Why modern philosophers are cowards when it comes to the war on drugs
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
July 17, 2025
As enchanted as western philosophers are with Socrates1, you would think that they would be playing the role of a Socratic gadfly with respect to the absurd presumptions of America's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine, a policy which is at once childish, anti-scientific and inhumane, as it denies Americans, and now virtually everyone in the world, the right to tend to their own health, without a "by your leave" from government. And yet philosophers actually ban me from discussion groups for the simple reason that I try to discuss the topic.
Take the subject of the massive self-censorship brought about by Drug War ideology. Almost every author on scientific and social topics these days reckons without the Drug War, and yet I am the only philosopher who bothers to point this out. I am the only philosopher who is emulating Socrates and so acting as a gadfly on this topic.
Here are just a few examples of the kinds of self-censored books to which I am referring.
"Liberalism and Its Discontents" by Francis Fukuyama23
Francis never mentions the fact that American Drug Warriors have taken the totally unprecedented step of outlawing almost all psychoactive medicines. He completely ignores the obvious fact that these prohibition policies cause extreme violence - which is an unforgivable lacuna on his part since he well knows that liquor prohibition first brought machine-gun-fire to America's erstwhile tranquil streets. Worse yet, he actually blames inner-city violence on the liberal's distrust of the police rather than on the drug prohibition which created inner city violence in the first place and first gave racist cops carte blanche to hassle minorities -- a world in which the Dizzy Gillespies of the world could be searched for drugs at will while the Isaac Sterns of the world would never, ever be subject to such an indignity4.
The inner-city violence was caused by liberalism's foes, Francis, not by liberals - even if those liberals have themselves been bamboozled by drug-war propaganda into supporting the Drug War for so-called health reasons - as if it's healthy to refuse to teach safe use, as if it's healthy to refuse to regulate product, as if it's healthy to support a policy that armed cities to the teeth and brought about tens of thousands of minority deaths over the last ten years alone - many of them young kids like 15-year-old Niomi Russell who was killed in a drive-by shooting in Washington, D.C. in 20245. Nor were white young people dying in the streets from opiate use when opiates were legal in America. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that.
What blindness on Fukuyama's part - blindness, it must be said, with obviously racist implications!
"The Dream of Enlightenment: the rise of Modern Philosophy" by Anthony Gottleib 67
Again, not a single mention of the War on Drugs, nor the fact that new laws about laughing gas 8 championed by our FDA are now officially outlawing the type of philosophical research recommended to us by William James, nor the fact that drug laws have censored academia and caused researchers to anti-scientifically focus only on the downsides of drug use9.
"Billionaire Democracy: The Hijacking of the American Political System" by George R. Tyler10
The billionaires control conglomerate media, a media that refuses to mention any drugs except in a negative light - a media that refuses to connect inner-city violence and Mexican civil wars with the drug prohibition that so obviously caused those problems, nay, which created them out of whole cloth -- and yet the Drug War is completely off Tyler's radar. The Drug War is the unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicines, and yet Tyler completely ignores it.
Although he makes a living out of tantalizing Americans about drugs, Michael Pollan does not believe that we little people are able to use drugs wisely - he still believes in prohibition (not for himself, perhaps, but for his readers) -- meanwhile, he never discusses the downsides of prohibition in this book, downsides that one might have supposed had been made abundantly clear by liquor prohibition, which first brought machine-gun-fire to America's erstwhile tranquil streets. Pollan clearly sees no problem with the end of civil liberties in America that has been brought about by the desire to protect us from Mother Nature - he sees no problems with the 67,000 minorities killed over the last 10 years13 nor the 60,000 disappeared in Mexico because of the Drug War over the last 20 years14, nor the fact that the Drug War led to the election of Donald Trump by throwing millions of minorities in jail thanks to laws that were designed for that very purpose15.
Pollan's attitude seems to be: "If drug prohibition can save one white young person from misusing a psychedelic, then the rest of the world can go to hell." Hello? Ever heard of education, Michael, education and a rational approach to drug use?
Oh, and tell me something, Mike: How can a botanist, amateur or otherwise, actually be in favor of the government outlawing plants and fungi??? In my view, any botanist who believes that government should be outlawing Mother Nature should be laughed off of the bookshelves and kicked out of all botany clubs, with their pens being ceremonially broken in half by true lovers of freedom and nature 16.
