n a free world, drugs would not be the enemy. The enemies would be ignorance and unwanted dependency. In such a world, we would actually teach people how to use drugs as safely as possible. We would even encourage drug use in cases where it might prove beneficial. For in such a world, we would actually prefer that a suicidal person use drugs that elate and inspire rather than to have them commit suicide1. Imagine that! We would actually prefer that they use drugs rather than to have their brains fried by electroshock therapy2. Imagine that! We would actually prefer that a hothead use MDMA rather than to shoot up a grade school3. Imagine that! We would recognize, moreover, that there are many worse things than drug use, especially given the fact that many drugs can inspire and elate without the threat of addiction - and that even addictive drugs are used wisely by most people4. In other words, in such a world, we would recognize the obvious. We would realize that drug use is like any other risky activity on the globe, like horseback riding and drinking, that it will have its victims, and that our goal can only be to make the activity as safe and beneficial as possible in a way consistent with democratic liberties. In other words, all drugs would be re-legalized. That is, they will be returned to the legal status that they have enjoyed throughout most of human history, until the arrival of racist and xenophobic American politicians who decided in the 20th century to use drug laws to disempower minorities and foreigners.
In this free world that I envision, we would actually study drugs to find common-sense ways to ensure their safe use and to steer potential problem users to better drug choices and better protocols. For the first time in world history, researchers would set forth with the freedom and resources necessary to study potential uses for ALL psychoactive drugs in the world, both natural and synthetic. This study would ask and answer the following question: how can we best use ANY of the psychoactive substances in the world (or any combination thereof) to help individuals live the best life possible, according to THEIR definition of that outcome (whether the goal of use be to study harder, to appreciate music more deeply, or even to help people commune with their God). In such a study, the effectiveness of drugs for such purposes would not be established by behaviorist standards5, which tell us to ignore everything that really counts in life, such as the "mere" happiness and optimism of the user. We would no longer be dogmatically blind to the benefit of psychoactive substances based on our slavish adherence to the principles of the inhumane and long-obsolete psychology of J.B. Watson. Instead, we would muster enough common sense to admit that a person who is motivated and inspired by the strategic use of drugs IS INDEED motivated and inspired thereby - that we need no scientists to come along with a microscope to search still further for a "real" cure in an effort to vindicate materialism viz the study of mood and mentation.
In enumerating these aspects of a post-prohibition world, it becomes clear why such ideas gain so little traction in the modern mind. Such a world would call for a moderate capital outlay for public health, after all, and Americans these days are dogmatic skinflints. The mainstream mindset, as personified by America's new king in Washington, D.C., holds that we should spend zero government money on public health. Zero.
This might sound like Libertarianism at first blush6, until we realize that the people who favor such an approach to public health have no problem whatsoever with spending billions on arresting the people whom we refuse to educate and for whom we refuse to do any drug research whatsoever that would conduce to their actually thriving in life. Yes, today's doctrinaire skinflints will gladly spend billions to address drug problems - as long as this means arresting minorities for problematic use and using our drug laws as a means to lord it over countries south of the border, where, indeed, prohibition has long since destroyed the rule of law. These seeming skinflints will spend further billions on fighting wars to enforce our own Drug War prohibitions overseas. In other words, if economics were really all that mattered and the Drug Warriors had an ounce of brains, they would dismantle the enormously expensive military infrastructure that the drug-war approach has erected and spend a fraction of the money that they save thereby to let empathic people with common sense help their fellows to make decisions about drug use based on actual experience and common sense. The fact that such plans are a non-starter with the Drug Warriors belies their real goal, which is not to save money but to arrest minorities and so triumph at the polls as racist and xenophobic demagogues.
But back to utopia - or rather common sense.
All sane people in such a world will have been taught from grade school - not that drugs are wrong, but that prohibition is wrong. When it comes to prohibition, America has been there and done that and the approach has been found to cause endless unnecessary suffering, meanwhile thoroughly censoring the media and academia and leading to the election of tyrants. It has caused death and destruction, creating the Mafia and drug cartels out of whole cloth. It has destroyed the rule of law in Latin America and turned inner cities into shooting galleries. It has destroyed the 1st and 4th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It has censored academia and outlawed the freedom of religion. It has infantilized labor by forcing employees to urinate for their employers, not to identify impairment, but merely to search for Christian Science heretics in the workforce, i.e., those who use substances of which politicians disapprove. It has forced pain patients and the depressed to go without godsend medicines that elate and inspire. It has placed mental and physical pain relief in the hands of federal bureaucrats - and this at the behest of politicians who profess to hate Big Government.
