End Drug Prohibition Now

Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass

End Drug Prohibition Now

an open letter to Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 11, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

May 26, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

I wrote the following essay under the impression that Mike Jay was in favor of a go-slow approach to ending drug prohibition. I drew this conclusion from reading the following two sentences in the concluding paragraph of the chapter entitled "The Black Drop: Opium" on page 87 of Jay's "Emperor of Dreams, ¹" the edition published in 2000 and reprinted in 2005:

"But it's one thing to cast a critical eye over the cultural and scientific context in which opiates were criminalised, and another thing entirely to argue that history proves that these substances should simply be legalised. This is a conclusion which puts a greater weight on the story than it can necessarily bear."

Mike has since assured me that he is a drug prohibition advocate of long-standing. This is easy enough for me to believe considering the compelling historical case that his book implicitly makes for drug re-legalization . Whether he shares my desire for fast-tracking the re-legalization process is not yet entirely clear to me, but the last thing I want to do is quibble with one of the few successful authors who has condescended to respond to my emails, and substantively at that!

In light of this backstory, I ask the reader to ignore any hint of criticism of Jay in the following essay.

Brian

PS I look forward to reading Jay's other drug-related books, including "Artificial Paradises,²" "High Society,³" "Psychonauts,⁴" and "Blue Tide.⁵" The latter title concerns "the search for Soma, ⁶ " a subject in which I am particularly interested at this time given my recent attempts to identify the drug/god/concept ⁷ based on the many diverse references to it in Vedic scripture ⁸.

MY LETTER TO MIKE

Hi, Mike.

I was enjoying your book ⁹. However, you "lost me" at the conclusion of the chapter on opium .

Response from Mike Jay

Update: May 14, 2025

You speak as if re-legalization of Mother Nature is problematic. I very much disagree. Or rather, I agree that it might be problematic for hysterical Drug Warriors and Big Pharma execs and racist politicians and the medical establishment and law enforcement, etc., but so what? It SHOULD be problematic for them. Take Big Pharma , for instance. It has a monopoly on mind-and-mood medicine thanks to which 1 in 4 American women have to take a Big Pharma drug every day of their life! They are dependent for life on drugs that are harder to kick than heroin ¹⁰! Re-legalization of drug alternatives SHOULD be problematic for Big Pharma , just as arrest is problematic for a criminal. The chronically depressed, like myself, should be able to use drugs that inspire and elate and are not dependence-causing by design. Outlawed drugs have blazingly obvious benefits for the depressed, after all -- once we take off the behaviorist, materialist and reductionist blinders of modern science. If giving me mind-improving medicine is problematic for modern society, then bring on the problems. Let OTHER people suffer problems for a change while I get long-denied relief: let the Drug Warriors and prohibitionists reap the whirlwind that they have been asking for for over a century now.

Re-legalization is the right thing to do for two reasons:

First, drug re-legalization is the right thing to do based on principle, because the government never had the right to outlaw Mother Nature in the first place, least of all in a country founded on the Natural Law of John Locke, who claimed that a citizen has a natural right to the use of the earth and all that lies therein ¹¹. (Thomas Jefferson was rolling in his grave when the Reagan DEA stomped onto Monticello ¹² in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking.¹³) Moreover, the Drug War is the outlawing of the religious impulse ¹⁴. The Hindu religion owes its existence to the use of a drug that inspired and elated, from which it follows that it is the outlawing of religion to outlaw drugs that inspire and elate -- and those are precisely the drugs that are outlawed by drug prohibition. Finally, we live in a time when I cannot get a job in America if I am a Christian Science heretic -- for drug testing ¹⁵ will "out me" to my potential employers as having used godsend medicines of which racist politicians disapprove. Without any judicial process, I can be removed from the American workforce, and without any means of appeal -- nay, without even being charged with a crime. America is a Christian Science theocracy thanks to drug prohibition. (For more on this anti-democratic tendency of drug prohibition, see "Drug Warriors and Their Prey" by Richard Lawrence Miller.¹⁶)

