong: our desire to find scapegoats, to find reasons to hate our neighbors, and our warped idea that passion-scorning materialists are the experts when it comes to psychoactive substances. The following truth needs to be taught in grade schools: that PROHIBITION KILLS, not drugs. This should be obvious but it is not thanks to the brainwashing agenda of the mass media conglomerates controlled by America's billionaires. Liquor prohibition created the Mafia, after all. Liquor and drug prohibition turned inner cities into shooting galleries and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America. And, believe me, I am just getting started in enumerating the downsides of prohibition. Above all, we have to restore sight to the American people who are currently afflicted with a twofold blindness. They are blind both to the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition (in inner cities and in Mexico, for instance) and to the glaringly obvious upsides of drug use (as for instance the use of Soma, 7 which inspired the creation of the Hindu religion).
Many of my essays are about and/or directed to specific individuals, some well-known, others not so well known, and some flat-out nobodies like myself. Here is a growing list of names of people with links to my essays that in some way concern them.
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.
I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
Yeah. That's why it's so pretentious and presumptuous of People magazine to "fight for justice" on behalf of Matthew Perry, as if Perry would have wanted that.
Drug prohibition is the perfect racist crime. It brought gunfire to inner cities, yet those who seek to end the gunfire pretend that drug prohibition has nothing to do with it.
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
"The Legislature deliberately determines to distrust the very people who are legally responsible for the physical well-being of the nation, and puts them under the thumb of the police, as if they were potential criminals."
-- Aleister Crowley on drug laws
"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx
Brits have a right to die, but they do not have the right to use drugs that might make them want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of the many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world.
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.