when former drug users proselytize on behalf of America's Drug War Cult
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 18, 2025
A few months ago, I received a tweet from a Drug Warrior assuring me in a nice fatherly tone that I would change my mind about drugs when I was "older," just I wait and see! I guess he failed to realize that I was already 65 years old at the time and that if I was going to change my mind on a subject, I had better start doing that pronto. Nevertheless, the tweet came in handy. It reminded me that there are a large number of people who condemn drugs, not so much for being dangerous as for being superfluous and ridiculous, as things that any grown-up could and should do without. "Silly Rabbit," they seem to say, "kicks are for hedonists. There is no mature and sensible reason why anyone should wish to alter their mental state - except perhaps to get meaninglessly plastered by alcohol." The anthem for this condescending mindset, by the way, is the 1974 "No-No Song" by Ringo Starr, in which the Beatles drummer declaims as follows:
"No thank you, please, it only makes me sneeze and then it makes it hard to find the door."
I have encountered this attitude among some of my former schoolmates, especially those who used to use drugs irresponsibly in their youth. These days, it's a point of honor for them to say that they no longer "do drugs." They preen themselves on their wholesale renunciation of all the substances that have been outlawed by our racist politicians, as who should say: "I do not 'do drugs' anymore, just as I no longer use skateboards or drink Red Bull or scribble graffiti on freight cars! I am an adult, after all, thank you very much, indeed!"
Generally speaking, one might assume that Ringo Starr is on our side in our war against the Drug War, and yet with friends like Ringo, one scarcely needs enemies. For surely this notion that drug use is silly, even when put forward in the lyrics of a facetious and disingenuous pop hit, can only aid and abet and give comfort to the Drug Warriors who, for their part, are focusing on the supposed dangers of drugs. These two attitudes combined - the idea that drugs are both unnecessary AND dangerous - provide the one-two punch that is keeping drug re-legalization 1 "down and out" when it comes to public opinion.
But surely any philosopher reading this essay sees what is going on here. We are being taught to judge the propriety of drug use based only on examples culled from reports of the irresponsible and uneducated use by young people. If we judged other risky activities in this way, those activities would be banned at once, and not just for young people but for everyone. There would be no more horseback riding, no more drag-racing, no more cliff climbing - and certainly no more rifle shooting or beer swilling - no, not for anyone.
Putting aside this hypocritical inconsistency for a moment, it is demonstrably false to claim that there are no good reasons for drug use. That statement betrays a total ignorance of anecdote, of history, and of psychological common sense. It is, however, a mindset that is all-too-easy to adopt in a world that has effectively banned all positive reports of substance use from all media. One searches in vain for movies 2 and books that depict the beneficial use of drugs for positive purposes. One searches in vain for news stories that cover the sane and sensible use of drugs. We are all obliged to believe that drug use must end in disaster while our politicians crank out drug laws to make that outcome as likely as possible. Yet, in the words of the "X-Files" tagline, "the truth is out there." The truth about beneficial drug use can be found in such books as "Pihkal" by Alexander Shulgin3, "The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide" by James Fadiman4, "Plants of the Gods" by Richard Schultes5 - and even in "The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James6. It will be remembered that James used laughing gas 7 to study altered states and that he urged his fellow philosophers to do the same. Or perhaps it will NOT be remembered, given that James's work with altered states is not even mentioned in his online biography at Harvard University, where he founded the department of psychology8. Apparently, the polymath's personal history had to be rewritten to pass muster with the sensibilities of the Drug Warrior.
Of course, even if there were no good reasons for "drug use," it does not follow that we should outlaw the practice. (Is there a good reason for drag-racing or beer drinking?) But the claim is hopelessly subjective in nature. It is not clear what is meant either by "good reasons" or by "drug use." Objectively speaking, the latter term refers to such a wide variety of activities as to render it meaningless. And the term "good reasons" is entirely subjective. I claim that a good reason for certain drug use is that I can better see and appreciate the intricate body structure of a Monarch Butterfly. Is that good enough for you? Another claims that drugs let them rise above self-destructive impulses and to thus perform more naturally on stage and so earn a living. Is that a good enough reason for you? Still another uses drugs to obtain the sorts of feelings experienced by the drug study participant who wrote the following in the book Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin:
"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.9"
Is that a good enough reason for using drugs, to have a feeling of camaraderie with your fellow human beings?
Yet a fourth claims that they want to follow through on the suggestion of William James, that philosophers study altered states in order to learn about the nature of reality.
Is that a good enough reason for using drugs? Is it good to have a free academia?
We see then that the Drug War is all about the subjective evaluation of the propriety of drug use - which is no surprise, however, since the word "drugs" itself is the ultimate in vague terminology. The term only seems to make sense to us in light of a purely fictional notion: namely, that there are two types of psychoactive substances in the world: meds, which are good, and drugs, which are evil. This is the drug-war apartheid of which Julian Buchanan10 writes, this imaginary division of drugs into two separate types of substances. In reality, however, drugs are drugs are drugs. None of them are either good or bad in themselves. The only thing that is bad is a lack of education. But the Drug Warrior's job is to convince us otherwise, that drugs can be bad in and of themselves. Unfortunately, this erroneous belief is not just a piece of harmless superstition; it has tragic consequences in the real world for it results in legislation that forces millions around the world to go without godsend medicine. Why? Because racist politicians have this strange idee fixe: they believe that a drug that can be misused by white American young people at one dose for one reason in one context must not be used by anyone for any reason in any context ever.