Second, we need to end drug prohibition for practical reasons, because drug re-legalization would lead to far less death and suffering than is now going on thanks to drug prohibition. If you do not believe me, then I would suggest that you are not considering all the stakeholders in drug policy decisions. In that case, you are guilty of what I call "The Bill Clinton Fallacy,¹⁷" the idea that we can save white young people by outsourcing the downsides of drug prohibition to American inner cities and overseas. Bill thought he was saving his brother Roger by keeping cocaine illegal, but even if that highly problematic claim of his were true, he was saving his white brother only by killing minority children, Black children like Niomi Russell, who died in a drive-by shooting in 2024 in Washington, D.C.¹⁸ because drug prohibition had turned the 'hood into a shooting gallery. But then it is "out of sight, out of mind" for Drug Warriors when it comes to the downsides of their drug laws. Kids were not being mowed down in BILL's neighborhood, after all, so why should he care?

And yet, as Heather Ann Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2014:

"Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence ¹⁹ that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist.²⁰"

There was no machine-gun fire in American streets before liquor and drug prohibition. Nor were there daily drive-by shootings in inner-city neighborhoods.

Drug prohibition killed 67,000 Blacks in major US cities over the last ten years ²¹, and drug prohibition has resulted in the disappearance of 60,000 Mexicans in the last two decades ²² ²³. Meanwhile, outlawing drugs like DMT has the effect of forcing determined users to work with highly caustic chemicals in order to extract DMT for themselves. Who is worried about THEIR safety? Not Rick Strassman, for starters, who agrees with you that drug re-legalization is too risky. Meanwhile, drug prohibition has killed thousands of American opiate users by refusing to teach safe use and by refusing to regulate the drug supply as to quality and quantity. Kids were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal in America. It took drug prohibition to accomplish that. Drug prohibition also outlaws a wide variety of drugs that could be used to fight drugs with drugs ²⁴ -- as for instance the symptomatic use of "laughing gas " could have easily helped me through the hour or two when I was recently overwhelmed by depression thanks to my attempted withdrawal from the Big Pharma ²⁵ ²⁶ antidepressant called Effexor ²⁷ . (Such strategic and as-needed drug use is common sense -- or it would be if Americans did not believe the Drug War lie that outlawed substances can have no positive uses whatsoever.) Instead, I had to go back to full-dose Effexor use -- and it was all totally unnecessary! But then no one thinks about people in my position when they speak so breezily about outlawing drugs. Who cares if I get off Effexor? I am supposed to "shut up and take my meds" in any case and let science cure me. I am supposed to forget about all the common-sense medicines out there that bring that pesky euphoria and insight.

Millions of chronically depressed like myself go without godsend medicine every day and this is brought about by drug prohibition. Young people kill themselves every day because we outlaw all drugs that inspire and elate. Kids use alcohol only because we have outlawed all the far-less-dangerous alternatives. The depressed are given brain-damaging shock therapy because we have outlawed the drugs that would make shock therapy unnecessary.

And the list of unrecognized downsides of drug prohibition goes on.

Drug prohibition has censored academia, or rather brainwashed and intimidated academics into censoring themselves. William James told philosophers to use laughing gas to learn about ultimate reality ²⁸, but the government is now trying to render that research illegal, even though such research was already totally impractical. And why? Because cowardly philosophers never took James seriously viz. the exploration of the "anesthetic revelation"²⁹ whereas in a sane world, laughing gas would be made readily available for a wide variety of common-sense uses. For starters, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.

And the list of drug prohibition downsides continues.

