Why Drug Free Zones are Dangerous and Unconstitutional
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 1, 2022
The use of "Drug Free" signs around schools represents the establishment of a religion, since the idea that one should "say no to drugs" is merely the highly debatable premise upon which Mary Baker Eddy founded the religion that she called Christian Science. Worse yet, the concept that one should be "drug free" is unscientific.
Should one be "free" of antibiotics or aspirin? Should one be free of coffee and chocolate? We certainly don't think Americans should be free of antidepressants considering that one-in-four of our women are addicted to them and mainstream America does not even notice the fact. Why then should they be free of psychoactive medicines from Mother Nature, especially when such medicines have been used responsibly by other cultures since caveman days, sometimes inspiring the creation of entire new religions. Should we teach students to say no to medicines merely because they have been demonized by American politicians?
Moreover, placing "Drug Free Zone" signs around schools is like surrounding schools with "Prostitution Free Zone" signs. It is just as likely to give students ideas as it is to prevent them from misusing substances. In fact, studies show that drug use increases to the extent that schools remind students of "drugs" through anti-drug campaigns. To surround schools with "drug free zone" signs is like surrounding schools with signs that read: "Whatever you do, don't use your skateboard in the following dangerous locations that you've never heard of before until now..." and then listing the most exciting but dangerous locations in which to use a skateboard.
If we were really worried about our kids, we'd talk to them calmly and honestly about all substances (including coffee, alcohol and Big Pharma antidepressants), citing both their positive and negative uses and reminding students of the need to make their own decisions on political and religious topics. We wouldn't surround them with political messages determined to turn them into hypocritical Christian Scientists, who "just say no" to a politically defined roster of superstitiously hyped mega-enemies that unscientific America demonizes with the pejorative appellation of "drugs."
Drug Free Zones encourage kids to think they should fear medicine rather than understand it. It signals a jaundiced Christian Science view toward plant medicine. It is Christian Science indoctrination.
Author's Follow-up: September 29, 2022
Paul Stamets ate some psilocybin mushrooms in his youth and it allowed him to focus his mind in such a way that he stopped stuttering IN ONE DAY and, for the first time in his young life, could look girls straight in the eye. The psychedelic botanical(s) known as "Soma" inspired the Vedic-Hindu religion. Mushrooms were godlike for the Mayans and the Inca considered coca to be divine. Given this back story, "drug free" zones are Christian Science propaganda, designed to scare kids away from using anything but alcohol, tobacco, and, oh yes, those Big Pharma drugs upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent.
Author's Follow-up: August 19, 2023
Also: America's foremost philosopher, William James, said we should study altered states, for they suggest that we see only a small part of reality with our limited senses. To say therefore that places of education are "drug free zones" is to say that their academic pursuits are censored by government. It is nothing to be proud of. Take the signs down and let's make America free again.
Author's Follow-up: January 3, 2024
Drug Awareness courses do just that: they make young kids aware of drugs. Why would you do that if you had no intentions of teaching safe use? Philip Jenkins has shown in "Synthetic Panics" that drug problems spread like wildfire precisely because of publicity given supposedly problematic use by the DEA and other drug agencies. The agencies know this and approve. They need an ongoing drug problem in order to justify their shamefully enormous budgets. It's a scam dedicated to the existence of an endless problem: first with PCP, then Ice, then crack cocaine, then Oxy, then Fentanyl, you name it. Of course, for all this seeming concern about safety, the Drug Warrior has no problems with guns that kill 50,000-plus people every year. They are more worried about drugs that kill no one -- or else do so only thanks to the problems created by prohibition -- including contaminated supply and the dogmatic refusal to teach safe use -- and to even punish those who do so. See my letter to the Vancouver Police.
Author's Follow-up: January 30, 2024
"Drug Free Zones" are indoctrinating our kids in the anti-scientific ideology of the Drug War, which tells us (falsely) that drugs can be voted "up" or "down" -- it tells us that if a drug can be misused in one way, then it must not be used in any way, by anyone, anywhere, ever. This is the superstitious point of view that has censored science and kept endless godsend treatments from even being contemplated by our healthcare professionals. Thanks to this racist, xenophobic and politically motivated dogma, we are living in the Dark Ages of healthcare, one in which we prefer that young people commit suicide rather than use the substances that tribal peoples have always used, many of which grow at our very feet.
Author's Follow-up:
May 17, 2025
The Hindu religion owes its existence to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. Opium inspired Marcus Aurelius. Coca inspired the Peruvian Inca. The fact is that drugs have a wide variety of positive uses -- not just the potential ones that humanity has already discovered but the many that would be available to us if we only performed common-sense research into the matter, in the same manner as Alexander and Ann Shulgin studied phenethylamines.
Speaking of whom, consider the following drug user reports from their 1991 book "Pihkal: Phenethylamines that I have Known and Loved.1"
"I feel that it is one of the most profound and deep learning experiences I have had."
"An energetic feeling began to take over me. It continued to grow. The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people."
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."
"Drug Free Zones" are absurd when one considers such glaringly obvious benefits to drug use. By establishing such zones around grade schools, we teach our kids to fear the world that they live in rather than to understand it. We may as well have "Car Free Zones" and "Fire Free Zones" around our schools if our goal is to scare kids about the world rather than to educate them about it. The prohibitionists are doing their best to "disappear" or at least marginalize all reports of beneficial drug use -- and the conglomerate media is doing all it can to help them. Let's hope that the truth will triumph. This used to be my default assumption, but recent events make me fear that Homo sapiens are unable to rise above intense brainwashing that has been orchestrated by government to make them feel a certain way about the world. There has been an almost complete censorship of positive reports of drug use over the last 100 years in America, and that has perhaps irreparably warped the American mind on the topic of drugs.
The drug war is the defeatist doctrine that we will never be able to use psychoactive drugs wisely. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the government does everything it can to make drug use dangerous.
Saying "Fentanyl kills" is philosophically equivalent to saying "Fire bad!" Both statements are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as safely as possible for human benefit.
If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"
A law proposed in Colorado in February 2024 would have criminalized positive talk about drugs online. What? The world is on the brink of nuclear war because of hate-driven politics, and I can be arrested for singing the praises of empathogens?
This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.
Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.
The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.
"Like Christians burning mosques and temples to spread the word of Jesus, modem drugabuseologists burn crops to spread the use of alcohol." -- Ceremonial Chemistry, p. 48
When psychiatrists write about heroin, they characterize dependency as enslavement. When they write about antidepressants, they characterize dependency as a medical duty.
Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.
Paul Stamets ate some psilocybin mushrooms in his youth and it allowed him to focus his mind in such a way that he stopped stuttering IN ONE DAY and, for the first time in his young life, could look girls straight in the eye. The psychedelic botanical(s) known as "Soma" inspired the Vedic-Hindu religion. Mushrooms were godlike for the Mayans and the Inca considered coca to be divine. Given this back story, "drug free" zones are Christian Science propaganda, designed to scare kids away from using anything but alcohol, tobacco, and, oh yes, those Big Pharma drugs upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent.
The drug war is the defeatist doctrine that we will never be able to use psychoactive drugs wisely. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the government does everything it can to make drug use dangerous.