As Thomas Szasz wrote in "Our Right to Drugs":
"The right to chew or smoke a plant that grows wild in nature, such as hemp (marijuana), is anterior to and more basic than the right to vote." --Thomas Szasz, from Our Right to Drugs, p xvi17
When will Americans ever learn the obvious lesson of prohibition, that it kills?! Apparently, never. But then waiting for philosophers to change their mind on this subject is like waiting for Americans to decide that Coke is not their favorite soda. That feeling, like our hatred of drugs, has been cultivated by a full-court press of media propaganda. Our feelings about drugs, like our feeling about Coca-Cola, are the result of a multi-billion-dollar branding campaign by almost all media, and so we live and breathe drug demonization. Of course, if anyone can see through to the counterproductive, racist and xenophobic assumptions on which this harebrained Weltanschauung is based, it should be philosophers, given their supposed concern with first principles, and yet philosophers roll over and play dead in the age of drug prohibition. Nobody points out the endless ways in which hateful drug-war assumptions distort our view of the world around us and convince us to discard the most basic American freedoms while doing so.
One can only sigh when one thinks that Michael is considered to be a champion of drug law reform. With champions like Michael, one does not need enemies. Clearly, I am not going to be legally able to use godsends in MY lifetime thanks to the glacial approach to drug re-legalization 18 championed by such "reform" advocates.
Rick Strassman is another book-peddling stealth prohibitionist. He claims to be interested in the safety of young people (apparently the white American young people who might use DMT inadvisedly). Does he not realize that, even as we speak, DMT prohibition is causing an untold number of determined users to engage in the highly dangerous task of synthesizing DMT for themselves? Is that not dangerous, Rick? Whose safety is Rick worried about, anyway? Not the safety of the tens of thousands of minorities in inner-cities whose communities have been destroyed by first liquor prohibition and then drug prohibition. Destroyed, Rick! Destroyed!
Why don't these authors have anything to say for education? Why is their kneejerk response to drug dangers always to plump for drug laws that they know perfectly well will inevitably lead to death and violence? They are not ending death and sorrow by outlawing drugs: they are rather outsourcing death and sorrow to minorities and foreigners - meanwhile denying chronic depressives like myself access to time-honored medicines, the kind that have inspired entire religions in the past!
Even Robert Whitaker is blind to the downsides of the Drug War. In this book, he pushes back against the psychiatric pill mill 23 , oblivious to the fact that the pill mill came about thanks to drug prohibition which first gave the field of psychiatry a monopoly on dispensing mind and mood medicine. Somehow the downsides of prohibition are just invisible to even our most intelligent authors! "Drug prohibition?" these authors seem to ask. "What drug prohibition?"
Greg explores the use of technology to achieve self-transcendence and to solve all human problems -- while completely ignoring the fact that we live in a world where we are not allowed to use Mother Nature's time-honored plants and fungi to improve our lives. It is just as if we lived in Vedic times and the government had outlawed Soma and told us to use technological implants instead. Drug prohibition is HUGELY relevant to this topic -- and yet like almost every other author in the world, Greg feels free to completely ignore drug prohibition, apparently under the assumption that it is a natural baseline from which to live life -- as opposed to an unprecedented and racist-inspired invention of 20th-century American politicians, designed to medicalize all mental states and throw minorities in jail.
How does Greg (or any of these authors, for that matter) get away with ignoring the Drug War? That's easy. Almost their entire readership is just as bamboozled as the author is when it comes to drugs, so they too will be unable to see the seemingly obvious relevance of drug prohibition to the topic at hand. We all live in a make-believe world thanks to drug prohibition -- one in which we are blind to all downsides of prohibition and to all upsides of drug use. America: home of the brainwashed and the infantilized25.