Let's look at the censorship of authors in the non-fiction world. Most authors never mention drugs, even though drug use is of central importance in the study of a wide range of topics, from consciousness to anxiety. And so Donald Trump was right, albeit for the wrong reasons: we DO have a "fake science" today, but it came about because scientists are pretending that substance prohibition does not exist and that neither do the many psychoactive substances that have been outlawed thereby. And so these scientists say things like, "Depression is a tough nut to crack," when that is just a lie. They can only say that because they are reckoning without drug prohibition. The fact is, we could end most depression in a heartbeat with drugs that inspire and elate. In a heartbeat! Yet we treat drug prohibition as a natural baseline, so much so that many American history books do not even MENTION the Drug War. That is how "natural" we have been taught to feel about our unprecedented status quo of wholesale drug prohibition. The Drug War is not even mentioned in "A People's History of the United States" by progressive historian Howard Zinn ³⁰, nor in "Birth of the Modern" by conservative historian Paul Johnson ³¹. Not mentioned once! Future humans may not even know that we lived in the times of a Drug War. How will we ever end prohibitions that most people pretend do not even exist, so blinded have they become to the sorts of downsides that I am enumerating here?

Here are still more downsides to drug prohibition.

When we crack down on opiates, we think we are saving white young people -- but we are actually forcing kids in hospice to go without adequate pain relief in India, where morphine is often unavailable thanks to bureaucratic, financial and legal hurdles brought about by America's anti-drug hysteria ³². I say nothing of the creativity that we have outlawed for our poets and writers. As author Richard Middleton wrote, 19th-century poets used opium wisely, in "a series of quarterly carouses." When we outlaw drugs, therefore, we are not just making a medical decision about psychoactive substances; we are also tacitly deciding what we should value in life. And so doctors are called on to decide questions for which they have no expertise, such as:

"Do we prefer literary freedom, or would we prefer a level of safety for drug use that we do not demand of any other risky activity on planet Earth?"

The outlawing of LSD and Ecstasy did not just get rid of two drugs: it got rid of two major peace-and-love movements in a world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. And yet the geniuses in the prohibition movement think that they are saving lives? Please!

And this prohibition mindset is fundamentally flawed. Why? Because, as GK Chesterton pointed out in "Eugenics and Other Evils,³³" health is the result of a balance of a wide variety of factors, it is not created by a single input. A drug that is deadly for one person when used at one dose for one reason may yet be a godsend for another person when used at another dose for another reason. When we place the government in charge of personal health via drug prohibition, therefore, it will necessarily be ham-fisted and unjust by treating everyone alike.

To paraphrase Shakespeare: "Do you think because some Americans are irresponsible , there shall be no more opiates, laughing gas and phenethylamines?"

Sadly, most Americans would probably answer yes, so blind are they to the endless downsides of substance prohibition -- not to mention the endless upsides to drug use, of which we are only now becoming reawakened as westerners thanks to the still largely ostracized work of such people as Alexander Shulgin, Charley Wininger, James Fadiman, Terence McKenna ³⁴ , and Paul Stamets ³⁵.

For these reasons and countless others, I reject the idea that we are not ready for drug re-legalization . I do not believe you would say so yourself if you took into account all of the downsides of drug prohibition from which you -- like everyone else these days -- has been "protected" since infancy by Drug War censorship. Even today, our conglomerate media refuses to publish stories that either 1) place drug use in a good light, or 2) place drug prohibition in a bad light. And so reporters who cover inner-city violence profess to be baffled at the nonstop shootings, never stopping to notice that drug prohibition armed the 'hood to the teeth in the first place, not just in American inner cities but in inner cities around the western world. Indeed, Lisa Ling produced an entire documentary about Chicago gun violence ³⁶ for CNN in which she never even mentioned the War on Drugs ³⁷. And so drug prohibition has committed the perfect crime. It has disrupted Black neighborhoods, arrested minorities wholesale, and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America -- and gotten away with it. Yet westerners still think of drug prohibition as a rational policy.

In my view, this is because prohibitionists like the world that drug law has created: it has created artificial good guys and bad guys, with most of the bad guys being minorities and foreigners. It has also enriched their pharmaceutical portfolios, kept the workforce under the thumbs of government, and blinded us to real social problems (like a shortage of affordable housing and income equality and, indeed, the Drug War itself) by blaming everything on drugs.

