How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 6, 2025
I stopped by a convenience store yesterday and noticed a huge sign behind the counter: "Nicotine is an addictive drug. This is because it changes the brain."
This warning, as the fine print makes clear, is displayed thanks to a court ruling. (I say "fine print," but the sign is so large that even this introductory blurb reads like a banner headline.)
This made me stop and think, why do we never see a sign like the following at psychiatrist's offices:
"SSRIs are dependence-causing drugs. This is because they change the brain."
That latter claim has been clearly demonstrated in the work of Richard Whitaker, who reveals how antidepressants 1 cause the very chemical imbalances that they are purported to fix2.
The Jekyll and Hyde nature of America's attitude toward drugs is made clear by such over-the-top warnings about tobacco: on the one hand, we're screaming "Danger!" On the other, we're screaming, "Just let me buy what the hell I want to buy!" And the former court-supported warnings get louder every year. It seems it won't be long before stores are required to hire someone to personally lecture a would-be purchaser about the dangers of nicotine before allowing them to buy a pack of cigarettes.
This got me thinking about the relationship between nicotine and drug prohibition.
In my childhood in the '60s and '70s, I was subject to a barrage of television commercials 3 teaching me that cigarette smoking causes addiction and cancer. I now see in hindsight that this public health campaign helped to normalize the idea of drug prohibition in my mind by getting me used to the idea that the government and the courts had a role in protecting me from making bad decisions.
What I had yet to realize was that drug prohibition itself is what made tobacco the go-to drug for most Americans in the first place! It did this by outlawing all alternatives. Opium smoking drastically decreases the desire for tobacco smoking (and alcohol, for that matter), as does the use of certain phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, as is clear from the user reports that the chemist cites in "Pihkal.4" And yet we legalize tobacco while outlawing all less inherently risky drug use, in the same way that we legalize alcohol while outlawing all less inherently risky drug use.
This is what America cannot get through its thick puritanical skull: that drug prohibition causes the very problems that we assume that it will solve. Drug prohibition has always been based on the assumption that less drug use is always better -- but that is demonstrably false, not least because drug use has inspired entire religions5! In a sane world, we would use the least harmful drugs in the wisest possible way, and this is made impossible by drug prohibition.
What are the prohibitionists thinking? They seem to be expecting that someday people will be happy to do without any mood-enhancing substances of any kind, but that is a bizarre, anti-scientific, ahistorical and inhumane goal. It can only be maintained seriously by a Christian Scientist as a matter of religious faith. To enforce such laws is, in fact, the enforcement of the Christian Science religion as the law of the land. Such tyranny makes no more sense than outlawing drugs for physical conditions, under the theory that no one "really" needs those either, provided only that they were "right with God."
Drug prohibition has not ended drug use in America. To the contrary, it has ensured that only the most dangerous possible drug use is practiced. Why? Because we have outlawed everything else!
As with any essay on the idiocy of drug prohibition, there is so much more that could and should be said on this topic. But I will spare the reader any more obvious truths in this particular post. Let me end, however, by citing a quote from William H. Brereton in the Truth About Opium, published in 1822 to counter the absurd lies of the Anti-Opium Society.
"Nicotine, the alkaloid of tobacco, is simply a deadly and rapid poison, useful only to the assassin. Morphia, the alkaloid of opium, is only poisonous when taken in an excessive quantity; whether used internally or injected under the skin, it is the most wonderful anodyne and sedative known. I fully believe that, when medical men come to study opium and opium smoking more fully, it will become the established opinion of the faculty that opium smoking is not only perfectly harmless, but that it is most beneficial, so that it may ultimately not only put down spirit drinking, but perhaps supersede, to a great extent, tobacco.6"
Of course, this quote will be hard for Americans to believe, since they have been protected from their birth from learning anything about the benefits of drug use -- just as they have been shielded from learning anything about the endless downsides of drug prohibition.
AFTERWORD
Even Psychology Today now acknowledges that SSRIs do not fix chemical imbalances. In fact, in a 2022 PT article7 by Noam Shpancer Ph.D., the author tells us that "We don't know how antidepressants work." I would agree, except to add that "We don't know that they work at all," except perhaps to make the user satisfied with a lack of self-realization in life. Some might even claim that they keep some folk from committing suicide, but they only do so by limiting their possibilities in life. If we really wanted to help the depressed, we would let them thrive on the wise use of phenethylamines and opium and coca, all of which are inherently less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco, at least in a world in which we teach safe use and regulate product -- a world in which we replace the hateful Drug Enforcement Agency with a Drug Education Agency, staffed by what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths8.
Capitalism naturally results in disease-mongering by a self-interested medically establishment -- and disease-mongering requires the suppression of medicines that work holistically.
"Now, now, Sherlock, that coca preparation is not helping you a jot. Why can't you get 'high on sunshine,' like good old Watson here?" To which Sherlock replies: "But my good fellow, then I would no longer BE Sherlock Holmes."
It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.
We've got to take the fight TO the drug warriors by starting to hold them legally responsible for having spread "Big Lies" about "drugs." Anyone involved in producing the "brain frying" PSA of the 1980s should be put on trial for willfully spreading a toxic lie.
There are no recreational drugs. Even laughing gas has rational uses because it gives us a break from morbid introspection. There are recreational USES of drugs, but the term "recreational" is often used to express our disdain for users who go outside the healthcare system.
Drug prohibition is superstitious idiocy.
It is based on the following crazy idea:
that a substance that can be misused by a white young person at one dose for one reason must not be used by anybody at any dose for any reason.
Cocaine is not evil. Opium is not evil. Drug prohibition is evil.
Smart people in America are like Don Quixote. They are sane on every subject on earth, but mention the subject of "drugs," and they start talking politically correct blather.
Let's pass a constitutional amendment to remove Kansas from the Union, and any other state where the racist politicians leverage the drug war to crack down on minorities.
In a free future, newspapers will have philosophers on their staffs to ensure that said papers are not inciting consequence-riddled hysteria through a biased coverage of drug-related mishaps.
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