In this academic study of witchcraft, Hutton only refers to "drugs" once, and then in a pejorative fashion. He apparently does not realize that the "herbs" that he is forever citing in his book WERE drugs -- just as surely as modern "meds" are "drugs," despite the multi-billion-dollar attempts on the part of Big Pharma 2829 to brand their dependence-causing nostrums as so much lamb's milk. The subtitle of Hutton's book is "A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present" -- and yet the author ignores the War on Drugs entirely. How bizarre, given that the War on Drugs is the ultimate case of racist and xenophobic fearmongering on behalf of the powers-that-be!!! One can only conclude that the Drug War is one big enormous magic act that has rendered drug prohibition invisible -- along with all of its endless downsides, not least of which is this seemingly subconscious self-censorship about drugs practiced by almost all modern non-fiction authors these days!!!
"Uncertain Places: Essays on Occult and Outsider Experiences" by Mitch Horowitz 3031
Mitch mentions Charles Fort32 in connection with UFOs, explaining how science ignores facts that it cannot assimilate into its system of classification. In Fortean language, this means that science has "damned" all such inconvenient truths. Why? Because science wants to appear omniscient and so refuses to even acknowledge the existence of facts that it cannot plausibly explain, especially when an explanation might call into question the metaphysics of materialism 33.
So far, so good.
Amazingly, however, Horowitz says nothing in his book about the way that modern science damns all positive facts about drug use. Positive reports of drug use are clearly the most DAMNED fact ever in the Fortean sense of that word and yet Mitch is silent on the subject. Completely silent. Of course, this is understandable. No one mentions the benefits of outlawed drugs these days without endangering their very livelihood -- as British drug researcher DJ Nutt learned to his cost. So I am not surprised that Mitch censored himself on this topic.
Still, that scarcely accounts for the fact that Mitch ghosted me when I attempted to challenge him for this silence. Did Mitch not see the enormous irony implicit in thus ignoring my comments?
His very silence on this topic proved my point: that positive talk about drugs is indeed viciously censored today, not just by science but even by fans of Charles Fort like Mitch Horowitz himself!!! Mitch himself is participating in the very censorship of "facts" which he himself claims to deride in "Uncertain Places"!!!
For more on this topic, see the essay I wrote in response to Mitch's hypocritical silence: namely &715&.
SIGH!
It seems that Mitch only practices Iconoclasm Lite, not REAL iconoclasm. The author will criticize science for not being forthcoming about UFOs, but he is not going to risk his livelihood by taking science to task for the far, far deadlier coverup in which it is complicit to this very day, the intentional coverup of any and all facts that might tend to place drug use in a positive light, like, for instance, the fact that the psychoactive Soma juice inspired the Hindu religion or that morphine 34 use can inspire a surreal appreciation of Mother Nature or that the non-addictive phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin demonstrate a wide range of glaringly obvious psychological benefits for users. All such facts are damned because they run counter to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. It's sad to see that even our self-styled iconoclasts are frightened into silence about this willful censorship of the truth, especially when one considers the endless downsides of drug prohibition, like the 67,000 killed in America's inner cities over the last 10 years, the 60,000 disappeared in Mexico over the last two decades, and the fact that drug prohibition has placed Donald Trump in the White House by throwing millions of minorities in jail after first destroying the neighborhoods in which they lived with prohibition-caused violence.
Not a single word about the totally unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive substances, aka America's War on Drugs. Like a good Drug Warrior, Johnson only mentions drugs in connection with addiction and sorrow. And the fact that prohibition causes violence is of no interest to Johnson - a fact which confirms me in my belief that violence is what Drug Warriors really want - they just want it to take place in minority communities and overseas.
"A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn 3637
It is not just conservatives who ignore the downsides of drug prohibition. Howard Zinn never mentions the War on Drugs in his History of the United States. Not once. America has taken the unprecedented step of outlawing psychoactive medicines wholesale, and yet this is somehow not considered part of our history - these laws that keep Americans from taking care of their own emotional and mental well-being? You would think a progressive author would be awake to the fact that the Drug War has destroyed America's inner cities - on purpose! We all agree that there are no-go zones in inner cities around the world - and yet no one admits what we also know: and that is that these war zones were created by prohibition, first liquor and then drug prohibition, which first brought guns and gunfire to city streets.
Modern philosophers should be pointing out these inconvenient truths loudly and clearly - America lives in a world of fake knowledge, based on the idea that the Drug War does not exist -- and yet whenever I bring up these topics in philosophy forums, I am told to go elsewhere - that is, of course, if I am not completely ignored and automatically blocked by prohibition-friendly bots programmed by philosophically challenged programmers who would not know a logical inconsistency if it bit them on their acne-scarred face.