This is why I started my Drug War Philosopher website six years ago, to unearth all the truths that are censored as a matter of course in a Drug War society: truths about the positive uses of drugs and about the negative effects of prohibition -- the latter being so numerous that I am still spoiled for choice when looking for my daily essay topics.

One thing I think we do agree on, however: for re-legalization to take effect and last, we need a whole new outlook on drugs, and on life in general. For more on that topic, I invite you to read my articles on the subject of "pharmacologically savvy empaths ³⁸" and also my four-essay series entitled "After the Drug War.³⁹"

Finally, here is a downside of drug prohibition that hit home for me two months ago.

My sister-in-law recently went to the E.R. for severe depression. Did they give her a substance like laughing gas that gave her glimpses of heaven? Did they give her a holiday on opium ? Did they give her a phenethylamine that inspired rapture in the user in clinical studies? Did they, in short, reassure her that life could be good and that there were better ways of seeing the world?

No, of course not. That would not be scientific! Instead, they started her on a course of antidepressants ⁴⁰ that she will have to take for a lifetime, in the hopes that their sedating and mind-numbing qualities would "kick in" before she killed herself. That's a chance that they were willing to take. Why? Because drug prohibition inverts human values. It gives us a prior commitment to drug demonization that comes even before the well-being -- nay, the very survival -- of our loved ones.

And I am only getting started on enumerating the downsides of the prohibition that you suggest should not be ended any time soon. It cannot end quickly enough for folks like myself, who, at age 66, have now gone almost an entire lifetime without godsends that grow at my very feet. And why? Because of laws created by racist politicians for the purpose of marginalizing minorities and thereby winning elections -- thanks to which Donald Trump is in office today, by the way, and democracy -- at least for now -- has come to an end in the United States of America.

Is that not ENOUGH reason to end drug prohibition and end it now, come hell or high water? Or do we have to wait around to see what OTHER time-honored liberties we will have to forgo in an effort to quash the modern boogieman called "drugs"?

Best Wishes,
Brian Ballard Quass
The Drug War Philosopher @ abolishthedea.com

PS The Drug War works according to the following anti-scientific notion:

that a substance that can be misused by a white American young person at one dose when used for one reason in one context, must not be used by anybody at any dose in any context.

Talk about imperialistic! If we find aliens on another planet, I suppose the DEA will have to outlaw their godsend medicines as well.

Such a mindset leads to endless unnecessary suffering. Unfortunately, most of that suffering is off the radar of westerners because the conglomerate media is not aware of such issues -- or if it is, it is determined to keep the public in ignorance regarding them. And so we see anti-drug campaigns uncritically promoted by media with alarmist billboards shouting inane phrases like "Fentanyl kills" and "Oxy kills" -- utterances which make no more sense than shouting "Fire bad!" as did our paleolithic ancestors. All such phrases are philosophically the same: they counsel us to fear and demonize dangerous things rather than to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. Besides, if "Fentanyl kills" then "Alcohol massacres," but no one is seriously talking about bringing back liquor prohibition... although I should shut up, lest I give people ideas, for the prohibitionists are always looking for new scapegoats on which to blame social problems, thereby taking our eyes off the prize when it comes to social justice and democratic norms.

PPS If I had to sum up the problems with the modern mindset in one single blurb, it would probably be the following:

Prohibition kills, not drugs!

The media and government work together to keep us from noticing the fact. That is why an online search on "opiates" will bring up endless articles about abuse and misuse, but none about their godsend ability to inspire the prepared mind. Consider the following report of morphine use in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" by Edgar Allan Poe:

"In the meantime the morphine ⁴¹ had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf- in the hue of a blade of grass- in the shape of a trefoil- in the humming of a bee- in the gleaming of a dew-drop- in the breathing of the wind- in the faint odors that came from the forest- there came a whole universe of suggestion- a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought.⁴²"

For some of us, such outcomes of drug use are a consummation devoutly to be wished. And yet no one even considers such benefits to be benefits -- so brainwashed have westerners become by their cradle-to-grave brainwashing in the substance demonizing ideology of drug prohibition.