Such Drug Warriors fail to see that there is no bigger government on earth than a government that calls the shots when it comes to how and how much its citizens are allowed to think and feel in this life. There is no greater government intrusion into the lives of individual citizens than to control their minds like this. This is why I cannot help but laugh when they see these drug-warrior hotshots tooling around town in pickup trucks whose license plates read "Don't tread on me." It's really quite amusing. It's as if these wannabe rebels were telling the government: "Yes, indeed, don't tread on me, damn it! Humph! That said, please continue to tell me how and how much I can think and feel in this life, Mommy!"
Sorry about the digression, but can you blame me? Those Drug Warriors are just so precious when it comes to their counterproductive cluelessness about matters of principle! But now back to the delineation of the free-world zeitgeist already in progress.
All sane people in such a world would learn in grade school a fact that Drug Warriors never grasp: the fact that health is determined by a balance of factors, not by one single input. Health is determined by the unique circumstances of a single individual: their genetics, their biochemistry, their education level, the neurotic hang-ups of their parents, etc. etc. The same drug that seems to be a problem for one person can be a godsend for another. In other words, drugs in themselves are neither healthy nor unhealthy. It is nonsense, therefore, to talk about the healthiness or usefulness of a specific drug in the abstract. And so when we ask, "Is a psychoactive drug useful and appropriate?" the answer must be: "What do you mean? Is it useful and appropriate for whom? at what dose? in what circumstance? for what reason?" The appropriateness of drug use is always dependent on a wide variety of factors - and to come up with one-size-fits-all judgments about individual drugs is therefore insane and productive of great harm. The Drug Warriors try to convince us of the following antiscientific lie: namely, that a substance that may be misused, even in theory, by a white American teenager at one dose, for one reason, in one circumstance, must not be used by anyone, at any dose, for any reason, in any circumstance. It is hard to imagine a viewpoint more likely to produce sorrow and suffering in the world. Our post-Drug War world puts and end to such manipulative choplogic by exposing it for the anti-philosophical garbage that it is.
Yes, there will be victims of freedom - there always are. Young people die from horseback riding. Young people die from climbing cliffs. Young people die from parachuting. But anyone who thinks that this approach to drugs would cause more death and sorrow than the status quo is simply misinformed. The approach here proposed would be all about making drug use as safe as possible, whereas the prohibitionist status quo is all about making drug use as dangerous as possible. For when we outlaw desired substances like drugs, we place their manufacture and distribution in the hands of financially motivated dealers, whose product is uncertain as to quality and quantity, a fact that has led to the misnamed opiate crisis, which is actually a prohibition crisis. Why are folks overdosing, after all, except for the fact that they can have no idea of the exact content and dosage of the substances that they are using? Do we really think that this dystopia of young American deaths is better than the reality that obtained before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, when opiate users could smoke a regulated opium supply peaceably in their homes, reasonably certain of the quality and quantity of the substance that they were consuming? Moreover, the mindset I advance would provide new but psychologically obvious ways in which folks could kick unwanted dependencies by the common sense method of fighting drugs with drugs7. Most importantly of all, the end of prohibition would remove the incentive for extreme violence and even physical torture that drug prohibition has made an everyday reality in many parts of Latin America.
I could go on listing reasons why education, freedom and common sense provide the best approach to "dealing" with drug use from any conceivable point of view - except for that of a selfish and racist xenophobe, perhaps -- but I fear that those who remain unconvinced at this point are too brainwashed (at best) or too evil (at worst) to benefit from any further elucidation on my part. Perhaps, though, they are laboring under the illusion that drugs have no benefits - which is easy to believe, of course, in a world in which media companies refuse to publish any stories that serve to demonstrate the common-sense benefits of psychoactive substances. With this possibility in mind, let me provide some examples of beneficial drug use as described in drug user reports from Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin8 - one of the few pharmacists in the world who was given a chance to legally look for the kinds of beneficial drugs that we are talking about here - despite the DEA's de rigueur attempts to entrap him into illegal activity and so put a stop to his academic freedom. For there is nothing that Drug Warriors hate so much as education and truth.
"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 am experiencing more deeply than ever before the importance of acknowledging and deeply honoring each human being. And I was able to go through and resolve some judgments with particular persons."
"All emotions and feeling available, but there is a cool perspective which informs all thinking... Could do a lot of learning with this material."9
And these are the effects of drugs that the DEA tells us have no known positive uses whatsoever -- a lie with which today's scientists connive thanks to their adherence to the emotion-scorning doctrine of behaviorism10.
Finally, in a post-Drug War world, we would replace pill-dispensing psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy shaman: highly empathic individuals with a wide historic and anecdotal knowledge of the best and safest ways to benefit from psychoactive medicine11. By making this fundamental change in addressing psychological health, we would abolish the entire concept of the mental "patient," for these empathic shaman would counsel anyone and everyone who seeks to improve their psychological life with the help of psychoactive medicine. Whether one is dealing with a clinically defined "depression" or they are seeking to safely and thoroughly study altered states in the manner of William James, they would seek the informed advice of these modern empaths. These knowledgeable and experienced drug users would be a community resource, ready to intervene and educate in cases in which people use drugs unwisely -- for, as stated above, we will hold ignorance to be the enemy in our post-Drug War world rather than superstitiously blaming problems on the inanimate objects that we deride as "drugs."