The cowardice of philosophers
The cowardice of philosophers cannot be overstated. In its online biography for William James, the Harvard University psychology department (which James founded) does not even mention James' use of substances like nitrous oxide for the purpose of studying the nature of perception and ultimate reality38. But then most of these censors at Harvard are probably materialists, who have much to gain by censoring James on these topics. If you cannot beat your idealistic opponent on topics like these, then at least the Drug War gives them an excuse to censor that opponent. No need to refute James' ideas about ultimate realities when you can ignore them in the name of America's superstitious a priori demonization of godsend medicines.
Then, of course, the entire self-help genre is a creation of drug prohibition. Since we have outlawed all godsends, authors now make a living verbally describing the positive effects that in the past we could have brought about at will without their help but which we are now told to bring about by a series of "12 easy drug-free steps."
This situation cries out for modern philosophers to be gadflies on the topic of Drug War absurdities - and above all the fact that almost every author and scientist these days reckons without the Drug War, pretending that they are opining from a natural baseline on subjects like depression, human consciousness, crime, and religion etc. - never realizing that drug prohibition has huge implications in these areas, as, for instance, the psychoactive Soma 39 juice inspired the Vedic religion, as, for instance, there are countless drugs that could end depression in a trice for most people when used in a common-sense manner - not just the kinds of phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin40 but the wise occasional use of opium 41 and coca and the many psychoactive plants, fungi and even animals about which Americans have been kept ignorant by a media that refuses to publish any good news about rotten evil drugs - even though they will not stint at broadcasting prime-time television ads targeted at young people for Jim Beam bourbon42 - this despite the fact that liquor is the deadliest drug in the country, killing 178,000 a year43.
And yet I find myself in the role of Ignaz Semmelweis when it comes to drugs 4445. I have been banned from entire forums merely because I discuss these topics. I begin to understand what Schopenhauer was talking about in The World as Will and Idea when he championed "the real seriously understood philosophy which is concerned with the truth," in contradistinction to what he called "the jest of philosophy taught in the universities."46
Conclusion
Modern philosophers are hypocrites. They claim allegiance to Socrates yet refuse to follow his lead in stating inconvenient truths to the powers-that-be. This is why the Drug War is so hateful - because even its natural enemies have been silenced by the full-court press of substance demonization, to the point that no one even admits that there is a Drug War anymore - so complacent have we become over the last 100 years about living in a world in which racist politicians decide in advance what drugs are useful for us as unique individuals, all based on the following absurd and inhumane algorithm: namely, that a drug that can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person at one dose for one reason, must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
This is a superstitious and racist drug policy totally unbecoming of a nation founded on the right to the pursuit of human happiness. It is the triumph of the drug-hating religion of Christian Science as the law of the land. It is not just a tyranny -- it is a meta-tyranny, controlling as it does not merely what we can think -- but how and how much we can think and feel in this life. Drug prohibition is thus the ultimate tyranny, a fact that renders the cowardly philosophical silence on this topic a tragedy for freedom-loving people worldwide.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!
"Can I use poppies, coca, laughing gas, MDMA?" "NO," says the materialist, "We must be SCIENTIFIC! We must fry your brain and give you a lobotomy and make you a patient for life with the psychiatric pill mill! That's true SCIENCE!"
America is insane: it makes liquor officially legal and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.
Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.
More materialist nonsense. "We" are the only reason that the universe exists as a universe rather than as inchoate particles.
A pharmacologically savvy drug dealer would have no problem getting someone off one drug because they would use the common sense practice of fighting drugs with drugs. But materialist doctors would rather that the patient suffer than to use such psychologically obvious methods.
It's a category error to say that scientists can tell us if psychoactive drugs "really work." It's like asking Dr. Spock of Star Trek if hugging "really works." ("Hugging is highly illogical, Captain.")
Katie MacBride's one-sided attack on MAPS reminds me of why I got into an argument with Vincent Rado. Yes, psychedelic hype can go too far, but let's solve the huge problem first by ending the drug war!!!
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.