Finally, if the capitalist west really cannot get by without drug prohibition, then there is something wrong with the capitalist west, not with drugs. In that case, drugs are just our scapegoat for the fact that we are immature as a society and unable to create common sense healthcare platforms to ensure safe use. The political motivation of the Drug Warrior is clear in the fact that they will not spend one penny for healthcare, but will spend billions to lock people up -- especially when a disproportionately large number of those arrestees are minorities. Meanwhile, we are in such denial about the shortcomings of our social system that we insist that the entire world share our own jaundiced view of drugs, especially the kind that stand the chance of inspiring new religions.

BR>

Author's Follow-up:

May 12, 2025

Mike Jay responded to my concerns via email and I am happy to say that he has completely allayed my fears. It looks like we are both on the same page after all when it comes to the need for "drug re-legalization now." Quoth Mike:

"Thanks for this essay, I agree with you and have been involved in campaigning against prohibition for thirty years now."

He goes on to request more information about the sentences in the book that inspired my scruples in the first place. And so I responded as follows:

Thanks, Mike.

I was responding to the following two sentences in the concluding paragraph of the chapter entitled "The Black Drop: Opium" on page 87 of the edition published in 2000 and reprinted in 2005:

"But it's one thing to cast a critical eye over the cultural and scientific context in which opiates were criminalised, and another thing entirely to argue that history proves that these substances should simply be legalised. This is a conclusion which puts a greater weight on the story than it can necessarily bear." ⁴³

I do not want to quibble. My concern is, however, that if history fails to prove that substances should be re-legalised, it is only because that history has been censored, both when it comes to the downsides of prohibition and the upsides of drug use (and so we have substance-demonizing books like "Opium: How an Ancient Flower Shaped and Poisoned Our World ⁴⁴," as if a flower in itself could do anything of the kind). I can agree with the above two sentences if by "that history" you mean "that strategically censored history" -- but I do not believe that history as such proves that drug re-legalization is problematic. History as such would tell us that drug prohibition was the ultimate governmental power grab of all time and that it outlaws human progress by, for instance, blocking research into the mind-body problem via outlawing drugs that produce "ego dissolving" states.

I thought maybe you were making the argument that drug legalization cannot work now that we have all sorts of new synthetic substances to worry about -- when that actually should change nothing in our re-legalization calculus, insofar as prohibition is the problem ⁴⁵ , not substances themselves.

I am glad to hear, however, that we are on the same page, and I thank you again for a great read so far. I will now move on to Chapter 3, The Seraphim Theatre, absent my fear that you belonged (with Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman) to the "go slow" school of drug-law reform.

I especially appreciate your comment that drug-law reform will require "a different type of modern society entirely." I could not agree more. This is why I believe that the Drug War is the great philosophical problem of our time, because it is not just a hornet's nest of bad laws, but it is based on a wrong way of looking at the world, one that causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some.

Thanks again for your valuable time!

Brian

CONCLUSION: I stand by the essay above, but I disavow any criticisms of Mike Jay, implicit or otherwise.

Author's Follow-up:

May 13, 2025

Good job that I have a healthy heart. Mike Jay not only responded to my original email, but he responded to my follow-up email as well. That is so unprecedented in my line of work as to be potentially fatal for one at risk of myocardial infarction. I will not presumptuously publish Mike's end of our rare substantive colloquy, but here is my own latest installment in what I hope will become a thread of mutually exchanged insights over the coming months and years. (If not, that's okay, too, though. Mike actually "got back to me," and they can't take that away from me!)

Thanks, Mike.

I am always leery about reading books about "drugs" because, in my view, almost ALL of them betray some degree of brainwashing on the part of the author. So I am no doubt extra sensitive to statements that I find to be even slightly equivocal in nature.

Your highly informative text is a joy to read. I have taken extensive notes and will be adding observations related to the text on my essay page should you be interested in reading them at some point. I am now on page 200 and have found nothing else that unnerves me, philosophically speaking.