Why this change? Because it has always been a category error to place materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine. Because we need to stop gaslighting Americans by telling them that drugs have no beneficial uses, when many, in fact, have GLARINGLY OBVIOUS beneficial uses, when used strategically and intentionally. For more on this topic, see my essay entitled Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism.
AFTERWORD
I am always trying to anticipate and rebut any likely objections to my essays, so let me conclude by answering what I call the "Bill Clinton" objection. Bill, it might be remembered, once remarked that his brother would have been dead had cocaine in particular been legal. This objection, however, is easily disposed of. Firstly, Bill does not really know this - and even if he did, his statement begs the question, why is society not teaching Roger about safe use? Secondly, even if we agree with the doubtful assumption that we could "save" the Roger Clintons of the world by enacting prohibition, we can only do so by outsourcing the drug-related dangers to minorities and foreigners. So we save one white American to kill hundreds, if not thousands of Blacks and Mexicans. The outlawing of the coca leaf is the reason why 60,000 Mexicans were "disappeared" in Mexico over the last two decades12. It sparked a Drug War which destroyed the rule of law in Latin America. What a huge price to keep Roger Clinton safe! There were tens of thousands of gun deaths in inner-cities over the last ten years13. What a huge price to keep Roger Clinton safe! Moreover, when we outlaw the drug on behalf of uneducated users, we outlaw all manner of responsible use by responsible users. This is tyrannical in the case of psychoactive drugs like coca, whose positive and beneficial uses are limited only by the human imagination. Does the responsible world have to go without godsends because of the ignorance of Roger Clinton - an ignorance that the government refuses to correct on principle, under the warped prohibitionist premise that ignorance is the best policy when it comes to drugs? To paraphrase Shakespeare: "Dost thou think, because Roger Clinton is ignorant, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"14
If we want to save the maximum number of the Roger Clintons of the world in a way that does not throw all would-be responsible drug users under the bus, then we need to educate, not arrest. We need to rethink our entire outlook on drugs along the lines suggested above. In such a re-legalized world, drug use would be as safe as possible, while leading to as many benefits as possible - and that is all we can ask for any risky activity on the planet, at least if we want a drug policy that is consistent with the principles of democracy and freedom.
Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths
In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.
This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.
This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.
How do I know this?
Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.
More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?
This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."
It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.
Anyone who has read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin knows that the drug warriors have it exactly backwards. Drugs are our friends. We need to find safe ways to use them to improve ourselves psychologically, spiritually and mentally.
I should have added to that last post: "I in no way want to glorify or condone drug demonization."
Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.
Amphetamines are "meds" when they help kids think more clearly but they are "drugs" when they help adults think more clearly. That shows you just how bewildered Americans are when it comes to drugs.
Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.
The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.
Doc to Franklin: "I'm sorry, Ben, but I see no benefits of opium use under my microscope. The idea that you are living a fulfilled life is clearly a mistake on your part. If you want to be scientific, stop using opium and be scientifically depressed like the rest of us."
"There has been so much delirious nonsense written about drugs that sane men may well despair of seeing the light." -- Aleister Crowley, from "Essays on Intoxication"
Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, After the Drug War: what a free world would look like, published on March 29, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
n a free world, drugs would not be the enemy. The enemies would be ignorance and unwanted dependency. In such a world, we would actually teach people how to use drugs as safely as possible. We would even encourage drug use in cases where it might prove beneficial. For in such a world, we would actually prefer that a suicidal person use drugs that elate and inspire rather than to have them commit suicide1. Imagine that! We would actually prefer that they use drugs rather than to have their brains fried by electroshock therapy2. Imagine that! We would actually prefer that a hothead use MDMA rather than to shoot up a grade school3. Imagine that! We would recognize, moreover, that there are many worse things than drug use, especially given the fact that many drugs can inspire and elate without the threat of addiction - and that even addictive drugs are used wisely by most people4. In other words, in such a world, we would recognize the obvious. We would realize that drug use is like any other risky activity on the globe, like horseback riding and drinking, that it will have its victims, and that our goal can only be to make the activity as safe and beneficial as possible in a way consistent with democratic liberties. In other words, all drugs would be re-legalized. That is, they will be returned to the legal status that they have enjoyed throughout most of human history, until the arrival of racist and xenophobic American politicians who decided in the 20th century to use drug laws to disempower minorities and foreigners. 
You have been reading an article entitled, After the Drug War: what a free world would look like, published on March 29, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