That is the inhumane upshot of our War on Drugs: it makes life worse for countless millions who go without godsend medicines. They are countless because they are never considered stakeholders in drug policy debates despite the fact that they are the group that suffers most thanks to the mindless prohibitions of the Drug War. And this, of course, is only the beginning of the unnecessary heartache that the Drug War brings about, for we have yet to even mention the inner-city violence and the gangs and drug cartels that drug prohibition has created out of whole cloth. We have yet to mention the 60,000 who were "disappeared" in Mexico over the last two decades thanks to the U.S.-backed Drug War south of the border11. We have yet to mention the 67,000 gun deaths in inner-cities of the last decade12, deaths which would never had occurred had drug prohibition not incentivized the creation of heavily armed gangs in poor neighborhoods. We have yet to mention how the Drug War has destroyed American liberty, taking out the 4th amendment wholesale and denying freedom of religion 13 to those sects whose adherents consider Mother Nature to be a goddess rather than a drug kingpin.
Of course there may be plenty of good reasons why specific people should wish to refrain from using specific drugs given their own personality and biochemistry and perhaps even their own genetics. But this reminds us of the key point that Drug Warriors always ignore: namely, that the propriety of any specific case of drug use must always be established by specifics, not by generalities. The variables to be considered must include factors such as the following: who used what drug(s) for what reasons under what circumstances at what doses in what context... etc. etc. etc. In other words, we must take into account all of the variables that the Drug Warriors ignore. And why do they ignore them? Because the Drug Warrior's goal is to convince the world that there are no positive uses for "drugs," and so they do not want to hear any upbeat "specifics" lest such facts should "send the wrong message" to the young people whom the Drug Warrior is trying to brainwash on the subject. The last thing that the Drug Warrior wants is for a full and honest discussion about drug use. Fortunately for them, they can point to purblind materialist drug researchers to support their views about the supposed uselessness of drugs, since those scientists are behaviorists in their approach to psychology and are therefore blind to all obvious drug benefits for their own dogmatic reasons. For such scientists, drug efficacy must be determined by looking under a microscope, not by looking at actual use by actual people in actual circumstances.
If I were ever to change my mind on these topics, it would only be because I had succumbed to the siren song of the Drug Warriors, who are forever trying to pawn off misrepresentations and lies as truth. I live in a Drug War society, after all, where people are absolutely afraid to speak up for sanity and where the media pretends that outlawed drugs are either evil or do not exist. In such a world, I could very easily give up in frustration and shout: "You know what, screw it. Let me become one of 'them'. Let me quietly embrace the popular prejudices of our time and say no more about it!"
That is why I created this website in the first place: so that I could keep my mind clear as to what the Drug Warrior is up to when it comes to their misleading and disingenuous arguments against drugs. I wanted to analyze their various claims and decipher their many faulty but hidden premises. The fact that the above-mentioned gentlemen considers my pushback in this quarter to be an immature fad is a disturbing sign. It suggests that he himself has fallen prey to Drug War propaganda and is now in the business of going about enrolling others in the Great American Cult of Substance Demonization. I fear that my very presence as a philosopher against the Drug War constitutes an implicit rebuke to his slavish belief in government propaganda. And so he calls me to join him in the Land of Lethe. "Come on, Brian," he cries. "It will be so easy! No need to think for yourself anymore - just accept the anti-scientific bias of racist politicians as gospel truth! Everybody's doing it! Why fight it anymore?! Just say it to yourself: 'Drugs are bad, drugs are bad...' That's it, you can do it!"
Well, if that is what it means to be an adult, then I gladly renounce my claim to the title.
Author's Follow-up:
November 21, 2025
I am returning to all my essays as time permits to point out that cocaine14 and opium15 are time-honored panaceas -- and that they were outlawed in part thanks to demonization by the medical industry, whose employees could lose their jobs were human beings allowed to access Mother Nature in order to take care of their own problems.
Cocaine and Opium are godsend medicines -- and yet even many drug law reform advocates have been successfully taught from childhood to dismiss them as "hard drugs," as substances that are somehow beyond the pale -- just like that naysayer on Twitter.
So he thinks I will outgrow my desire to have peace of mind? my desire to be all that I can be in life? my desire to follow-up on the work of William James viz. the nature of reality writ large16?
This is so typical of the Drug Warrior -- to invert values like this. The guy wants me to become a couch potato and learn my metaphysics from television commercials. Meanwhile we have an FDA that advocates brain-damaging shock therapy while refusing to approve of drugs whose use could make that shock therapy unnecessary17.
Inverted values. There's your tax dollars at work in the American War on Godsend Medicines.
One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise come from user reports.
Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.
Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.
The drug war is is a multi-billion-dollar campaign to enforce the attitude of the Francisco Pizarro's of the world when it comes to non-western medicine. It is the apotheosis of the colonialism that most Americans claim to hate.
Drug testing should flag impairment only. Any other use is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.
Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.
I can't believe people. Somebody's telling me that "drugs" is not used problematically. It is CONSTANTLY used with a sneer in the voice when politicians want to diss somebody, as in, "Oh, they're in favor of DRUGS!!!" It's a political term as used today!
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.
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