Thanks again for contacting me. I have written (via snail mail and email) to hundreds of authors and philosophers on this topic over the last six years and almost all have ignored me.

Best Wishes,
Brian

PS One of my latest emails was to Ronald Hutton, author of "The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present.⁴⁶" The author only mentions "drugs" once in his academically oriented work, and then he does so in a pejorative context, likening them to the poisons sold by "service magicians" for the purpose of dispatching one's enemies. I politely suggested to Mr. Hutton that the peaceful-sounding "herbs" which he is continually referencing in his book were "drugs" just as surely as are the "meds" prescribed by modern doctors. I further suggested that the Drug War is the epitome of strategic fear mongering on the part of the powers-that-be, and that in many ways, today's drug dealers may be seen as our modern witches ⁴⁷. To his credit, Ronald Hutton thanked me for my email; however, he had no comment about my substantive criticisms. I have acquired the feeling over the years that it is considered impolite to bring up drug-related issues in academia. It is as if academics have made their peace with drug prohibition and are unwilling to discuss the matter further.

I also contacted the chair of the Harvard Psychology Department, Matthew K. Nock, questioning his university's failure to mention the "anesthetic revelation ⁴⁸ ⁴⁹ " in their online bio for William James ⁵⁰. (Needless to say, I have received no response to that complaint.)

I wonder if you know of our FDA's attempts to treat laughing gas as a "drug." To my knowledge, I am the only philosopher who has lodged a formal complaint about the move on behalf of academic freedom and the legacy of William James ⁵¹.

Author's Follow-up:

May 14, 2025

Thoughts on "Emperors of Dreams ⁵²" by Mike Jay

Er, that is, the book is by Mike Jay; the thoughts are by the Drug War Philosopher, one Brian Ballard Quass by name.

MOB RULE AND FIRST PRINCIPLES

Reading Jay's book ⁵³ leaves the philosophical reader with the following troubling question:

Is democracy a fundamentally flawed form of government thanks to its susceptibility to mob rule?

And by "mob" I do not just mean the Mafia that liquor prohibition created out of whole cloth, but also the mob of average citizens who are not sophisticated and educated enough to make the a priori judgments about medicines that the politicians call on them to make in the name of eliminating human freedoms and maximizing the interests of the powers-that-be.

One is reminded of an historical anecdote related by the revivified Egyptian count in "Some Words with a Mummy," a short story by Edgar Allan Poe ⁵⁴. When his eager reanimators start bragging about the benefits of American democracy, the count recalls a similar political experiment in Egypt that took place thousands of years ago. The narrator summarizes as follows:

"For a while they managed remarkably well; only their habit of bragging was prodigious. The thing ended, however, in the consolidation of the thirteen states, with some fifteen or twenty others, in the most odious and insupportable despotism that was ever heard of upon the face of the Earth.

I asked what was the name of the usurping tyrant. As well as the Count could recollect, it was Mob.⁵⁵"

The frustrating thing is that America presumably had the constitutional armor to repel the attacks on freedom implicit in a War on Drugs. The Constitution gave Americans the right to the pursuit of happiness and the ability to be free from unreasonable search, for instance. It gave Americans the freedom of religion ⁵⁶. Moreover, the country was founded by Thomas Jefferson based on the concept of Natural Law as defined by John Locke, according to which Mother Nature was the property of human beings and not the government.

"The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." -- John Locke, Second Treatise of Government ⁵⁷

The problem is that Americans do not believe in the fundamental nature of such principles. Their motto is "by any means necessary" when it comes to getting the result that they desire in any one case. And so we have "Megan's Laws" and "Amber Laws" and "one strike, you're out" policies. There is no more privacy in private therapy or in the confessional anymore because Americans can find no use for core principles. Why? Because Americans have been taught to favor expediency over first principles ⁵⁸ .

This, I might add, is why a site that approaches the Drug War philosophically is such a hard sell. Even the enemies of the Drug War tend to argue from facts alone - as who should say, "We can prove that drug legalization ⁵⁹ would have better outcomes than drug prohibition." While such facts are necessary, they are far from sufficient, because it is the prohibitionist mindset that is at fault here, not just specific laws. Any gains that we achieve by using strictly utilitarian ⁶⁰ ⁶¹ ⁶² arguments will be subject to later veto by Chicken Little demagogues - UNLESS we can re-educate Americans (and the world) to believe in the importance of first principles! It is not just youngsters who need to learn the importance of deferred gratification. Grown-ups need to learn that skill in the political realm as well, or else the very raison d'etre for a free country will disappear in the name of expediency.

Facts are important for demonstrating the corrupt and hypocritical bona fides of drug prohibition. But the best arguments against the drug-war mindset are the ones that make the opposition blush, as, for instance, when we remind them that the Hindu religion owes its existence to the use of a substance that inspired and elated - from which it follows that drug prohibition is the outlawing of religion. For the diverse substances that we have outlawed and demonized under the name of "drugs" have nothing in common except for the fact that they all have the potential to inspire and elate.

We can also make the Drug Warriors blush by reminding them of the following inconvenient fact: namely, that saying things like "Fentanyl ⁶³ kills" and "Crack kills" is precisely the same, philosophically speaking, as saying "Fire bad!" All such statements counsel us to fear and demonize dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them wisely for the benefit of humanity. The Drug War, in fact, is a modern superstition.

FLAWED MEDICAL MODELS

In reading the section on mescaline, it occurred to me that Thomas Beddoes' critique of modern medicine fully applies today, at least when it comes to the treatment of mind and mood disorders. As Jay writes:

"Eighteenth-century medicine had largely progressed by discovering, naming and classifying new diseases, leading to a profusion of different schools with competing nomenclatures, taxonomies and diagnoses. For Beddoes, most of these were as meaningful as medieval disputations about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. All they had succeeded in doing was to elevate the pretensions of the medical profession, and at the same time distance them from the proper focus of their enquiries: how to cure patients.⁶⁴"

Such indifference to patient suffering on the part of self-important doctors is alive and well today. We have reified the human condition into all sorts of presumably separate and discrete pathologies in the Diagnostic Statistics Manual, meanwhile insisting that all common sense treatments for these conditions are unscientific, or are even morally objectionable as being "crutches.⁶⁵" We believe as a society that chronic depression, for instance, is a tough nut to crack, when in reality it could be "cured" in five minutes with the help of a vast array of psychoactive medicines. We need merely to use phenethylamines, and/or coca, and/or opium ⁶⁶ , and/or laughing gas , and/or psychedelics (etc.) as part of common-sense protocols, based on individual needs and desires and preferences and risks - based, that is, on all the crucial details that the Drug Warrior ignores in favor of denouncing drug use per se. This dogmatic blindness to the benefits of godsend medicines has become laughable in the case of nitrous oxide, as materialists like Dr. Robert Glatter write articles in Forbes magazine questioning the power of the gas to help the depressed ⁶⁷. It's laughing gas , for God's sake! Even Reader's Digest knows that laughter is the best medicine.

As Whitehead reminded us in "The Concept of Nature":

"The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us.⁶⁸"

It is deductively clear therefore that materialist philosophy must be rejected, at least in the realm of mood and mentation -- materialist philosophy and the passion-free behaviorism for which it stands when it comes to human psychology ⁶⁹.

Not only does laughing gas have prima facie potential for treating the depressed, we should actually be giving laughing gas ⁷⁰ kits to the suicidal in the same way as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies ⁷¹. Instead, we show by both our actions and our inactions that we would rather have the depressed person commit suicide than to have them use the kinds of drugs that inspired the Hindu religion: namely, the kinds of drugs that inspire and elate. How is that for an "absurdum"? Our FDA outlaws drugs that inspire and elate and yet actually recommends brain-damaging shock therapy for the severely depressed ⁷². How is that for an "absurdum"?

ABOUT THOSE LOTUS-EATERS

Mike Jay quotes Dr. Silas Mitchell, creator of the "rest cure," as follows regarding the potential for mescaline abuse:

"How many people might choose to live in the land of the Lotus-Eaters rather than inhabit their quotidian lives?⁷³"

This is the same fear that Aldous Huxley was to echo years later when he wrote about mescaline use as follows in "The Doors of Perception":

"And yet there were reservations. For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.⁷⁴"

I have responded to this objection in my recent essay entitled Huxley's Reservations about Mescaline, in which I point out that social norms and education will keep most of us on the straight-and-narrow. Moreover, it is folly to try to save everybody. For more on this latter topic, see my essay entitled "The Bill Clinton Fallacy," in which I show how Bill's attempts to use prohibition to "save" his brother Roger from cocaine ⁷⁵ ⁷⁶ abuse entailed the deaths of tens of thousands of Blacks (including that of 15-year-old Niomi Russell in 2024 in a drive-by shooting in Washington, D.C.)⁷⁷. That is just the beginning of a long list of totally unrecognized downsides to drug prohibition that I have made it my business to point out on this website.

Moreover, here is a problem that no one seems to notice:

We always contemplate these problems of potential drug-related obsessions in the context of drug prohibition itself, a prohibition which drastically limits the ways in which we can respond to such obsessions. In a world of drug prohibition, we would indeed have few effective ways to keep people from overdoing it with mescaline (or with any other drug for that matter) except to criminalize the overused substances and thereby potentially "save" that person from the drug by creating drug gangs and mafias out of whole cloth (and, of course, by making safe, sane and beneficial use impossible for everybody around the world, including children in hospice, etc.)

In a re-legalized world, to the contrary, the problem of drug obsessions appears far more tractable. In such a world, we could use drugs to fight drugs ⁷⁸. A user who has a problematic obsession with one drug could be steered toward the use of alternative substances that are less likely to be problematic for them given their particular personality and circumstances in life, etc. (given all the crucial details that, once again, the Drug Warriors like to ignore). I am presupposing here a world in which we have established drug experts in the form of what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths ⁷⁹: folks who have actually used a wide variety of psychoactive substances and are familiar with usage patterns for a wide variety of users around the world and who can therefore suggest use protocols that have maximum potential for safety and efficacy given an individual's goals in life, their unique personality, etc... all those currently ignored specifics which, in a free world, we would actually take into account! Imagine that!

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Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity. It is the outlawing of our right to take care of our own health.

I might as well say that no one can ever be taught to ride a horse safely. I would argue as follows: "Look at Christopher Reeves. He was a responsible and knowledgeable equestrian. But he couldn't handle horses. The fact is, NO ONE can handle horses!"

Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."

The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for withholding godsend medicine from the depressed. Here is just one typical drug-user report that appeared in "Pihkal": "A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."

Philip Jenkins reports that Rophynol had positive uses for treating mental disorders until the media called it the "date rape drug." We thus punished those who were benefitting from the drug, tho' the biggest drug culprit in date rape is alcohol. Oprah spread the fear virally.

It's funny to hear fans of sacred plants indignantly insisting that their meds are not "drugs." They're right in a way, but actually NO substances are "drugs." Calling substances "drugs" is like referring to striking workers as "scabs." It's biased terminology.

"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.

I'm grateful to the folks who are coming out of the woodwork at the last minute to deface their own properties with "Trump 2024" signs. Now I'll know who to thank should Trump get elected and sell us out to Putin.

Whether we judge people only by the words that they say or only by the substances of which they partake, we are ignoring the most important things: what they really mean and how they really behave.

We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP

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End Drug Prohibition Now

an open letter to Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century

Author's Follow-up:

May 26, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

May 12, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

May 13, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

May 14, 2025

Thoughts on "Emperors of Dreams 52" by Mike Jay

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Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend

Thoughts on "Emperors of Dreams ⁵²" by Mike Jay